The Writers Guild of America West 2013 TV Staffing Brief, the organization’s analysis of who was hired to write American television shows during the 2011-2012 season, is out, and as usual, the results for women and people of color are not encouraging. Of 1722 writers who wrote for 190 shows, 519 or 30.5 percent of them were women, and 269 of them were people of color. For women, those numbers are up 5 percent from the 1999-2000 television season—as the report put it, “At this rate of increase, it would be another 42 years before women —roughly half of the U.S. population – reach proportionate representation in television staff employment.” And for people of color, the rate of increase is more mixed: the percentage of Asian and Latino writers has risen 2.9 percent since 1999-2000, but the number of African-American television writers has grown much more slowly in the same time period, rising from 5.8 percent to 6.5 percent of overall writers. If the percentage of African-American writers is going to rise just .063 percent, it will take 87 years for black television writers to reach proportional representation in their industry relative to their current presence in the U.S. population.

Part of the reason these numbers are so frustrating to see again and again is that it only takes a few shows to make a difference. As the report points out, “until the recent rise of multicultural dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal,”—both shows created by Shonda Rhimes— “there had been no successful television dramas that featured a critical mass of minority leading roles or writers.” If all of the 55 shows that hired no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season hired just one person of color to write for them, the representation of writers of color in television would rise three percent. And the examples of a few networks show that it’s not impossible to find women and people of color to hire for all kinds of positions. 50 percent of MTV’s executive producers, 43.5 of the CW’s executive producers, and 38.5 percent of ABC Family’s executive producers are women. 13.3 percent of the executive producers on ABC are people of color, a number likely significantly driven, again, by Shonda Rhimes. 55 percent of BET’s writers are women, and 95 percent of them are people of color. Clearly, there are women and people of color available and eager to work in television, if only someone would think to ask.

Or, as Marlo Thomas put it when I asked her how she found female writers for That Girl, back at a time when television was even more male and white, “Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said ‘What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl’ We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers.”

It’s an instruction that the 19 shows that hired no women writers in the 2011-2012 season, and the 55 shows that hired no writers of color during that same time period might take to heart. It’s worth noting that these shows’ lack of diversity doesn’t define all of them. Mike White, who wrote all of the episodes of the first season of Enlightened himself, turned in one of the most complex, sympathetic portrayals of a woman anywhere on television. And Breaking Bad, which employed no writers of color in the 2011-2012 season, produced one of the most nuanced roles for a man of color to appear on screen in the last decade. But just because white men can get it right about women and people of color doesn’t render women and people of color irrelevant—it just means that the standards for white men who are writing female characters or characters of color should be higher. The list of shows that didn’t hire women writers or writers of color in the 2011-2012 season should provide a pretty clear guide to which writers are rising above their own life experiences—and which ones are badly in need of new perspectives in their writers’ rooms:

Television Shows That Hired No Women Writers During The 2011-2012 Season

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Big Time Rush
Californication
Comedy Bang! Bang!
Dancing With The Stars
Eagleheart
Enlightened (Creator Mike White wrote all the episodes)
Futurama
Geniuses
Gurland On Gurland
The Insider
Kickin’ It
Locke & Key
Magic City
Psych
Teen Wolf
Veep
Workaholics I
Workaholics II
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Red Widow, which follows Radha Mitchell as Marta Walraven, a woman who grew up in the Russian Mob in Marin County, only to find herself pulled back into the world of crime she tried to leave behind after the murder of her husband, premiered on ABC last Sunday. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, I spoke with Melissa Rosenberg, who created Red Widow fresh off her stints writing the Twilight franchise, about what mothers are allowed to do on television, what parts of sex can and can’t get past Standards and Practices, and what it’s going to take for women to succeed in Hollywood. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide that Red Widow was going to be about the Russian mob?

Well my first decision was where I was going to set it. The original is set just outside Amsterdam, and had this sort of suburban community versus in-town, so I was looking for that. And because I’m from Marin County, in NOrthern California, that was a natural place. You’ve got Marin County and you cross the bridge into San Francisco, which has become emblematic of the bridging of two worlds. And so I began to look at what was the organized crime situation in San Francisco. While the Russian mob isn’t the largest group in San Francisco, it’s one of the top three. So then we were fortunate enough to find the former head of the FBI organized crime branch for the Russian mob in San Francisco and he became our technical consultant…So everything we do is checked with him. We do a lot of research on the internet obviously and everywhere we can. But we’re always conferring with him as well.

In terms of that sort of mob tradition, one of the things I’m curious about in that context is how the mob culture interacts with the way that Marta and Evan are raising their children? I thought that sequence in the pilot where Evan tells their son to kick his brother, he gives his daughter the money for the paints, he’s very sort of emotional and undisciplined and she wants to set boundaries. I was curious how that interacts with the larger mob story and the larger mob culture.

