So far, 2019 has been the year of Extinction Rebellion, of Brexit, and – in more heartening news – of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. From doing stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe back in 2013, the Fleabag creator has now gone on to huge acclaim. This week, she won three Emmys before signing a huge deal with Amazon for a three-year contract producing exclusive content for the tech giant’s streaming platform.
With the deal reported to be worth more than $20m (£16m) per year, Waller-Bridge has secured one of the most lucrative production contracts ever signed by a female creative. She is now playing in the same field as Grey’s Anatomy’s Shonda Rhimes, for example, whose content Netflix previously paid $150m (£120m) for over five years.
There are many reasons to be excited about Waller-Bridge’s latest success, among them the fact that we can hope to soon stream fresh sarcastic asides and more disaster family dinners.
Equally important, though, is that Amazon is putting a woman in a key gatekeeping role – something that is still far from being the norm in television. But is Waller-Bridge’s deal a one-off, or has the rise of streaming services with deep pockets truly changed the game for female creatives?
“It is very significant that a female creative has been recognised for her talent,” says Amanda Brennan, lecturer in acting for screen at the Royal School of Speech and Drama. “It seems that streaming broadcasters are producing a lot more work and have female producers at the helm, like Anne Mensah at Netflix, which could make an impact on the diversity of what is commissioned.
The lack of women behind the scenes has been well documented in traditional broadcast for years. In the UK, between 2013 and 2016, the proportion of television episodes directed by a woman actually declined, falling by three per cent to just over 24 per cent. In a report, Directors UK singled out Channel 4, where the number of female-directed episodes fell by more than five per cent.
Since then, however, broadcasters have made an effort to promote the creative work of women. In 2015, for example, Channel 4 launched the Women’s Director Programme to mentor and shadow female drama directors.
A similar trend is happening in the US, where this year 40 per cent of pilot episodes released by the five major broadcasters were directed by women - an eight per cent increase from the previous year. HBO pushed the proportion of female-directed episodes to 43 per cent, in comparison to a bleak 15 per cent in 2014.
Now, streaming platforms are also coming into the market with large budgets to spend and more jobs for female creatives. “Logically, the guys with the big bucks will drag the broadcasters through the changes in the landscape,” says Alice Enders, director of research at Enders Analysis. And so, everything should be pointing towards an improvement of the gender ratio behind the scenes in television. Right?
Not so fast, says Melissa Silverstein, the founder of advocacy group Women and Hollywood. With the advent of streaming platforms, more jobs have been created and more people are working - “but that doesn’t necessarily mean that numbers have been shifting. In fact, they have been rather consistent,” she says.
A study published this month on the role of women in television confirms this: across broadcast and streaming platforms, women accounted for only 31 per cent of individuals working in key behind-the-scenes positions – this includes creators, directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors and directors of photography.
Martha Lauzen, who wrote the report, highlights that in 1997-98, this number stood at 21 per cent. “While this movement is in the right direction, an increase of ten percentage points over two decades is less than stunning,” she says.
What’s more – traditional broadcasters have no reason to envy streaming platforms, despite their shiny new deals with female creatives. Lauzen’s study indeed finds that women are employed at almost the same rate on older and newer television platforms, at 30 per cent for streaming programs.
Streaming has certainly pushed numbers up merely by increasing the number of opportunities for women to play key roles behind the scenes, recognises Lauzen; but it has not yet triggered the revolutionary shift that is much-needed in television. This is problematic because the lack of women at a high level in the entertainment industry has an impact on the gender balance in the creative team. For example, on programs with exclusively male creators, women comprise 19 per cent of writers. With exclusively male producers, they account for as little as 12 per cent of directors.
And this directly trickles down to the way women are portrayed on screen. Lauzen’s report, for example, also finds that the majority of male characters portrayed on TV are more likely to be older and play work-oriented roles, whereas women tend to have younger, personal-life oriented roles.
“Media should accurately portray women to women and their daughters, or it simply perpetuates outdated notions of femininity,” says Enders. “Role models are essential, and if all women are given supporting roles then how can they star in their own story?”
This is why Waller-Bridge’s work has received such global interest, Enders continues – not only because it is high-quality entertainment, but because it promotes a novel vision of women at the same time.
In that sense, Amazon’s move was primarily a commercial one; simply put, everyone loves Waller-Bridge, and she will bring in huge amounts of money. Lauzen also thinks Waller-Bridge’s commercial and critical success will definitely help push the door open a bit wider for other women.
After handsome priests and psychopathic yet hilarious Russian hitwomen, the world now has its eyes on what Waller-Bridge has in store for it. But she is still an exception. “If we consider the exceedingly slow growth in the percentages of women working in key behind-the-scenes roles,” Lauzen says, “we should not overstate the impact of these individual victories.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
