University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Women showrunners: authorship, identity and representation in US television

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Women showrunners: authorship, identity and representation in US television

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Content WOMEN SHOWRUNNERS: AUTHORSHIP, IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION IN US
TELEVISION
By
Stefania Marghitu
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMATIC ARTS (CRITICAL STUDIES)
May 2020
Copyright 2020 Stefania Marghitu

Dedication

To my grandparents, Elena and Dumitru, Vali and Emil

iii

Acknowledgements

I could have not completed this dissertation without the support of my family and friends, quite
literally, around the world. To my grandparents in Romania, for their eternal support and
encouragement, and summers of rest, relaxation and uplifting. To my parents, Dan and Daniela,
who have never stopped assuring me everything will work out, and visited me and met me in
Indiana, London, and Los Angeles throughout my education. My best friend, boyfriend, and
husband, Conor. My Irish family: Ann-Marie, Eoghan, Martin, Ruarc and Sorcha. My soul sister,
friend, nasa, and sister in law, Rosie.
I have met, made friends, and been mentored by so many amazing scholars. Justyna Beinek was
the first film professor I ever took a course with, and the first professor to subsequently
encourage me I had to pursue a PhD. Joan Hawkins taught the most incredible French Film After
the New Wave course my senior year of Indiana University. Both supported me and wrote
countless graduate school applications. Lee Grieveson gave me the best advice for moving
forward in my graduate education while at UCL, and Melvyn Stokes was the loveliest MA
Dissertation advisor I could have asked for. Harvey Cohen was the first academic to support my
project, and to believe in my work and future, and I thank him for remaining a mentor and friend.
I received my acceptance letter from USC on a dreary London January morning from Aniko
Imre, and I was in shock for so long. We talked over the phone while I sat outside Tate Modern,
and paced inside the Senate House Library entrance. Aniko has supported me in more ways than
I could ever imagine since then, and I am eternally grateful for everything she has done for me.
The choice to not work with Jennifer Holt at UC Santa Barbara was difficult, but she was beyond
gracious to offer to be on my committee, and be the most influential outside committee member.
Christine Acham helped so many graduate students at USC, myself included, and I am so
fortunate to have been one of them, and to have had the honor of her as a committee member. I
took a leap my first year of my PhD and enrolled in Henry Jenkins’ advanced Medium
Specificity seminar. It was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life,
and led to Henry’s initial involvement, encouragement and eventual role as chair of my
dissertation. Henry carried me through what could have been a difficult transition process with
all of the guidance I could have hoped for and more, to get me to where I needed to be not only
in the PhD, but as an academic and intellectual. Henry, you are the most generous and humble
advisor and chair, and all of your students are in awe of your labor to help us. Sarah Banet-
Weiser’s friendship and mentorship was the greatest gift. J.D. Connor’s guidance as Director of
Graduate Studies and labor to help us in our diverse set of needs is unparalleled. Working as a
TA for Nitin Govil and Priya Jaikumar were some of the best pedagogical experiences. To have
been lead TA for Priya during the Coronavirus shift to remote education was somehow kismet,
and I was so fortunate to have worked with her my last semester at USC. Tara McPherson’s
Television Theory class remains one of the most influential courses I ever took, and helped in
my pedagogical training in so many ways. My thanks to Tara for her support as her role as Dean
during my last years as a PhD.
A massive thank you to Ellen McCormack for her support and guidance.
A one year Masters program led to a lifetime of friends. My fellow PhDs in battle, Elisa Jochum
and Sigrid Priessl, were the best support network. My London family, Ben Stevens, Conrad Ng,
Anne-Mette Jaeger Hansen, Lydia Burt, Richard Evans and Filipa Marques. What can I say?
You all saved me in more ways than you’ll know.

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My Indiana University family are the most amazing people in the world. My friends since our
undergraduate days, Denise Reyes, Stephanie Mendonce, my sister Leslie Streicher, Anna
Strand, are the most inspiring group of women. You all amaze me, my kweens. Thank you for
always believing in me. Amanda Keeler became a friend and mentor when I was lost in the sea
of graduate applications, and Daniel Murphy remained a kind and generous friend throughout the
process. Fate must have brought me to the Kelley family, because Andrea, Bay, and Izzy feel
like family to me at this point. Kathy Cook hosted me on my returns to Indiana for conferences
and archival trips, some of the best breaks from LA and PhD life I had.
I didn’t think I would be able to make the friends I did at USC in LA, but once again I proved
myself to be lucky. I couldn’t have made it without Kelsey Moore Johnson and Erendira
Espinoza Taboada.To my LA ladies, at USC and beyond: Sabrina Howard, Perry Johnson,
Courtney Cox, Rachel Moran, Becca Johnson, Katie Walsh, and the incomparable Rachel
Summers. My fellow CAMS TAs and grad students: Qui Ha Nyguen, Kata Kis, Jelena “cool
brick” Culibrk, Emily Rauber-Rodriguez, Manouchka Labouba, Ennuri Jo, Michael Turcios,
Jake Bohrod for his friendship to both me and Conor. My Indiana and LA family, Hutch and
Brit, Spencer and Jen from Indiana to Colorado. To my conference and fellow graduate students:
Gry Rustad, Sarah Louise Smyth, Ania Ostruka, Swagato Chakravoty, Megan Minogue,
Caitriona Reilly, and so many more.
To the professors who helped me when they had no reason to besides their caring nature: Chris
Becker, Michael Newman, Elana Levine especially. Nothing beats the Midwest! To the PhD to
early career scholars who also helped me during so much work on their end: Alyx Vesey, Alfred
Martin, Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Faye Woods for sharing her work
with me every time I asked, and so graciously, Rebecca Harrison. To my editors and allies:
Shelley Cobb’s mentorship and assistance, Tanya Horeck’s encouragement and support, the level
of work Frances Smith and Timothy Shary worked on for my and Lindsey Alexander’s
contribution to the Amy Heckerling chapter.
I am fortunate enough to still be close with my childhood friends, who were my constant
cheerleaders and biggest supporters: Dr. Nadia Bhuiyan, Katie Panhorst, Emily Jenda, Delia
Barnes, Caroline Gibson, Matthew Parten, Russ Parten, Rebecca Rittenour Stianche, Miles
Bugg, Chandler White, Caroline “CJ” White, Lina Nguyen and Lan Ma, my niece Emilia,
Melanie McDonald, Adam G and Meg, Rollie Harris, Torrance Jones, Brian, Jessica and
Penelopie “Nellie” Miller, Emi Peters, and Brittani “Bee Kirk.”
To those who helped me in LA to gain teaching experience at Chapman and Pitzer, two amazing
departments and faculty: Emily Carman, Emily Aguero, Courtney White and Elizabeth Affuso.

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Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vi
Introduction: 1
Chapter One: Gertrude Berg as Proto-Showrunner: 31
Negotiated Authorship and Jewish Identity from Early Radio to Television (1949-1962)

Chapter Two: The Personal Politics, Production Savvy, 68
and Aspirational Second-wave Feminism
of Diane English and Murphy Brown: (1988-2018)

Chapter Three: From Self-Promotion to Social Justice: Shonda Rhimes and Paratexts 110
Conclusion 153
Bibliography 161

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Abstract

In the post-network digital era, discourses of quality and creative freedom in the form of
the showrunner as auteur erase the history of the showrunner as a commercial artist who must
function as a bureaucratic author. Meanwhile, larger studies or histories of writers, producers, or
writer-producers often cite the scarcity of women in these positions to prove inequality without
further qualitative analysis. Subsequently, they only provide a historical overview of women
producers to prove their existence and prominence. A different approach would provide
examples of women showrunners who attempted to climb the traditional ladder, from writer to
executive producer, but their original series did not progress past development or initial episodes.
This would demonstrate the structural inequality facing women who attempt to reach the highest
levels in the television industry. Of course, only a small percentage of network television series
succeed and thrive, and the majority do not move past development or a pilot season. All
potential showrunners, whether men or women, experience these rejections. However, most
television series, successful or not, have been created and spearheaded by showrunners who are
predominantly white men, reflecting key patterns found in nearly all competitive industries.
Therefore, this dissertation focuses on case studies of socially-conscious women showrunners
instead of contributing qualitative research that supports the quantitative findings of gendered
inequality. What connects these showrunners’ entry point into the industry is a time of
uncertainty, seen as an opening for innovation, that led to executives hiring women for lead
series.
This dissertation employs case studies of three of the only women showrunners in
television who were hired based on the premise and potential of their original series rather than
emerging from the industry based on a traditional ladder-climbing model: Gertrude Berg, Diane
English, and Shonda Rhimes. The use of case studies shows that women showrunners are the
exception and not the rule. The infrastructure that leads to becoming a showrunner is never
guaranteed, but the lack of women showrunners who reached success via progressing upwards
through positions highlights the gendered battles to achieve showrunner status.
These showrunners served as the creators, head writers, and executive producers of their
own programs. They did not work as showrunners who were brought in to execute someone
else’s vision. Not only did they succeed in these roles, they subsequently became public personas
known for their social and political messages while maintaining creative authorship and financial
ownership of their series. Each of these showrunners challenged both societal conventions and
those of the television genre. Further, they presented alternative viewpoints of women, both on-
and off-screen. While many commercial artists, including showrunners, must concede to the
demands of the industry, this dissertation reveals how the bureaucratic authorship of these
women initiated a cultural negotiation based on expectations of women in television, on- and off-
screen, during each historical period.

