Things are getting better for women behind the camera in TV, but female directors weigh in on how there's more to be done and Hollywood's role in it all
Melissa Rosenberg had a modest goal: For the second season of her Netflix series "Marvel's Jessica Jones," which premiered last week, at least 50 percent of the directors would be female.
But in conversations with Allie Goss, vice president of original series at Netflix, they established a new mandate: All 13 directors would be women.
"I've been on 25 years of shows, and nine times out of 10, those directing staffs are all white men," said the showrunner, whose long list of credits dates to "Party of Five." "So why not all women?"
Had she simply turned to the usual industry gatekeepers - typically agents with a tried-and-true Rolodex of names - the task might have seemed daunting: "You're always handed a list with all the white guys," Rosenberg said.
Instead, she reached out to fellow showrunners, did a lot of Googling and quickly discovered that "it was really not at all difficult to find 13 terrific female directors. "
The Netflix drama, which puts a feminist spin on the typically male-dominated superhero genre, is the latest television series to make the hiring of female directors a priority. For two seasons now, Ava DuVernay's "Queen Sugar" (OWN) has been directed entirely by women, while on shows as disparate as "The Deuce" (HBO), "Feud" (FX), "Jane the Virgin" (CW), "Transparent" (Amazon) and "The Handmaid's Tale" (Hulu), at least half of