What’s interesting is, you know, having come from Marin County, and we all have these experiences growing up. You think you are raised in, you think that is everyone’s reality. And when you finally leave that nest, you realize, oh, the Marin County way of thinking and being is completely different from the rest of the country. It’s a sort of rude awakening. But there’s part of it that’s always living with you. Things that seem very odd to the rest of the world are just the norm to me. I mean, I htink that’s very much the case with Marta. A lot of people would think that having your husband exporting pot, it would be “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” But for her, it’s in the realm of “I don’t love this, I’d rather you didn’t do this.” But it’s not this huge moral violation in the way it would be for anyone else in the world who had a different background than her. So it’s always exploring the line for her, it’s an unclear line, and it’s different from what a lot of other people’s experiences might have been.

I wonder if we’ve had so many of these anti-heroes who are fathers because of TV tropes about men as bumbling dads, they’re not really involved, so their betrayal of responsibility to their kids doesn’t hit as hard?

There is definitely a much higher standard for characters who are mothers. There are a couple of things you don’t do. You don’t kill a dog. You don’t have a mother betray her children. You’ve lost your audience on either of those two fronts. And it’s just something embedded in our culture that we are less forgiving. And that’s always the line we’re going to be riding with her. She’s never intentionally betraying them. She’s never intentionally putting them in danger. She’s doing the very, very best she can. As we all are!

I love the sex scene in the pilot, and I am consistently cranky about sex on television. This looked like people who were having intercourse like real people. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing that scene—and was there anything Standards and Practices wanted you to cut or change?

There’s always a few grinds and pumping, I can’t remember the word—

Thrusts?

You can’t thrust! When we shot that scene, it was one of the most intense shooting days of our pilot, because those two have amazing chemistry. You really felt that you were stepping into a very intimate relationship. We had a very closed set. These two actors, both of them, have a lack of vanity, and will just fling themselves into something. There’s a lot of footage that will never be scene, 95 percent of it, because it’s just so outrageous in an incredibly fantastic way. What it got pared down to, you still get, it’s a very sexy scene, it’s not pretend, it’s not “And now we’re doing this for the cameras because it looks really hot.” It’s two actors as directed by Mark Pellington, who’s a very real director, who basically let the room disappear for them and immersed themselves in this moment.
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Over at Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein has what appears to be an early look at figures from the latest report from San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film (the report doesn’t appear on the institute’s site yet). In the last season, according to the figures Silverstein reported, 26 percent of the television shows aired on the broadcast networks and reality programming, were created by women. Silverstein adds what I think are some useful caveats:

This is up one point from last year and five points since the 1997-98 season.

Some things to note:

Women creators rose from 18% to 26%.
Women writers make up 30% of the staffs.
Women make up 25% of executive producers. That’s up three points from the previous year.
I wish the stats actually tracked the actual jobs on the TV shows including all the writing positions so we can see where women are at the different levels. Are women stuck in the staff writer positions? Are women getting promoted to the next levels? That’s what I want to know.

I’d add a couple more. First, I’ve stopped caring about year-on-year data as a meaningful measure of women’s progress in any category in Hollywood, be it highest-paid actresses or the number of women employed in writers’ rooms. These numbers spike one year and fall the next, both because there are so few people involved in these positions in any case, and because they can climb dramatically when women become a trend and tank if a show or several shows get cancelled. We’ll know that change is permanent when the numbers climb steadily over a period of years, and when there aren’t dramatic dips in between. Structural improvement is what matters, not cyclical improvement.

Second, measuring who creates shows is of limited utility. As much as I hate to say it, because I do think it’s great when men and women can partner on projects, it’s not necessarily a test of whether women creators are doing better if the shows they create are sold jointly with male co-creators. If women create shows, that doesn’t mean they’re running them. Whitney Cummings’ creation of 2 Broke Girls isn’t much of a victory on the substance, and it’s not much a victory behind the camera, given that Michael Patrick King’s creative vision now dominates the show. And as I broke down last season, just because women create television shows doesn’t mean they, or whoever end up running those shows, hire other women to write for them.

I want to see progress on these figures. And I do celebrate the shows that women sell, if only because they mean more women with experience, and with some money from studios that if nothing else, supports them as they work on the next thing. But I also don’t want to be fooled by one year of improving figures into believing that the historically resistant television industry has actually started addressing its deep-seated issues with women, both in front of the camera and behind it.