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INTRODUCTION
Television is both a part of a larger cultural pluralism and currently is a central
component in American life. In its role as a central cultural medium it presents us
with its own multiplicity of meanings rather than a monolithic presentation of a
dominant point of view. Because it is, to a great extent, culturally written,
television presents us with our most prevalent concerns, our deepest dilemmas.
Our most traditional views, those which are repressive and reactionary, as well as
those which are subversive and emancipatory, are upheld, examined, maintained
and transformed. The emphasis is on process rather than product, on discussion
rather than indoctrination, on contradiction rather than on coherence.
Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch1

This dissertation highlights the role of television authorship in the United States (US)
through the figure of the socially-conscious woman showrunner, known as the joint creator,
writer, producer, and sometimes star of a series. While feminist film scholars continue to provide
histories and studies of overlooked and forgotten past authors, primarily focusing on film
directors, scholarship on women’s television authorship remains sparse.2 In direct opposition to
film auteurism, feminist television studies first investigated the quintessentially “feminine”
serialized genre of the soap opera and its female audiences, focusing on production, textual
analysis, and reception.3
The lack of work on women’s televisual authorship subsequently creates a rupture
between the underlying connections of authorship and representation, both on- and off-screen. In
the tradition of feminist studies, this dissertation does not perpetuate authorship through the
“great male” history of showrunners who are considered auteurs. Instead, it focuses on women
creator-writer-producers turned showrunners who also sought to represent women characters and
issues “symbolically annihilated” by broadcast media.4
The growing attention dedicated to US women showrunners and their visibility in the
digital era suggests women showrunners did not previously occupy roles as public figures.

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However, this dissertation provides both historical and contemporary analyses of their role in
television and US cultural politics through key case studies of three prominent showrunners who
became public personas: Gertrude Berg, Diane English, and Shonda Rhimes.
My project fills in the gaps of previous academic scholarship by considering showrunners
from a historical perspective: the radio to early broadcast era; the late 1980s network era; and the
contemporary post-network digital era. This dissertation pinpoints showrunners who are
acknowledged as public personas in US culture, beyond recognition within the industry. Berg,
English, and Rhimes have been selected as women whose careers and trajectories follow the
fundamental paradigm of a socially-conscious commercial artist who profits from work that is
made to challenge norms and provide a previously untold perspective of the culturally-specific
group their series focuses on. Thus, this dissertation is a study of US network television creator-
writer-producer hybrids, known as showrunners, who have the twofold goal of gaining financial
capital and upward mobility while also working toward social capital with a greater vision of
their series in terms of cultural specificity, politics, and representations of race, class, gender,
ethnicity, and nationality. Consequently, I consider these showrunners both stars and activists
who gained celebrity status through press coverage, even if the historical examples are largely
forgotten in contrast to their peers.
I first assert that the position of showrunner has existed since the beginning of mass
broadcast media, starting with radio.5 While “showrunner” is not the most frequent title for series
creators, producers, or leading actors, it is the identifier that describes their multitude of positions
as creative and managerial heads of a series during the production process, with studio and
network executives and heads as their colleagues or superiors depending on the level of control
they attain. Once this level of authority was reached, showrunners often served as cultural

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ambassadors of television, propelling the medium beyond the perceived monolithic anonymous
mass medium and gaining stardom before and after the rise of the internet—from Rod Serling in
the 1960s, Norman Lear in the 1970s, and David Lynch in the 1980s to Joss Whedon in the
1990s and Tina Fey in the 2000s. Yet, white, affluent males dominate the industry as they do
many others; the Writer’s Guild of America West released their first “Inclusion Report Card” for
the 2017–2018 staffing season and found that 88% of showrunners are white and 75% of
showrunners are men.6 These gendered and racialized disparities occur in the highest positions in
television. For example, staff writers were reported to be 50% men and 50% women with people
of color constituting 45%, although “people of color” is a broad umbrella.7 The disparities are
most visible among high-level producers and particularly stark in the top writing position, that of
the showrunner.8 Further, the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity provided a thorough report of
staff writers from marginalized groups experiencing discrimination that deters them from staying
in television or prohibits them from advancing.9 This historical and reported contemporary
disparity is why I have chosen to focus on showrunners who enter the television industry as
outliers.
Television, and radio before it, has always been viewed as a commercial endeavor. As a
result, its authors are viewed as intrinsically commercial. As representatives of the commercial
interests of the industry, producers hold power over writers, creators, directors, and actors.
Aware of the power of this role, radio and television author-writers who want to take control of
their projects have learned to take up the managerial role of the producer. Creative writers
learned the television business to assert their authorial presence throughout the making of a
series.10 This hybridity is what marks the role of the showrunner. As with the writer-director-

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producer trifecta in film, being a showrunner includes heightened income, cultural capital, and
influence.
If Hollywood and television are considered structures of US nationalistic imperialist and
capitalist propaganda, then creators’ defiance and breaking of barriers demonstrate that
subversion is possible. Totalitarian and democratic governments both follow, persecute,
imprison, and kill dissidents—from the USSR to the US. This acknowledges that creatives have
influence over the public that may contrast that of state rulers. Historian Steve Ross cites Charlie
Chaplin as the first political movie star; FBI agents under J. Edgar Hoover issued a memo that
Chaplin aimed to use movies as communist “propagandist appeal for the cause of the labor
movement and revolution”.11 Television creators and stars also experienced similar persecution
during the Blacklist and the rise of McCarthyism, both for their on-screen representations and
their off-screen activities. The connections between on- and off-screen were particularly
troublesome for the government agents attempting to silence them.
As such, I will also examine how showrunners use outlets beyond their main text, known
as paratexts, to assert their views.12 Further, film and television programs are a product of their
respective nations, production practices, distribution methods, and creators’ distinct worldviews.
These mediums hold distinct differences that subsequently require different methodological
approaches to authorship. I consider authorship from a production studies perspective: first, as
industrial, based on labor and contracts; second, as a cultural phenomenon that is negotiated on
an interpersonal level within the production process; and third, based on the discursive texts
around it, which include various interviews, public appearances, personal papers, and third-party
material.13

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Part of this paratextual analysis is the showrunner’s relationship with fans. I emphasize
how fans and their individual and collective actions (in the form of visibly passionate audiences
who love their work) and the industry at large (in the form of studio and network heads,
executives, and advertising sponsors) are all inherent in the development of the showrunner’s
career trajectory. Without the support of viewers and the business side of the industry, a
showrunner cannot sustain their place within cultural memory and history. Further, I show that
the visibility of a series’ fan following can be used to understand how burgeoning subcultural
formations influence the ways network, cable, and streaming platforms all formulate
programming based on targeted demographics and specific, previously ignored audiences.
In my first case study, Berg, the showrunner was able to achieve subcultural to
mainstream success. Despite this, the cancelation of this showrunner’s series and the end of their
career (based on cultural and economic reasons that did not lead to regular syndication) led them
to be the anonymous, forgotten series Levine describes. As Kathryn Cramer Brownell asserts:
Hollywood activists made entertainment an integral component of public life. In the
process, celebrities and studio executives showed national politicians how valuable
entertainment could be in generating funds for philanthropic campaigns and shifting
public opinion during an international crisis, and ultimately, in spreading democracy
across the world during the Cold War.14

The showrunner’s function within the economic logic of television programming often
shifts with the supply-and-demand nature of cultural norms in the US and the changing views
and attitudes of television viewers. Critics of US television and mass media since the Frankfurt
School have argued that it purely serves to promote capitalism through consumption and
consumerism. Some scholars, such as Mark Crispin Miller, go as far as to state that:
In short, the modern history of America is, in large part, the history of an ever-rising
flood of corporate propaganda—and also of our various responses to it, as We the People

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have obscurely struggled to reverse it, or resist it, or to live our lives in spite of it, or have
simply let it carry us away.15

I do not accept the notion that television is a monolithic and homogeneous medium when
considering its multifaceted contributors and producers, from the strictly corporate networks,
advertisers, and programmers to writers and producers. Within the ecosystem of television,
public opinion—through cultural critics, audience and fan interventions, and government and
nonprofit organizations—contributes to the cultural shifts of the medium, as well as to changes
from within the industry via collective bargaining and unionization.
This dissertation is not a comprehensive history of the showrunner, and because the labor
demands of a showrunner who has a long-term, impactful career that reaches brand recognition
is so rare, there is no typical formula or path for their success and status. Thus, Berg, English,
and Rhimes illustrate the evolving intersection of television production and reception cultures,
politics, and the power of stardom. I have chosen to focus on showrunners who work in
broadcast, or network, television (NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX), because the information and
discourse of cable and streaming platforms perpetuates the concept of “total” creative freedom
and conceals the majority of disputes between showrunners, their studio, and the distribution
platform.
Due to the nature of the showrunner’s labor practices, I refer to them as bureaucratic
authors. This is due to their understood position as intermediaries who work within the television
industry’s bureaucracy alongside the fact that the work of the showrunner begins with writing.
Filmmakers have been considered artists due to film’s function as a visual medium since its birth
as a silent, non-scripted endeavor, whereas writing has been integral to television from its radio
roots. Therefore, I ascribe showrunners as authors rather than artists. Television has also been
posited as a producer’s medium, as the producer oversees the day-to-day production of a series

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and retains ownership of the project. If a writer is the author of a television series and a producer
is the owner, the incentive for the creator-showrunner to be a writer-producer is understood as a
pathway to both financial and creative control over their work. Previous works that have fused
industry and textual analysis while investigating television from an authorial perspective were
based around the power of studios, networks, eras, and viewer-producer interactions.16 An
exploration of television’s creators and laborers will provide a context to understand how
authorship, ownership, identity, and representation function in television in their socio-historical
contexts.
Auteurism and Authorship to Activism and Stardom
While authorship has been a fundamental component in film studies since the early
1960s, television authorship has been slower to emerge as a critical tool for understanding a
program’s origins, meanings, and reception, largely because television was previously
considered an anonymous mass medium and television directors do not have creative control
over series. The director as auteur facilitated film’s transition from mass medium to art form in
the 1960s with the Cahiers du Cinema writers in France and, later, Andrew Sarris in the US
being the major proponents of auteur theory.17
The rise of auteurs in the 1960s also boosted new Hollywood marketing strategies based
on filmmakers as public star personas. Auteur theory and star studies, both subfields of film
studies, exist in parallel. The construction of the auteur mirrors that of the star image, as both are
enacted by the branding and marketing strategies of the media industries:
This kind of voluntarist and Romantic understanding of the agency of film authorship as
encapsulating the possibilities for expression (especially male) artist’s “personality” was
immediately co-opted by film commerce, for the purposes of which the name of the
author came in the post-war period, outside and inside Hollywood, to “function” as a
“brand name,” a means of labeling and selling a film and of orienting expectations of
meaning and pleasures in the absence of generic boundaries and categories.18

