Watch a TV comedy like According to Jim or The King of Queens and it becomes clear -- TV writers are primarily male. (Why else would attractive, 'hot' women be married to loud-mouthed, unattractive, overweight men with thinning hair?)
The statistics for women writers in the industry aren't good.
During the 2007-2008 prime time season, only 23% of television writers were female, and nearly 80% of shows during that time had no women writers. With odds like those, it's even more extraordinary that one of the most critically-acclaimed shows on television has a writing team that's primarily female.
On the surface Mad Men, AMC's sixties-era tale of advertising agency hijinks, looks and sounds misogynistic with its sexist ad execs and pert secretaries. But the complex female characters offer the actresses that play them some of the best roles for women on television. It helps that out of the nine writers on the show, seven are female.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick talks with Mad Men's women writers who mine their own lives for details that make the show's female characters so compelling. Chozick finds that several have drawn heavily from the experiences of their own mothers, even using elements from their parents' love letters and their own childhood memories.
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Despite the fact that Mad Men takes place almost half a century ago, the issues still resonate, largely due to the staff of women writers. Which may also account for the fact that women are playing the “MadMen Yourself”. What’s intersting is why we want to define ourselves in terms of TV characters. More about this on my blog, which is about the impact of choices on today’s women in a post-post feminist world:
http://undecidedthebook.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/as-in-sit-coms-so-in-life/
“Mad Men” is broadcast on AMC (not HBO). In my opinion, this small error severely damages your credibility. The speed at which you joined those talking about this award-winning show should not be at the expense of personal knowledge or experience.
Greytone, thanks for catching that obvious error! Of course it’s on AMC, but my fingers are too used to praising shows on HBO (think of it as typing on autopilot and not having another set of eyes to proofread.) I appreciate your noting the mistake. Even undecided didn’t see it….
Men are NOT portrayed in a good light in comedies like King of Queens. They are basically always the idiots because the female ego is easy to bruise these days and making the “hot” woman out to be an idiot would be a stuuuuupid move by the writers.
That being said, writing in Hollywood is seriously sexist towards women. Men can go the whole movie without a love interest, but the woman ALWAYS ends up with a guy one way or the other. Men need never resort to stripper tactics, but a woman won’t get far without doing at least one movie either topless or crawling all over their male co-star. Few and far between are the female leads in plots, and you won’t see a I II and III movie with a female as the lead. How far would Indian Jones have gotten with a female archaelogist? What? Women can’t dodge a boulder and wave a flaming stick at snakes?? And don’t get me started on the music industry…where are the ugly women rockers?? If she’s not “do-able” then there’s 20 more women with good voices and a sexier smile right behind her. Even women won’t support a singer like that.
Anyways…said my piece…peace