Last night, Encore began airing the miniseries adaptation of The Crimson Petal and The White, Michel Faber’s novel about Sugar (Romola Garai), an enterprising Victorian prostitute, William Rackham (Chris O’Dowd), the industrialist who becomes infatuated with her, Agnes (Amanda Hale), William’s anorexic wife who becomes convinced Sugar is her guardian angel, and Sophie (Isla Watt), William and Agnes’s daughter, who bonds with Sophie. The series, which continues tonight at 8 PM, weaves a rich tapestry out of the contradictions of Victorian sexuality, the ways in which the rigidity of gender roles damaged both men and women, and the importance of writing for people who were constrained from speaking freely to each other by social mores. As Sugar is drawn deeper into William’s life after he first buys the right to be her sole customer and then moves her into her home, she learns both the limits of the man she believed could rescue her from a life in London’s worst quarters, and the value of her mother, Mrs. Castaway’s (an astonishing Gillian Anderson) bitter perspective on life, even as she summons the courage to truly make a life for herself.

I spoke with The Crimson Petal and The White‘s writer Lucinda Coxon about the challenges of adapting Faber’s extremely dense novel, the meaning of writing for her characters, and the medical abuse of women in Victorian England. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This is very much a miniseries about writers. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the characters’ relationship to their writing. That scene where William, who dreams of being a famous novelist instead of working for his father’s business, is just awful to his mentally ill wife Agnes about her intentions to write as a novel struck me as really one of the saddest scenes in the series.

Agnes, it’s something we develop slightly more than in the book, is that Agnes will write on anything. She’s writing on the windows in the steam of her own breath. I think it’s fantastic that these characters who are incapable of actually speaking to each other and confiding in one another and expressing themselves in any way to one another are all busy desperately committing their passions to paper and imagining that somehow that means they told somebody something, or they’re fulfilled in some way.

I think it is a story about stories, in a sense. It seems to me it’s about whether you can write your own story, whether you can escape the hand you’ve been dealt by writing your way out. And Sugar is, in a sense, writing her way out. She brackets the whole film in a sense. That voiceover is in a sense part of her writing…She’s taught herself to read as kind of a survival mechanism. It’s how she bonds with William in the first place. It’s how she seduces him. She realizes he fancies himself as a writer and that’s what she deploys.
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In a long piece on Parks and Recreation as part of Deadline’s look at Emmy-contending shows, I was struck by this section on what made the show successful, and how it’s influenced the television landscape:

Producer Daniel Goor says that finetuning Poehler’s character was essential to assure viewers that she was not just a female version of Steve Carell’s self-absorbed Michael Scott of The Office.

“Once we clarified that the other characters in the ensemble liked her, it made it easier for people who liked her, too”, Goor says.

Goor also believes that Poehler’s strong female presence is helping the show surf this season’s new wave of comedies created or cocreated by women, about women, including HBO’s nominated Girls, New Girl, Suburgatory, and Up All Night.

“I think in way we lucked out, and we’ve kind of inadvertently surfed this trend, because our show is very much about a girl, a girl with a job”, Goor says. “Amy Poehler is very much the lead of this show, we’ve tried all along to make it her perspective, and the perspective of a woman working in a man’s world”.

(Goor notes as an aside that Up All Night creator Emily Spivey and Suburgatory creator Emily Kapnek both served on the staff of Parks.)

Parks and Recreation is one of a few shows, along with Community, which has already spun of showrunners of its own in the form of Anthony and Joe Russo, who created Animal Practice, and New Girl, which spawned its first showrunner in Dana Fox, who created Ben and Kate, which premieres on Fox on September 25, that may never achieve astronomical ratings but that seem likely to be labs that produce a lot of influential writers in years to come. I can’t wait to see what, for example, Community‘s Megan Ganz, or Parks‘ Aisha Muharrar (who wrote the upcoming season that takes Leslie Knope to Washington) do when they get their own shows someday.

But Goor’s remarks also strike me as an illustration of how hard it can be to replicate the best parts of a show like Parks and Recreation. I think it’s absolutely true that the show didn’t make it clear whether Leslie was admirable or a joke in its first season, and the entire show clarified and clicked into place when it became clear that she was extremely competent and committed, and the people around her admired her for it. But Leslie isn’t just likable—she stands for ideas more specific than the archetypes represented by Regan’s working mother, Whitney’s committmentphobe, or Jess’s lovable kook. That may be a limitation on the show’s ultimate audience, though I do wonder if a less surreal take on small-town public service could capture a wider viewership. But the point remains that Leslie has some problems that are inflected by gender, but the bigger idea she represents isn’t solely bounded by her sex. More lady shows could stand to have big ideas where the program’s perspective on it is tied to a main character’s gender, but not solely defined by the fact that she’s a woman. I’m all for explorations of femininity and what it means to be a woman, and I wish more male audiences were interested in those kinds of shows, or that the entertainment industry trusted them to be. But not everything every woman does is about gender and gender roles.

And it’s important that the default for telling those kinds of stories about public and national service, or saving the world, or surviving the workday not always be male. As long as male characters are coded as an acceptable representative for all of humanity but female characters can only represent the experiences of women, and in some cases, a very narrow slice of womanhood, we’re unlikely to get to a place where the depictions of men and women are roughly equal in terms of both number and characterization.