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For proponents of auteurism, demystifying the notion of a pure artist—one who pursues
art for art’s sake—seems to take away from the value of the art itself. Yet, hiding the process of
cultural production (which in many ways reveals the struggles of the artist) eschews commodity
fetishism and brings the issues of the industry’s relationship to its treatment of art and artists
based on branding, marketability, and supply and demand. These figures are not pure artists or
activists; they are television’s politicians who must negotiate and balance their goals and the
interests of their constituents (audiences). To unite these women showrunners’ struggles is to
appeal to the end of the “Oppression Olympics”.19 I believe this is what Lear and other socially-
conscious showrunners’ ultimate creative and political goal was in their work on broadcast
television.
Despite their similarities, the intersection of authorship and star studies is underexplored.
While broadcast media borrowed its “central producer” system from early cinema, the director
retained less control. The producer continued to be the principal decision-maker of operational
activities, planning and budgeting, coordinating various departments, and ensuring production
was done in a cost-effective and timely manner. The contrast to this standardization of the
production process is distinguishing a media work as worthy of watching through advertising,
marketing, and branding of the most attractive element: the genre or star.20 Thus, the star system
must straddle standardization and differentiation.21 This was the case in the studio star system as
well as the broadcast system.
A formulated “star system” of showrunners does not exist; the evolution of showrunners
into stars relies on the response of fans. For this reason, the subsequent chapters will focus on
individual showrunners who gained access to the industry during different socio-political eras

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that often share no commonalities and are typically ambivalent toward larger messages and more
concerned with success before dissecting the outcomes of their series that attempt to push
boundaries and gain a wider appeal. The purpose of analyzing the star personas of these
showrunners is not to discern between their “real self” and their public persona, but to
understand what these bifurcated representations reveal about the expectations of the television
industry. Just as stars’ careers are viewed as texts, I scrutinize showrunners’ personas as
performative.
The role of the television writer as a for-hire/freelance and salaried position, and the
history of its unions, guilds, and strikes, has previously been chronicled by historians such as
Miranda Banks to reveal the labor struggles and precarity of the position.22 Conversely,
producers who only held that position could be business-minded individuals seeking to find a
successful series, serving as the managerial boss of those programs, and holding control over all
creative staff. Then came the creator-writer-producer who could take on all these roles. By the
late 1950s and 1960s, when television was understood as a big business, writer-producers
became the norm. Meanwhile, the past generation, as epitomized by Maurice Tombragel, a
writer on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, “expressed [their] distaste towards what
[they] called the new job description of the writer-auteur”23:
Today you have to be an auteur. You not only have to create your own material
… you have got to raise the money for it, you have to direct it, you have to
produce it. You are the one man show … [doing] a picture today. And the writers
that I know … we just couldn’t do that nor were we interested in doing it … To sit
down and write something, fine. To try to sell it? Just leave me alone. I don’t even
want to go on a set. I don’t want to even be involved in the studio.24

While these broad histories provide an overall view of these positions, my study
examines those who were able to break outside the standard and gain heightened industrial and

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cultural power and clout while facing pushback, failures, and backlash. While the role of the
writer-producer was established early on, my case studies do not always reflect what a writer-
producer could accomplish within their time, much less the individual rights of the writer or
producer. Further, I focus on case studies of showrunners that reflect the struggles of television
as a study of the negotiation of the neoliberal commercial artist, or bureaucratic author.
A set of logics often cannot explain the successes of the case studies over their peers;
however, it can account for their persistence, negotiation, the industry and respective audience’s
interest in their programming, and ultimately their ability to tap into something viewers can
identify with and watch over the course of several seasons. Their failures or demise in the
industry are indicative of the limits they were able to push, as well as the cultural climate of the
time. Hindsight allows me to interpret why a showrunner or series was successful or not with
mass or small audiences, and the intentions of the industry at large with the series, but I claim no
greater understanding of what makes a showrunner or series successful. This uncertainty is what
makes the creative industries mysterious, fascinating, and frustrating for those who are employed
within and study their workings.
I do rely on an amalgam of cultural, political, economic, and industrial forces as my tools
for understanding these case studies. Just as film writer-producer-directors who gain name-brand
recognition and authority in the industry are rare, these showrunners are equally, if not more,
rare. Muriel Cantor argues that successful television practitioners must adhere to the commercial
logic of the industry to be successful, but my case studies elucidate the perpetual outsider-insider
dichotomy.25 Cantor’s monograph on the Hollywood producer, in its title and subject matter,
refers to His Work and Audience, inherently omitting any women. Showrunners who can push
the boundaries of the medium have previously been trained in other professions where they have

11

been able to negotiate their content and their role. This is also how non-television professionals
with accolades in other creative industries can enter the television industry with higher standing.
While this is primarily the case during the height of the post-network renaissance that brought in
film, theater, art, and literary practitioners, it was a practice that began with radio and
television’s conception. This is natural when considering the inception of the medium when there
was no precedent for practitioners, as was the case when the nascent film industry hired novelists
as screenwriters and turned theater actors into movie stars.
While business-minded executives, developers, agents, managers, and producers must
prioritize profit, hybrid creator-showrunners who are socially conscious and industry know-how
serve as intermediaries who can use their power to promote pluralism in television, on- and off-
screen. Writer-producer hybrids were rare at the onset of television, as the roles were considered
separate departments with different skills. Nascent writer-producers of the network era were
often the creators who stayed on as writer-producers and learned to become bureaucratic authors,
a term synonymous with a corporate author and related to circumscribed agency and discerning
savvy.26 In pitching their series and brand while continuing to maintain their success in the
competitive marketplace of television, showrunners always inherently abided by this neoliberal
practice by serving as CEOs of their own series. What sets apart showrunners who create
socially-conscious programming and aim for progressive ideas and resistance politics during
conservative eras is their ability to separate their business capability from their creative goals.
As will be illustrated in the case of Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises (MTM) and Norman
Lear’s production companies, this negotiation between creative incentives and business
capability is also seen when showrunners stop working directly on programming and take on
managerial power over several series. Just as being a writer-producer holds the twofold benefit

12

of authorship and ownership, developing a series and becoming an executive producer leads to
your vision and brand being carried out by future generations of showrunners, while also
profiting from their work under your support. Just as the post-Blacklist 1950s and 1960s era of
television led to the efficient writer-producer, the 1980s saw the birth of franchise showrunners,
which continued to expand in the 1990s. These showrunners were predominantly white males
(with the noted exceptions of women who gained entry during the 1970s) who were able to enter
the industry and climb the ladder to showrunner. Lorne Michaels has thrived as the creator and
executive producer of Saturday Night Live since its inception in 1977. The emphasis on
franchises also favored what Todd Glitlin refers to as “recombinant culture” through spinoffs,
reboots, and sequels.27 For example, since 1990 Dick Wolf has created an empire out of his Law
and Order franchise, yielding six police/courtroom series and the longest-running primetime
series, Law and Order: SVU, which entered its 21st season in 2019. Behind many successful
series—even if they were primarily known as actor-star vehicles—were showrunners who
carried out the neoliberal twofold principles of consistency and efficiency.
Blockbuster series also led to franchise showrunners, such as John Wells of ER and The
West Wing (along with Aaron Sorkin); Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David of Seinfeld; Matt
Groening of The Simpsons; David Crane and Marta Kauffman of Friends; Michael Mann of
Miami Vice; Chris Carter of The X-Files; and Carmen Finestra, Matt Williams, and David
McFadzean of Home Improvement. Further, former network executives Marcy Carsey and Tom
Werner formed their own company, Carsey-Werner, which developed hit series from The Cosby
Show to Roseanne in the same manner that Lear developed spinoffs of his original series. This is
not to say these showrunners and their series lacked innovation, but their trajectory was different
from my chosen case studies.

13

Positioning the 1970s
From 2013 to 2015, television witnessed a rise in diversity-based programming on-screen
that reflected off-screen representation, across emerging streaming platforms delving into
original programming and established cable and broadcast channels: Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the
New Black (Netflix, 2013–2019); Mara Brok Akil’s Girlfriends (UPN, 2000–2006; CW, 2006–
2008) and Being Mary Jane (BET, 2013–2019); Kenya Barris’ Black-ish (ABC, 2014–); Abbi
Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s Broad City (Comedy Central, 2014–2019); Jane the Virgin (CW,
2014–2019); Lee Daniels and Danny Strong’s Empire (FOX, 2015–) and Nahnatchka Khan’s
Fresh Off The Boat (ABC, 2015–2020). While the television industry and some cultural critics
are quick to praise this advancement, it is only recent and has not yet proven long-lasting.
Considering the pre-Blacklist era and the 1970s as a comparison, eras of progressive
programming can be fleeting as can the position of women in the television industry.
With some exceptions, the post-Blacklist lack of women writers in television lasted until
the 1970s, when creative development teams with knowledge of the industry worked out how
innovation could be incorporated within standard conventions and the industry’s understanding
of new viewer demographics. Women in the 1970s began to write for socially-conscious
television programming and even became co-showrunners through producer Norman Lear.28
Like second-wave feminism itself, this structure prioritized upper-middle-class white women.
Even fewer women of color were making strides in the industry at the time, and they were not
counted in the Writer’s Guild of America West (WGA) statistics reports. Willette Klausner
became the first black female Vice President of Market Research when she was hired by Warner
Bros. in 1975.29

14

In short, the mid-1970s was an opportune time to be hired in television and some writers’
rooms wanted to hire a token female writer or two without necessarily supporting their future
careers.30 Despite this, women writers credit the men who hired them as helping to start, support,
and promote their careers. Norman Lear, James Brooks, Steven Bochco, Steven Spielberg, Roger
Corman, Lindsay Law, David Susskind, Allan Burns, Warren Beatty, Barry Diller, Jeffrey
Katzenberg, Fred Silverman, Michael Eisner, Peter Guber, Frank Wells, Ned Tannen, Grant
Tinker, and Mike Medavoy are frequently cited in this regard:
When a man hired a woman from the new, untested group in the 1970s and 1980s, it went
against all the usual hiring codes—work with people you trust and have worked with
before. The only reason a woman began working in the 1970s was that some guy gave
her a chance.31

