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After a sex scene on Claws, there is a moment where female lead Niecy Nash pulls up her spanks.
“She has a realness,” said Claws showrunner and executive producer Janine Sherman Barrois. “That’s what makes it kind of revolutionary.”
Sarah Aubrey, executive vice president of original programming for TNT, remembers getting some raised eyebrows from some of the male producers on set, but they went with it.
It’s honestly not a fight everyday,” Aubrey said about incorporating female ideas into storylines. “We have to work on it, but it’s not a fight, and that makes my job a pleasure.”
Leading ladies, both on and off screen from across TNT and TBS spoke about opportunities for women in Hollywood at the Television Critic’s Association summer press tour.
Women have only one-third of speaking roles in broadcast television, while 19 percent of shows lack African Americans with speaking roles, wil 59 percent lack Asian speaking roles, Aubrey said.
“We’ve made progress on this front but it clearly needs to stay at top of mind,” she said.
TNT and TBS highlighted shows with strong female characters such as Claws, Search Party, People of Earth, Good Behavior, Will, and Animal Kingdom that feature new voices breaking through the clutter.
The past three to four years has brought a hunger for more female representation, and shows like Claws with “all these amazing, beautiful talented black women leading the charge on the this project,” may not have been possible not long ago, Nash said.
The same may be true for Good Behavior, starring Michelle Dockery as a con artist with good intentions.
“Five years ago, if we were trying to put on a show with a character like Michele, there would have been this question of, well, ‘is she likable?’ … It’s so liberating to not have to live inside that box anymore.”
Nash agreed the television business is very different when it comes to women and diversity than it was when she started in the industry 20 years ago, but stressed that “the world is so much bigger than black and white women.”
“There’s a whole lot of women whose stories are not being told. We still have a ways to go.”
Iranian-American actress Nasim Pedra (People of Earth) is one of those women. She started out auditioning for roles like the wife of a terrorist.
“That’s why I started to write, to empower myself to create opportunities to tell the stories I wanted to tell,” she said.
It starts with the writers room she said, and that in turn offers varying, female perspectives that pave the way for storylines like Nash pulling up her spanks after a sex scene.
Where Nash was once told to stick within her comedy genre, she now can “have all the tricks in my bag on display.”
This changing of the guard also opens doors for a new generation of younger actors, like 19-year-old Olivia DeJonge who plays the female lead on Will, to take on strong, prominent characters straight out of the gate.
DeJonge said playing Alice Burbage on the show has helped her gain confidence as a woman in Hollywood, and it’s evidence of more networks “tapping into that demand for female lead characters in the foreground of story arcs and character arcs,” she said.
“To see that represented is incredible,” she said, “and it’s an honor to be a part of it.”
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