{"id":69469,"date":"2020-12-02T14:12:23","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T19:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=69469"},"modified":"2020-12-02T15:26:40","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T20:26:40","slug":"brock-prof-to-discuss-female-showrunners-streaming-services-on-livestream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2020\/12\/brock-prof-to-discuss-female-showrunners-streaming-services-on-livestream\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock prof to discuss female showrunners, streaming services on livestream"},"content":{"rendered":"

With colder weather on the horizon, many people may be settling in for some binge-watching in the coming weeks. But Liz Clarke hopes they will consider who is responsible for the content they consume.<\/p>\n

Although Clarke, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, is primarily a silent film historian, she has been keeping an eye on the number of women responsible for telling stories on the big streaming services for the past few years.<\/p>\n

Back in 2017, she noticed that the streaming service Hulu had a higher proportion of women showrunners than its main competitors, Netflix and Amazon Prime.<\/p>\n

However, based on what she knew about early Hollywood, Clarke suspected that as Hulu gained prestige and recognition with its early original shows, the proportion would not hold.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a relative latecomer to original programming, Hulu’s branding wasn’t focused on the originals, and with their eyes cast elsewhere, Hulu’s originals included a fair number of niche programs for teen and female audiences, among others, where women showrunners were the norm,\u201d Clarke says. \u201cAt the time, however, there was a push for Hulu to move into \u2018quality\u2019 programming, with shows like Handmaid’s Tale<\/em>, and my argument was that women’s place in Hulu’s original programming would come to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clarke\u2019s suspicions grew out of her scholarship around silent film and the role of women in early Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Liz Clarke, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, will discuss her research around women showrunners on Hulu at a live Q&A session taking place Friday, Dec. 4.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIn the 1910s, Hollywood was a place for\u200b women to find work, with a push even in national newspapers for women to move to Los Angeles to work in an industry that welcomed them as writers, extras, actresses, directors and editors,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cBut as the film industry grew in prestige and became more profitable, women were pushed out of many levels of production and their labour made invisible in under-the-line labour, secretarial jobs, custodial jobs and in cafeterias.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a trend that others have mapped in many industries \u2014 radio and coding are two other examples Clarke points to.<\/p>\n

Clarke presented her predictions<\/a> at the Forms and Platforms conference about forms and series in an era of emerging streaming platforms hosted by the Labotele research institute at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al in 2017.<\/p>\n

A book grew out of the conference presentations, and Clarke observed that the number of female showrunners quickly dropped even as she was writing up her presentation for the book publication.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a person who publishes mostly on silent film from the 1910s, this was my first experience of the academic publishing timeline not being conducive to a rapidly changing industry,\u201d Clarke says. \u201cHulu and the other streaming platforms have changed so much, and we can also see something similar happening at Netflix \u2014 not with showrunners, specifically, but with a slew of female-led series that were recently cancelled, including one of my favourites, GLOW.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

The shift away from female showrunners leaves many women creatives unable to gain the experience they need to build their careers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the ways that women and especially women of colour are kept out of media production is with the line \u2018we would hire you if you had experience\u2019 \u2014 whereas men in the industry are more likely to get that first try that kick-starts a career,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cWithout a first time, women are turned down on the basis of meritocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clarke cites the example of Queen Sugar<\/em>, a show she calls \u201cbeautiful and moving,\u201d as having deliberately given women a chance. \u201cOne of the mandates of the show was only to hire women directors for each episode, and it paid off,\u201d she says. She also recommends Fleabag<\/em>, Derry Girls<\/em>, Dead to Me<\/em> and Wynonna Earp<\/em> as great shows driven by women\u2019s voices.<\/p>\n

Clarke says that hiring women in higher positions in the film and television industries is also a simple matter of equity and labour, in addition to the other benefits it can bring.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudies have shown that women and people of colour in higher positions can have a trickle-down effect of diverse hiring practices in the many jobs on set and in diverse casting choices,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cAnd women writers, creators and showrunners will bring new stories. This line of reasoning extends to all forms of diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clarke will appear at a livestreamed Q&A viewable on Zoom<\/a> or via Facebook<\/a> Friday, Dec. 4 from noon to 1:30 p.m. to mark the launch of Formes et plateformes de la t\u00e9l\u00e9vision \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e8re du num\u00e9rique<\/em><\/a>. The public session will be conducted in French with live translation.<\/p>\n

Clarke says she\u2019s excited to talk about what has changed at Hulu in the years since the conference and to hear about what her colleagues make of some of the most recent developments in the streaming world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope that someone brings up the new experiment that Netflix France is trying with scheduled programming,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cPerhaps we’re moving back to traditional TV, after all?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With colder weather on the horizon, many people may be settling in for some binge-watching in the coming weeks. But Liz Clarke hopes they will consider who is responsible for the content they consume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":69474,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3319,1,38],"tags":[153,522,8958],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69469"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69478,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69469\/revisions\/69478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}