Women being hired as writers in the 1970s led to women showrunners in the 1980s—
Diane English is one of the most prominent—who did not emerge after working their way up the
ladder of the industry but came in as executive producer turned creator-showrunner. There was a
new acceptance of feminism and civil rights, reflected in shows incorporating single women,
black families, and new workplace series that mirrored the decline or delay of the US nuclear
family. Second-wave feminism’s impact on women writers led to their demands for greater
access into the industry as creatives and executives, including showrunners, and this further
yielded new representations and feminist readings of programming.
While the success of Lear’s spinoffs with women or black men as protagonists led to
Lear hiring more creators and writers to reflect these characters, they were not able to forge their
own identities with name-brand recognition to thrive without Lear’s support; for example, Allan
Mannings and Whitney Blake, an early woman showrunner.32 It was only when Mannings
became a writer on Lear’s Good Times that he pitched the idea for One Day at a Time to the

15

producer, who greenlit the script.33 Blake promoted the series based on her credit as the creator
and writer credits with Manning for the eight successful seasons that the series ran.
As she reached middle age, Blake experienced less demand for acting roles and later
attempted to work in producing and directing. She eventually became a Los Angeles-based talk
show host. Many women in the 1970s who gained access as creators and writers had male
creative and business partners to help their careers, who were often their romantic partners or
husbands. The husband-wife partnership, as demonstrated by Blake and Mannings and English
and her husband, has been a tradition since the era of silent film when actresses gained agency
with their husbands’ help.34 This was also the case for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Other creator-producer-writers who worked for Lear had varying outcomes in their
careers. Lear particularly helped with the hiring of women and, although he is now considered a
beacon of liberalism, even he had to overcome the previous standards as chronicled by Ann
Marcus, who worked on Mary Hartman:
Working with Norman … was very difficult because at first he was very chauvinistic. I
can swear with the best of them, but the language there was really bawdy and rough …
We’d spend hours in story conferences with Norman—he loved the show and wanted to
contribute. After one of the marathon sessions, I was in the conference room gathering
my papers, and Norman was in the bathroom. He came out and said, “Annie, you were so
terrific today I could fuck you.” I thought that was one of the nicest compliments I’d ever
been paid by a boss. Now, today you wouldn’t think of saying something like that.35

Conventional knowledge of television history also places the birth of progressive
programming in the 1970s, catching up to the 1960s civil rights movements. While this decade
indeed marked a boom as a result of wider social justice and civil rights movements, I argue that
pervasive precedents occurred. I further assert that the women showrunners I analyze were able
to enter the television industry when the industry, as a whole, was uncertain about the future of

16

programming and took chances on creator-writer-producers with a vision to influence the social,
political, and cultural landscape outside the status quo of the US by reaching out to viewers.
These showrunners are also not a direct result of climbing up the hierarchy of the
television ladder conventionally, from assistant to staff writer to executive producer and head
writer. I will first show that, in all their earliest forms, fledgling radio, network television, cable
programming, and streaming content were not dictated by the mass audience appeal of the
marketplace. Rather, alongside the uncertainty and associated openness of the industry,
showrunners were driven by utopian, progressive ideas and were eager to pursue a new medium
or changing commercial platform. This occurred even before the eventual commodification and
formulaic nature of capitalist logic to perpetuate the same type of product took hold and viewers
grew tiresome, demanding changes to “keep up with the times”.
Many of these utopian hopes were crushed by the Blacklist and only began to be revived
during the 1970s. Like justice itself, television progress is slow and can serve as both a reflection
of the status quo and a transition to newly-formed eras of progress. As creators in a commercial
medium and as commercial, bureaucratic authors, television showrunners provide an ideal site
for investigating how new ideas around equality and inclusion can be erased, opposed, and
resisted or embraced, accepted, and commodified when it is “good for business”. Throughout
this dissertation, I remain cognizant that these authors do not work in an artistic vacuum; rather,
they must work within the confines of their field and what is accepted at the time based on
general public opinion.
Although 1970s television is known for its progressive programming, these series were
monopolized by the studios of Norman Lear and Mary Tyler Moore, two studios based on
collaboration between a writer-producer and business-based producer. The next generation of

17

showrunners that thrived after the demise of these studios consisted predominantly of white
males, while women and black men were not able to gain traction.
In contrast to Blake, the producers who learned from Lear since writing for All in The
Family (CBS, 1971–1979), Don Nicholl, Michael Ross, and Bernie West, created its spinoff The
Jeffersons (CBS, 1975–1985) under Lear’s development and production support. For several
decades, The Jeffersons held the record for most episodes (253) of a black-centered series until
2012.36 The three creators went on to develop, produce, and write for the successful Three’s
Company (ABC, 1977–1984). In the Lear tradition, it was based on a British sitcom titled Man
About the House (ITV, 1973–1976). Lear and producing partner Bud Yorkin created another
family spinoff, Maude (CBS, 1972–1978), which starred a liberal-minded, strong-willed, middle-
aged woman (played by Bea Arthur) and her family navigating personal and political conflicts.
The most famous episode of the series, “Maude’s Dilemma” (1972), deals with Maude’s
decision to have an abortion, which had become legal in New York the year before it was legal
nationally under Roe vs Wade. Susan Harris, who won a Humanitas Prize for this script, wrote
the two-part episode. Harris later became a successful woman showrunner, creating series such
as Soap (ABC, 1977–1981) and the wildly successful The Golden Girls (1985–1992), in which
Arthur co-starred. Both Maude and The Golden Girls were rare series that showed middle-aged
and senior-aged women as fully-nuanced characters.
As Mollie Gregory chronicles, even if 1973 was declared “the Year of the Woman” a vast
majority of film and television programs at that time were made by male producers, writers, and
directors, with men also dominating the industry’s corporate structure.37 While second-wave
feminism contributed to a shift in some broadcast content, women behind the camera had to start
their own call for equality as the changes did not transcend hiring practices.

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This began with a group of women from the WGA. To show the statistics of women’s
underemployment in the industry, they developed their own survey of women writers in the
1972–1973 season, the first of its kind from any Hollywood guild. It revealed that of the 2,978
members of the WGA, 2,567 (86%) were men and the remaining 411 members (14%) were
women.38 On The Mary Tyler Moore Show there were 50 men and 25 women writers, which
constituted the highest number of women working on a single show at the time. Previously, I
Love Lucy employed 116 men and 4 women, and The Partridge Family hired 69 men and 7
women. 39
The statistics committee considered these numbers progress, as many series had no
women writers at all.40 Hollywood Reporter’s Sue Cameron was given the survey and published
it in November 1973. Variety later also reported on it, which pushed the industry to solve the
now publicly-addressed problem within a heightened climate of demand for equal rights.
Gregory cites that one solution was hiring women as vice presidents, with Ethel Winant’s
promotion to vice president of casting and talent at CBS the first of many. Compared to
production, this area was considered a “safe” place to “put women and where they thrived.”41
Winant’s promotion to vice president led to several women taking over the role by the
1980s as if it were a figurehead position that was “declassed or demoted,” which is “not an
unknown occurrence when women enter a field.”42 However, these positions helped women
climb the ladder and, by the 1980s, Sherry Lansing’s position as president of 20th Century Fox
Productions marked the first time a woman held the position at a major company.43 Marcy
Carsey’s success as a development executive with Tom Werner, under Carsey-Werner
Productions, helped. They hired Ann Beatles, who became head writer and producer of A
Different World. Cagney and Lacey creator and former showrunner Barbara Corday became

19

head of Columbia television and hired women for the show even after she was no longer
involved in the day-to-day running of the program. Sharon Gless won an Emmy for the series,
and Georgia Jeffries (who previously worked on China Beach) was one of the first working
mothers hired on the series, which was considered a rare occurrence at the time. She contributed
to writing for protagonist Lacey when she balanced her family life.44 Cynthia Cidre, whose
parents moved to the US from Cuba in 1967 when she was nine years old, won a writing award
in 1979, and became one of the few Latino writers in the industry. Cidre, who went on to
showrun the TNT Dallas reboot (2012–2014) and daytime the soap opera Cane (2007, CBS)
describes being treated like “some exotic thing” and recounts how studio presidents and other
bosses and coworkers invited themselves over to her home.45
To summarize this movement in the 1970s, Gregory states a handful of women
producers, writers, and executives became many, but equality was not achieved. Working
women were an “acknowledged fact, but the same old cultural restrictions were working right
along with them,” with women occupying 96.8% of secretarial jobs while constituting only 30%
of managers and administrators. Additionally, in 1976, women earned 56 cents to every dollar a
man earned on average and later statistics show the disparities for women of color were even
greater.46
Gregory states that, by the 1990s, “the perception of women as window-dressing was
persistent” and that “it takes generations for deeply ingrained attitudes [about women working in
television] to change.”47 This often resulted in the rhetoric of “I’m not a female writer, I’m a
writer who happens to be a female,” as stated by Janis Diamond.48 However, several women
continued to work in the industry and they began hiring more women. This led to women
climbing up to executive producer and showrunner positions. Statistical studies about women in

20

the industry were continued by scholars such as Martha Lauzen, who stated that “changing
Hollywood is going to be like turning around a battleship,” as the 1980s rhetoric was “having it
all” while the 1990s said “let’s examine that”.49
Contrast: Other Types of Showrunners
Two types of showrunners operate as contrasts to my case studies. The first is a
showrunner who is compliant with the requests and demands of the industry and does not face
conflict or struggle in terms of entering the industry or goals for their representation. This type of
showrunner does not have a body of work that indicates a common vision or themes across their
series. The second is the type of showrunner who gained success from an established working
relationship with a successful showrunner who supported their project(s).
Chuck Lorre exemplifies the first type. When a showrunner from an underrepresented
group fails in their project to establish a series that shifts the norms of representation, it can be a
setback that signals to the industry that these series are not marketable and will not sell. While a
failed series does not mark the end of a showrunner’s career, it indicates different opportunities
for the future. When Lorre, one of the largest network showrunners and known as “the King of
Sitcoms,” had his Netflix series Disjointed canceled, he was given another chance with The
Kominsky Method which went on to win him a first Golden Globe for Best Comedy. After
working on Roseanne and eventually serving as an executive producer, he understood the power
of star vehicles. Yet, the first two series he created in the 1990s, Grace Under Fire with Bret
Butler and Cybil with Cybil Sheppard, were only mild successes. Later, Dharma and Greg, about
a married couple who reflected conservative/liberal binaries with polar opposite viewpoints and
upbringings, was a top 25 fixture. His biggest series would be the male-driven Two and a Half
Men (starring Charlie Sheen as a philandering bachelor who takes in his passive, beta male

21

brother and his son) and The Big Bang Theory (about a group of stereotypical scientists and their
problems with social ineptitude).
Amid calls for diversity in the industry, Lorre devised Mom, co-created with Gemma
Baker and starring established actresses Allison Janney and Anna Farris. Returning to his
knowledge from Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, and Cybil, the female-driven series addressed
social issues while staying largely apolitical. It revolved around a mother and daughter duo who
were both alcoholics and attempting to stay sober. Lorre is an example of a franchise showrunner
who first seeks a profit and appeals to the traditional network audience. His return to creating a
socially-conscious female-driven series further proves the trend of diversity, even if it still
featured a predominantly white cast.
The second type of showrunner is exemplified by the genealogy of alumni from MTM
and Norman Lear’s Tandem Productions in the 1970s. One way to ensure industry inclusivity is
not fleeting is for the power of showrunners who incorporate these values, and those who support
their work, to gain more power and hold over the industry. The success of MTM led to future
generations of showrunners throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
One prime example is Steven Bochco, who began working for MTM in 1978 and went on
to co-create and produce series such as Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. He later started his own
production company, Steven Bochco Productions, after an overall deal with ABC. Two other
MTM alums are Joshua Brand and John Falsey, who co-created St. Elsewhere during their time
there and then went on to work together on I’ll Fly Away, Northern Exposure, Amazing Stories
(with Spielberg), and A Year in the Life.
More recently, Brand was a consulting producer and writer for the FX Cold War drama
series The Americans. Further, under MTM, Michael Gleason and Robert Butler co-created

22

Remington Steele, a star vehicle for Pierce Brosnan that also began Butler’s television directing
career. The last of the MTM successes was Newhart, created by Barry Kemp, who later created
the successful sitcom Coach. Thus, MTM’s success stories were mainly white men. Conversely,
many of Lear and his production company’s spinoffs brought in women, black, and Latino
writer-creators who, as previously mentioned, did not always have lasting careers as
showrunners.
Case Studies
Each woman showrunner case study I undertake shares several key similarities. As
already established, they come from underrepresented groups who are not traditional television
creator-authors and held no connection to the industry before entering it. They also attempted to
change the genres they worked in, both in terms of representation and narrative, and combine
serialized narratives and comedy.
Because these case studies aim to convey relevant and topical messages through
representations, I will also analyze the content of the series in relation to the discourse
surrounding race, gender, ethnicity, class, and national identity at the time. That is, I will posit
what can be learned about these integral concepts through the lens of US television in relation to
the contrasting junctures and opportunities that have been given to showrunners, and what they
can write for the small screen based on cultural attitudes and norms of the respective time. This
will be interlinked with the political climate, be it the rise or height of civil rights and social
justice movements or neoconservative backlashes that lead to presidential terms dominated by
the ideology of “Making America Great Again” through the promotion of whiteness and
simultaneous moral panics that veil “Othering” when whiteness is perceived as threatened.

23

Therefore, I undertake a textual analysis of each series, incorporating the showrunner’s
political and social views. This is not to emphasize “good” or “bad” representations on
television; instead, it examines the ability to provide nuanced representations and progressive
values within the series, linking to the worldview of the creator.
Berg aimed to show the Jewish-American family as an American family while increasing
financial security and upward mobility through compliance with sponsors and studios. English
aimed to show aspirational feminism and reveal her political point of view through the
continuation of 1970s workplace series like Mary Tyler Moore, but focused on a middle-aged
woman at the height of her career coping with changes in politics, technology, the media and
news industry, and the state of feminism and gender equality in the late 1980s through to the late
1990s.
Rhimes’ workplace series focused on female protagonists with strong ambitions and
thriving professional lives, with a fear of commitment in their personal lives. Through colorblind
casting and visibility of underrepresented groups, Rhimes created a multicultural utopia that
placed those groups in positions of power, with minimal portrayal of struggles based on systemic
prejudices in the US. Rhimes came in with her first series, Grey’s Anatomy, with a diverse cast
assembled through colorblind casting. Despite this, her leading protagonists were white while
secondary characters were an Asian-American woman and African-American man, and gay
characters and couples held the B plot lines. It was not until her second original series, Scandal,
that she portrayed a black female protagonist and an interracial couple as leads.
What Rhimes had as a marketing and promotional tool in contrast to showrunners in the
past was a direct connection to her pre-existing Grey’s Anatomy fanbase on the social media
platform Twitter, which coincided with the rising cultural and political community of the

24

newfound Black Twitter. Through the platform, she was able to promote Scandal in a grassroots
manner before the industry really grasped the potential power of Twitter. In fact, it dominated
the newfound Twitter television Nielsen Ratings when it first appeared in 2013.50
All three showrunners examined were able to balance managerial and creative
negotiations so their series could be made. Lastly, their success was either stifled or thwarted by
neoconservative backlashes in US history: McCarthyism, the Blacklist, and the post-World War
II call for a return to traditional gender roles; then Reaganism, deregulation, and post-racial
rhetoric; and finally Bush’s anti-gay marriage and post-9/11 nationalism that also adhered to a
post-racial, post-feminist rhetoric. Consequently, these neoconservative movements
“symbolically annihilated” the rights of those underrepresented groups. These showrunners
attempted to combat this annihilation. Despite these heightened moments of backlash, television
still habitually runs on the concept of “90 percent convention, 10 percent innovation” within
“corporate and collaborative realities of contemporary television.”51
While I contend that Berg and English upheld identity politics—when they felt no other
creator was invested in representing their own culture, they decided they must do it themselves—
Rhimes was different. Her appeal toward multiculturalism and a utopian attempt at solidarity
politics in Grey’s Anatomy shows both the flaws of network television casting and
representation, and that her evolving power within her series and role as a public persona and
franchise showrunner can be utilized in favor of a more culturally-specific and nuanced take on
solidarity politics.
These showrunners, especially those who also starred in their series such as Berg, became
quasi-celebrities or full stars long before the digital era, as evidenced through discourse analysis
of vast press coverage. English demonstrates women as early franchise showrunners who

25

challenged the star system of leading actors in the 1980s, showing her series Murphy Brown
relied as much on her for its identity as on its titular actor Candace Bergen. In addition, Berg,
English, and Rhimes were not only the creative voices and business heads of their series but the
political messengers of potential progressive or subversive meanings through resistance politics.
Indeed, showrunners in the era of social media (who engage with this form of networking) can
be more visible and acknowledged than ever. However, several key figures among the most
senior writer-producer hybrids transcend industry acknowledgment, from cult followings and
subcultural capital to mainstream public personas. Like other influential media creators and stars
with subversive views, showrunners have also become enemies of the state as exemplified by
figures from Charlie Chaplin to Jane Fonda.
The dissertation will argue that Berg uncovered the utopian hopes for early radio
showrunners through programming about a Jewish-American family, conveying immigrant and
first-generation hopes of understanding in the US. Unfortunately, transitions to early progressive
radio and television programming were thwarted by several factors, primarily due to US Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s Blacklist. This was exacerbated by a post-World War II crisis in masculinity
after women took over the workforce during the war, which led to a return to traditional gender
roles as well as the industry’s move toward lowest-risk programming that was cheap to make and
yielded the widest possible audience (known as Least Offensive Programming); hence,
McCarthyism’s resulting emphasis on white Anglo-Saxon protestant (WASP), middle-class,
conservative ideology. This limited women’s on-screen roles to mothers, wives, and sisters, and
ethnic minorities were completely erased from screens or represented as subservient to their
white counterparts.

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With Berg, her pro-Franklin D. Roosevelt praise and cautionary tales of World War II
were met with fan letter backlashes that led her to focus on social rather than political issues.
Instead of framing things in a larger picture, she used the connection audiences had with The
Goldbergs’ family to reveal the dangers of anti-Semitism. As a wealthy Manhattanite with
influence, she turned to social outreach outside television and became more candid about her
politics in certain publications. In mainstream outlets, where audiences did not want to separate
her from her screen character, she was bureaucratic and did not shift from the maternal nature of
her on-screen character. In business memos and publications she presented herself as a flexible
and compliant media player.
Although Berg wavered and pushed back on her politics when she felt her career was
under pressure, she clearly did not foresee the Blacklist and its impact. In many ways, Berg was
most influenced by the “American Dream” and, like many established celebrities, believed she
was untouchable to a certain extent. She attempted to assimilate The Goldbergs, particularly the
character of Molly Goldberg, into the image of an ideal, white, assimilated American family.
However, her associations with Phillip Loeb and her media power as both a woman and Jew
were ultimately the death knells of her career as a leading author and star.
In stark contrast to Berg’s constant bureaucratic juggling and adapting to a medium that
was not yet established, English understood the niche demographic of second-wave Baby
Boomers who were once 1960s and 1970s political rebels who grew up watching the idealized
Mary Tyler Moore. Berg’s first series about two single career women was quickly canceled and
career women shows were rare until the late 1960s and 1970s. In exchange, she created an
idealistic Jewish-American family that learned from each other, climbed up the socioeconomic
ladder, and carried out the American Dream while retaining their Jewish roots. Any content Berg

27

created was essentially unprecedented, both in radio and television, as she was at the cusp of the
formation of programming for both mediums. She took influence from vaudevillian comedy but
also from theater dialogue and issues that concerned the masses, such as the Depression and
World War II.
By the late 1980s, English could draw on past successes. A single career woman show,
especially about a woman in news media, had yet to form in the 1980s and Murphy Brown was
envisioned as a politically and socially righteous role model with an illustrious position in
broadcast journalism. Just as Berg was the ideal matriarch and housewife, Brown would be the
ideal image of America’s middle-aged career woman.
The series begins with the seasoned journalist dealing with a conservative Republican
administration, second-wave feminism backlash through post-feminist rhetoric that feminism’s
work had been “done”, and a third-wave movement that directly opposed its predecessors.
However, the protagonist had personal flaws, seen primarily through the sacrifices she made for
her career which were visible in her lack of a family and personal life outside of work.
While the series needed three seasons to gain success during a tumultuous time for CBS,
English kept Murphy’s political righteousness intact but softened the character and turned her
into an emotionally mature individual. She conceded that she could not live a normal and happy
life with her ex-husband, who remained the love of her life, yet still valued their annual reunions.
While English herself was in a happy marriage with her producer throughout Murphy Brown, she
revealed the shortcomings of second-wave feminism were due to outside factors such as the
refusal to accept career women who were not wives or mothers. While the unwanted pregnancy
plot showed a protagonist who was not ready to be a mother, she balanced her motherhood and
profession with the support of her work family. Depicting Murphy as a mother contributed to the

28

softening of the character, while discussing the fact she would consider an abortion still
highlighted her political stances.
While certain elements of the series are autobiographical for English, motherhood was
not. Additionally, Vice President Dan Rather’s speech citing Murphy Brown and single
motherhood as a breakdown of traditional family values mirrored the way the Blacklist and
McCarthyism targeted Berg and her peers. While the series’ on-screen retort showed that
Murphy had support from her work family and could balance her career and motherhood,
English’s off-screen comments were radical. Instead of commenting on single motherhood she
used the outlet to speak to abortion rights, suggesting that network executives may have denied
an abortion on Murphy Brown or that it was perhaps an internal, bureaucratic decision based on
audience expectations.
On the surface, Rhimes’ career as a showrunner is a success story. She is celebrated by
the industry and in discourses of popular feminism and representation matters as a champion for
breaking barriers as the first black woman showrunner to lead a primetime drama and for the
accolades she received from various institutions including the NAACP and GLAAD. Like Berg
and Murphy before her, Rhimes took advantage of a sense of utopianism through the meritocracy
of blind casting and on-screen multiculturalism.
Again, at a surface level it appeased special interest groups that asked for more diverse
representation on-screen. However, unlike The Goldbergs and Murphy Brown, the backgrounds
of the protagonists were largely undeveloped. This technique favored placing them in a
workplace meritocracy that was unencumbered by race, gender, ethnicity, and class. By
establishing this utopian meritocracy, Rhimes’ first series, Grey’s Anatomy, adhered to a post-
racial and post-feminist discourse that believed in equality and a neoliberal attitude toward career

29

achievements. Further, while Rhimes is known for her multicultural and ethnically diverse cast
her early interest in and attempts to make a career on black-centered stories is largely ignored.
She simply did not receive enough opportunities and did not want to be a part of independent
cinema, but instead wanted to make an impact on the mainstream.
The progressions in Rhimes’ on-screen and off-screen career thus reveal a bureaucratic
understanding of establishing her success and dominance in order to gain more creative freedom.
For her second original series, Scandal, Rhimes loosely adapted the story of a black female
political fixer, which would become the first primetime network drama starring a black woman
since the 1980s. Aware of the risks and past failures of these series, Rhimes took to Twitter to
build the fanbase of her new series using established followers of Grey’s and a growing
collective known as “Black Twitter”.
Rhimes was a forerunner of using social media to promote her brand and specific series
by encouraging live viewership and engaging with Twitter audiences in real-time. Both Rhimes’
use of the social media platform and Black Twitter emerged as grassroots movements on the
fringe of the mainstream, but were later commodified by Nielsen, networks, and corporations as
a new way to tap into television viewers as consumers. Simultaneously, Black Twitter’s politics
emerged through the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Rhimes’ introverted and often isolated
persona, which she documents in her memoir, can also be reflective of her competitive nature
and status as the only minority, or one of the only minorities, within her settings: private high
school, Ivy League college, and a television boardroom. Black Twitter served as a space where
Rhimes could see the demands, views, and experiences of Black America in an unprecedented
way. Further, the attention to #BlackLivesMatter in the news, along with popular feminism,
allowed Rhimes to incorporate issues of race and gender discrimination within her series.

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Rhimes’ critics would surmise that she profited from the commodification of politics in
the digital era through hashtag activism. A closer look at Rhimes’ original intentions in her work
shows that the new public awareness of these issues in mainstream consciousness allowed space
for her to bring them into her work, as she first intended in her college and post-masters
ambitions.

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Chapter One
Gertrude Berg as Proto-Showrunner: Negotiated Authorship and Jewish Identity from
Early Radio to Television (1949-1962)
Timeline

1899—Gertrude Berg is born
1928—Appears on the radio for the first time with a Yiddish cookie commercial recipe
1928—Pitches first series, Effie and Laura, which is canceled after the first episode
1929—Rise of the Goldbergs debuts on NBC radio
1931—Berg’s first sponsor contract with Pepsodent increases her weekly salary from $75 to
$2,000
1937—Berg signs million-dollar contract with Procter & Gamble, becomes highest-paid woman
in broadcasting
1940—Sees a demonstration of television
1945—End of The Goldbergs on radio
1948—Molly and Me play—springboard for television series
1949—The Goldbergs television premiere
1950—Berg wins first Emmy Award for Best Actress
1950—Defends blacklisted “communist” Loeb
1950–1951—Sponsorship from General Foods dropped
1952—Listed as a “communist fellow traveler”
1952–1953—Moves from CBS to NBC
1954–1956—Moves from NBC to DuMont
1956—The Goldbergs’ demise on television; last season in syndication on local stations rather
than broadcast nationally
1959—Returns to the stage in A Majority of One with a Jewish mother persona and wins a Tony
for Best Actress
1961—Writes memoir, Molly and Me, with son Cherney Berg
1961–1962—Writes and stars in Mrs. G Goes to College on CBS
1966—Berg passes away in September

Radio Programming History
NBC
1929–1934 (Pepsodent sponsorship)
CBS
1936–1938 (Colgate-Palmolive-Peet)
1938–1945 (Procter & Gamble)

Television Programming History52

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The Goldbergs:

CBS (General Foods’ Sanka Coffee sponsorship)
January 1949–February 1949: Mondays 8:00–8:30
March 1949–April 1949: Mondays 9:00–9:30
April 1949–June 1951: Mondays 9:30–10:00

NBC
February 1952–July 1952: Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 7:15–7:30
July 1953–September 1953: Fridays, 8:00–8:30

DuMont (Rybutol Vitamins sponsorship)
April 1954–October 1954: Tuesdays, 8:00–8:30

First-run Syndication
1955–1956
January 1949–February 1949: Mondays, 8:00–8:30
March 1949–April 1949: Mondays, 9:00–9:30
April 1949–June 1951: Mondays, 9:30–10:00

33

Introduction
An investigation of Gertrude Berg, a radio writer-producer-voice-actor turned early
television writer-producer-actor, reveals the fundamental creative and business struggles of the
proto-showrunner. During her rise in the industry and subsequent prominence, Berg’s status as
the proto-showrunner of The Goldbergs was defined by her cunning proclivity to be a corporate,
bureaucratic author who worked alongside sponsors, studios, and networks. As a bureaucratic
author, her business savvy was complemented by her ability to balance the cultural specificity of
the Jewish-American family in The Goldbergs with universal American ideals and assimilation.
Berg operated as her own agent, manager, and producer within the developing business models
of radio and television to assert herself and convey her intended political messages and
representations of Jewish-American immigrants.53 Berg served as a triple threat to the post-
WWII conservative backlash: first, as a woman in power, both financially and in terms of media
influence; second, her alignment with progressive movements, liberal or socialist; and third, her
Jewish identity, which could be regarded as a threat from the perspective of stereotyping that
regarded Jews as taking over economic prosperity, as well as Berg as a European foreigner who
believed in socialist views during the Cold War. All of these potential perceptions were
ultimately deemed un-American at a time when American values were controlled by a
homogenous patriarchal view, rather than an acknowledgment of the plurality of American
identities. Meanwhile, her peer Irna Phillips (the creator, writer, and producer of US radio’s
earliest soap operas) was losing creative and financial control to the radio industry’s growing
power.54
This chapter highlights the successes, struggles, and failures of Berg as a proto-
showrunner, beginning with the premiere of the radio show The Rise of the Goldbergs in 1929

34

and concluding with The Goldbergs’ last television episode in 1957. Berg’s entry into the
industry began at the height of the Great Depression in 1928, spanned World War II (1939–
1945) and the Cold War, and ended with McCarthy’s introduction of the Hollywood Blacklist
and the 1948 House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This chapter illustrates
what it meant to be an “American” during times of opportunity for immigrants and marginalized
groups, and later backlashes instituted by neoconservative movements. Due to the premature
demise of her career, Berg remains largely overlooked despite laying the groundwork for
showrunner-star projects.
Berg’s hybrid showrunner position was uncommon but not entirely rare. Other
showrunner prototypes include Jack Benny (The Jack Benny Program, 1932–1948, 1949–1955),
as well as a variety of producer-performer-hosts of radio and television who functioned as
authorial figures, such as Fred Allen (The Fred Allen Show, 1932–1949; Texaco Star Theater,
1940–1944) and Jack Webb (Dragnet, NBC, 1951–1959, 1967–1970). Due to the more
conservative nature of these programs, these stars’ careers lasted much longer. Although Berg
attempted to distance herself from any association with the Blacklist, by the time the threat to her
career became plausible, it was already too late. In this chapter, I will also discuss how the
pushback of her representations led her to pursue resistance through other outlets—including
press, charity, and public appearances—by using her power to promote her ideals.
While Molly Goldberg may have been a domestic housewife, Berg left domestic life as
soon as her media career began. The Goldbergs and Berg’s creative intent can be used to
understand radio as the “imagined community” of the US in the 1920s, as she looked at “radio’s
early concern with the problem of national unity and identity in a diverse and conflicted
society.”55 Indeed, during its radio days beginning in 1929, The Goldbergs was one of the first

35

serials to employ elements of Jewish humor, including the use of Yiddish accents, in the
vaudeville-sitcom tradition. A 1949 Life magazine feature titled “The Goldbergs March On: A
famous 17-year-old radio family is an immediate hit on television” praises the Jewish family
series’ comforting nature to audiences, which made Berg a millionaire.56 It also cites the
televisual Goldbergs as one of the top three most popular television programs “on the east-
Midwest circuit.”57 The piece goes on to predict that the formula of the program is “so neatly
suited to television that it may well be the forerunner of a whole rash of televised domestic
daytime serials.”58 Within this feature the magazine establishes the social and industrial impact
of the series, along with Berg’s economic gains. The profile’s first page includes a photograph of
Berg that takes up over half the page, sitting and smiling among a decade of her scripts. The
caption recounts that she “had [a] terrible time convincing sponsors her show would not offend
either Jews or non-Jews.”59 Part of Berg’s success was attributed to her ability to shift from the
variety genre on radio to the sitcom genre on television, alongside her ability to be her own
publicist to market her series and persona. Susan Murray remarks that it was not until 1955, a
year after the end of The Goldbergs, that television standardized its production and
programming, including the star system in which “merchandising of one’s own persona had
become an absolutely essential component of a television star’s career.”60 Thus, Berg was able to
cultivate her star career on her own before the standards of television’s star system were
determined by the industry. I argue that these kinds of industry openings and times of uncertainty
are what allow women showrunners to enter and thrive in broadcast television.
These industrial and stylistic standards of radio also transitioned with both early iterations
of television as a nascent medium and The Goldbergs, which first aired in 1949 nearly 20 years
after its radio premiere. A 1951 Jewish cultural publication posited the potential timeless nature

36

of Molly Goldberg as a literary icon: “indeed, [she] is so basically true a character that I
sometimes think she may yet become an enduring name in the national literature. She is the
prototype of the Jewish mother in America during the past twenty-five years.”61 If Molly
Goldberg was the prototype of the wholesome Jewish matriarch in the imagined radio and
television community, Gertrude Berg was certainly the prototype of the socially-conscious
showrunner-star. In 1960, Look magazine lauded her ability to defy executives’ expectations of
Jewish-American representation in the broadcast industry:
Radio moguls once told a young actress-writer, Gertrude Berg, that Protestants,
Catholics, and Midwestern Americans would never accept the people in her radio serial.
It starred a warm, wise, Jewish mama, Molly Goldberg, who kept house in the Bronx.
The moguls were wrong. For the next 30 years, Americans of all faiths devotedly
followed the Goldbergs’ homely family doings on radio and television. 62

While Berg was clearly a radio star she also served as an early television star, which was
considered a difficult task in the beginning of the medium.63 As television began to shift to big
business in the 1950s, the production costs and labor demands involved in running a television
show increased. To retain control, Berg took on more roles and delegated other tasks when
necessary64 which allowed her to remain the ultimate boss and showrunner of her series. Berg’s
professional demise due to the Blacklist was not related to direct communist action; instead, it
came with the Blacklist’s mandate to fire media workers from marginalized groups who held
liberal values. Several of television’s earliest women writers and producers were fired under
McCarthyism while others, like Berg, lost their careers due to associations with communists or
by upholding their progressive views.65

37

Early Life:
Chasing the Jewish-American Dream: Traditions, Assimilations, and Career Ambitions
Gertrude Berg’s youth was defined by her status as a US-born Jewish-American, her
parents’ secular and modernized assimilation and career ambitions, and her grandparents’
mixture of immigrant aspirations and Jewish devoutness. Each generation chased the American
Dream, but in a different manner. As a result of these influences, a primary goal of her work was
to portray nuanced representations of Jewish immigrants and Jewish-Americans in the US as
hardworking, patriotic, and equally individualistic and family-centered. Berg began her 1961
memoir, Molly and Me, by introducing her working-class paternal grandfather, Mordecai. She
recounted Mordecai’s love of oral storytelling about his time in the US and his admiration of
historical figures like Christopher Columbus, signaling his staunch patriotism.66 The garment
business of her maternal grandfather, Harris Goldstein, allowed his family to live in the more
affluent and cosmopolitan area of Harlem. Through her grandparents’ and parents’ varied
socioeconomic experiences, Berg witnessed the diversity of the immigrant experience.67 All
Berg’s grandparents escaped poverty and survived harsh anti-Semitism during the late 19th
century. Like many other socially-conscious Jewish celebrities before and after her, her politics
were influenced by these stories. Berg noted that her grandfathers’ ambitions and the family’s
tight-knit nature defined her formative years.68 Her ambition to be a showrunner in charge of her
own series could be traced to her Grandpa Harris’ conclusion that it was ultimately better to be
“his own boss,” which is why he said he settled in the US.69
Berg learned the fundamentals of the entertainment industry in her father’s resort hotel in
upstate New York, known as the “Borscht Belt.”70 By the age of seven Tillie Berg had gained an
early understanding of hospitality and basic finance, working with her mother as apprentices in

38

the hotel and learning the trade from Berg’s father, Jake.71 A young Berg learned to be a
bookkeeper and performer, which instilled her hybrid creative and business talents early on.72
She was first directly exposed to the entertainment business at the Catskills resort through
visiting musicians and performers.73 She learned these early entertainment skills and attributed
her entry into performing to stints as a “fortune teller” at fourteen.74 Berg moved on to plays
when her predictions were unreliable, but she still prided herself on her accomplishments: “so I
wasn’t a gypsy, but whatever I was, I was lucky. Five new guests and not one checkout.”75 This
marks the mixture of creative self-entrepreneurship, independence, and business-minded goals
she had developed, all of which she would later utilize in broadcasting.
Berg’s maternal grandparents, Czerna and Harris, raised young Tillie and “imparted an
understanding that she did not have to sacrifice her Jewish identity in her search for
independence and opportunity.”76 In contrast, Berg’s mother, Dinah, did not want to be involved
in any Jewish traditions in the hope of assimilating as an American.77 Berg’s granddaughter,
Harriet Schwartz, states that Jews wanting to become “Americans” in the 1920s was “a trend”
and Dinah’s “self-conscious attitude toward her ethnic identity is best understood when
considering the forms of discrimination to which Jews of the mid-twentieth century were
subjected,” from “violent physical attacks” to “harsh stereotypical portrayals in books and humor
magazines.”78 The Goldbergs’ overall message was based on her grandmother’s, her mother’s,
and her own views.
Berg’s own religious dedication is depicted as ambivalent in her memoir and mainstream
interviews—a common trait of media workers who did not want to be persecuted based on their
beliefs. She did write that she always loved Jewish holidays’ family rituals and traditions. She
likened Passover to a Jewish Fourth of July, further connecting Judaic customs to US traditions.

39

In one of the few instances from her memoir in which she addressed her religion, she recalled
that Passover was her favorite holiday because it meant she would receive new clothes during the
coming of spring: “to a child, the Passover celebration meant a party with the whole family
together, laughing and singing songs and staying up all night.”79 Berg’s nostalgic appreciation of
her Judaism was rooted in secular family closeness and consumerism, in contrast to her
grandmother’s emphasis on God.
Berg embraced several aspects of secularized Jewish culture but she also rebelled against
the traditional idea that women should be confined to the domestic sphere.80 This was shown in
her Goldbergs character’s independence as a housewife who was loyal to her husband but made
her own rules. As much as she idolized her grandmother, she also sympathized with the pains of
her mother in dealing with arduous housework that she never wanted a part in. She understood
the plight of the housewife who had no choice but to stay in the domestic sphere. Yet, she also
wrote that Dinah was a “modern woman for her time” who lived through the invention of the
telephone, electricity, horseless carriages, airplanes, women’s suffrage, and talking movies.81
However, “no matter how much progress was outside, the house still had to be cleaned and the
dishes had to be washed. Progress was for everybody except housewives.”82 Berg went on to
mention the “colored” laundress her father hired to ease her mother’s workload but failed to
mention the struggles of non-white working-class Americans.83
Berg had to balance her family’s vision for her future with her own. While her paternal
grandfather encouraged her to make her own life, often telling her “It’s your America,” her
father hoped she would help run the family hotel business, marry, and have children.84 Part of
her family’s upward mobility and modern ambition was educating Berg, who attended Harlem’s
Wadleigh High School. Although formal education was rare for girls and women of her

40

generation and reflected her upper-class status, Berg claimed she was not interested in school.
She stated that she gained more of an education at the hotel, her home, and through her future
husband, Lewis Berg. Lewis took her to cultural events and shared his socialist ideals. This
education led her to realize “there was more than one way to look at things and that the
imagination of creative people is one of the most exciting parts of living.”85 Tillie Edelstein
married Lewis Berg in 1919. She had two children and was initially a housewife with career
goals. Despite her own devotion to her family, she needed a “sense of individual
accomplishment, time away from the typical routine of wife and mother.”86 Berg also returned to
her father’s hotel during the summer and worked on her act, developing her plays and the
character of Maltke. This fictional blueprint transformed into her Goldbergs heroine, who was a
mixture of several people:
Molly, when I first began to work with her, was an amalgam of my mother and
grandmother Czerny. Into that combination I put in a few characteristics of some of the
guests at the hotel that I felt Molly should have. Molly developed a manner of speaking
that put the horse in the cart and eye into the soup. From my grandfather Mordecai, Molly
picked up her formal English ... only when Molly was in a situation where she thought a
little educated talk was needed.87

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The Radio Years: 1928–1945
Utopian Dreams, Industrial Realities, and Financial Mobility
By 1928 Berg’s ambitions had led her to begin writing radio scripts in dialect.88 She spent
hours in her home writing, in the hope of presenting her radio scripts to the booming industry
that was increasingly being defined as “big business”. Lewis Berg helped his wife enter the radio
industry by introducing her to a prominent talent agent of the time.89 Initially, she briefly wrote
sketches for William Kamen for a series called Boomalay.90 Lewis’ connections also led to
Berg’s meeting with “Mr. Schwartz,” the program director of CBS’s New York station
WMCA.91 He read her script and said he liked it but did not offer her a series; instead, he asked
if she would be interested in doing a commercial voiceover.92 This turned into Berg’s first radio
appearance in 1928 wherein she provided a voiceover in Yiddish for a Christmas cookie recipe,
for which she was paid $6.93 Berg did not speak Yiddish; she simply learned the lines
phonetically.94 However, this was only an entry point into the radio industry. Berg’s goals were
clearly greater.
Berg’s radio career can be defined by a series of trial-and-error events, constant
arbitration with the industry and her viewers, and waves of success and failure. While initially
Berg may have held utopian hopes for radio’s potential, she came to understand the realities of
the industry and negotiated her authorship from the first script she pitched, which failed. As with
many showrunners that followed her, Berg’s first projects failed before she found success in
subsequent projects. The first script, Effie and Laura (1929), featured two single best friends and
salesclerks coworkers looking for “the meaning of life.”95 Single working women were not
featured as protagonists on television until That Girl (ABC, 1966–1971) and the more frequently
discussed The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–1977). The series was quickly picked up by

42

the network in an attempt to rival NBC; this pattern of taking a chance on a series when there
was uncertainty or pressure for something else is how many showrunners with non-traditional
viewpoints entered the business. Without reading a script, CBS ordered four episodes. When
executives heard Laura state that “marriages are never made in heaven”—a seemingly innocuous
yet still controversial opinion at the time—the series was canceled.96 Berg’s biographer Glenn D.
Smith argues that Effie and Laura is often overlooked as radio’s first episodic program because
of its short-lived nature.97
After the failure of her first series, it took Berg a year to ask for the help of Himan Brown
to pitch The Goldbergs. Once the series was accepted, Berg was allowed “complete control” of
her characters because the network only wanted the broadcasting rights. After this deal, Brown’s
services were no longer needed as Berg became the producer, the creator, and the only figure
responsible for the stories and casting; she also paid the actors and crew from her own wages.98
The Goldbergs became a family-centered series, which was more accepted than one about single
women. As the series’ creative force, Berg first had to balance her Jewish and American
identities while appealing to her viewers during hardships, from the Great Depression to WWII.
Once she became a mother, she used her own two children as inspiration for the young
Goldbergs and thus connected with housewives, a major demographic among radio listeners. In
The Goldbergs, children taught parents about US trends while parents informed their children
about the traditions of the old world.99 Further, “Molly’s respect of learning came from all the
immigrant families I knew in New York City” who “lived in the world of today but kept many of
the values of yesterday.”100 This multicultural and cross-generational teaching concept became a
pillar of the family sitcom. However, in shows from Father Knows Best (1954–1960) in the
1950s to the Cosby Show era of the 1980s, the learning was unidirectional and the titular

43

patriarch gave the last word to his children and wife. Although Molly, the matriarch, was the
center of The Goldbergs, she was a facilitator of communal coexistence between the family unit
and neighborhood and as a result promoted this to audiences.
Berg’s content was rooted in social realism rather than vaudevillian escapism to convey
issues linked to Jewish-American identities, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and WWII.
The series was Berg’s picture of the ideal Jewish-American family.101 She used the nostalgia of
her childhood to depict a devout family, but one that non-Jewish families could also relate to
through universal themes.102 For example, both Jewish and American holidays and rituals were a
staple in the series and episodes covered bat and bar Mitzvahs, Hanukah, Passover, Yom Kippur,
Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. Molly’s teenage son, Sammy, had his bar mitzvah rite of
passage ceremony and celebration as early as the first radio season. A Mother’s Day episode was
included in season two, showing the assimilation of the Goldberg family as they celebrated an
originally Christian holiday that had become secularized and commercialized.103
Using the power of radio as a medium the series became a plea for the American
population at large to accept Jewish-Americans as a hybrid identity that embraced, rather than
defied, what it meant to be an American. Berg already witnessed micro-prejudices against Jews
that often led to mass-scale prejudice. By the 1920s, during the first “Red Scare” and resurrected
Ku Klux Klan, Jews in the US were either “feared as capitalists who were bound to take control
of the economic system, or as communists who wanted to undermine long-held Christian
doctrine.”104 Berg had to defy all these potential stereotypes to enter and thrive in the industry,
on- and off-screen. Smith writes that Jewish citizens during Berg’s time were either blue-collar
workers who stayed within their own groups or established, aspirational immigrants who were
denied access to social organizations and subjected to enrolment limits within universities.105

44

Growing up, Berg’s family fell between the two, yet she and her husband became part of the
latter through their social mobility. This was also revealed in the series, as both an attempt to
show the family climbed up the social ladder and to appeal to broader audiences. By 1939, the
fictional Goldbergs moved from the Bronx to suburban rural Lastonbury, Connecticut, further
demonstrating the family’s assimilation by removing them from their predominantly Jewish
neighborhood.
When Berg entered radio during the Depression, entertainment had to comfort listeners.
She understood that she needed to connect to listeners struggling through the Depression to gain
popularity for her fledgling series. The series began pre-production a month into the Great
Depression in 1929; Berg had a week for rehearsals once she hired the cast and a four-week
contract to convey the message “that there was room for a Jewish program not just for Jews only;
for non-Jews too; for folks.”106 Berg was not subject to the same economic squalor as most
Americans during the Depression; her husband had a secure job and her family had not invested
in the stock market. However, she wanted her radio work to provide her family with financial
security.107 Using her grandparents’ comforting words during times of trouble and optimism
about escaping poverty, Berg could directly soothe listeners. Molly Goldberg had no answers to
the problems of the Depression but offered matriarchal wisdom, becoming a realistic figure for
an entire nation dealing with the crisis. This realistic catharsis contrasted escapist vaudeville
radio programming from the likes of Eddie Cantor, George Burns, and Gracie Allen, as well as
music programming such as NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour. Berg’s early genre formations
combined the serialized soap opera with the family sitcom in radio, which would later be applied
to her series’ adaptation into television before it established any genres or programming.

45

It took Berg several years to secure her economic and cultural standing in radio. The
Goldbergs aired on NBC radio from 1929 to 1934 and then moved to CBS from 1936 to 1945.
The series was often the second most listened to radio program, following Amos ‘N’ Andy, which
also premiered in 1929.108 Amos ‘N’ Andy (CBS, 1951–1953) also made the transition to
television and was also considered an “ethnic” series, although the series incorporated “black
face” on radio and was arguably a minstrel show. According to Berg, the first time she realized
she had an audience for the unsponsored show (with an often-changing time slot) occurred when
NBC told her they had received close to 18,000 letters asking why The Goldbergs had
disappeared when Berg was sick with laryngitis and could not go on air in 1928.109 Radio was
also growing as a business. By the early 1930s, newspapers and magazines were declining and
Americans were listening to the radio for one million hours a week.110 Berg, who was dubbed the
“Cinderella of the air waves,” received $75 a week for the first Goldbergs contract and a mere
two years later fainted when the Pepsodent Company announced they would spend $2,000 a
week on the show. 111
Molly the housewife could connect to the average American. Berg, as a radio
professional, was aspirational as her public persona conveyed professional and personal success
and she garnered significant press once the series gained momentum. To gain the appeal of
multiple demographics, Berg catered to various identities based on the specified publication and
maintained multi-faceted on- and off-screen personas. Even if Berg could not represent women
as single professionals or businesswomen on the radio, fans could discern that was her off-screen
identity. One of her earliest feature pieces, a year after the premiere of The Goldbergs, came
from a 1930 issue of The Jewish Tribune: The American Jewish Weekly, the self-proclaimed
“Foremost English Publication of General Jewish Interest.”112 Her profile, titled “Interesting

46

People: Gertrude Berg Has Made ‘The Rise of The Goldbergs’ a Popular Radio Feature,” stated
that Berg’s “universality of appeal is what makes it important to us as a people.”113 That is, she
not only succeeded in attracting non-Jews to the show but also in changing their preconceived
notions of Jews. The article cited a letter from a viewer who claimed they “didn’t know Jews
were so nice” and noted that Berg promoted “brother-love between the Jewish and Gentile
races.” 114 The feature writer, fellow female author Sulamith Ish-Kishor, even pointed out that
Berg sometimes received more letters from gentiles than Jews, which demonstrated her
crossover appeal.115
In feature stories about Berg, her hybrid talents were quickly established. Ish-Kishor
described her as a “dramatic genius” for her writing on the show, stating that she was also “a
born actress” in a modern world where one had to make it by delivering a single talent “to the
public in the most forcible way possible.”116 Ish-Kishor observed that Berg became glamorous
with a touch of makeup but she made no attempt to be beautiful on stage, just to be simple.
While this seemed strange to Ish-Kishor, it was part of Berg’s attempt to be relatable to the
masses throughout the Depression. Ish-Kishor asserted that Berg was a talented businesswoman
and her artistic skills did not suffer because of it. This was a common thread for showrunners:
they could have pursued “the finer arts,” but something about the medium of radio or television
resonated with them. Often, this might have come in the form of nostalgia from growing up with
it or admiring a star or creator on a series. Because radio was a brand-new medium, just as
television would have been when she began her career, Berg’s shrewd business sense was even
sharper, indicated by her choice to pursue the mediums and ability to foresee their potential.
Another profile on Berg, in a 1932 issue of the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune,
emphasized her strong work ethic, stating that she wrote all of the episodes herself, maintained

47

1600 words a day, prepared her sketches two weeks before airtime, and rehearsed for hours with
her radio family.117
As a business-minded author, Berg had to prove her series’ commercial worth to gain a
substantial financial income. Despite The Goldbergs’ popularity, the series did not have a regular
schedule in its first couple of years. This did not occur until Berg received her first sponsorship
from Pepsodent from 1931 to 1934, at which time the series appeared every day, except Sunday,
from 7:45 to 8 PM.118 Corporate sponsors and the advertising agencies that worked for them,
rather than networks and studios, were the primary financial backers of radio and television
programming during Berg’s career.119 By December 1932, NBC had invited her to make an
appearance at the opening of their new headquarters, known as “Radio City,” which served to
cement her radio stardom.120
Once Berg attained financial success and creative control, she still struggled to convince
US listeners, eager to be entertained, about the threat of the Holocaust. Her attempt to warn the
US of the threat of anti-Semitic extremism in Europe in the radio version of The Goldbergs
received pushback from listener-consumers who wrote letters arguing that they wanted to be
entertained without political intervention.121 Berg’s struggles with these causes were evocative of
the anti-Semitism that was also growing in the US entertainment industry, as The Dick Van Dyke
Show (among other titles) creator-showrunner Carl Reiner stated:
The Yiddish accents they employed were all reminiscent of how Middle and Eastern
European Jewish immigrants spoke English. Their accents were considered to be cute,
charming, and funny, but when Adolf Hitler came along and decreed that all Jews were
dirty, vile, dangerous subhuman animals and must be put to death, Jewish and non-Jewish
writers, producers, and performers started to question the Yiddish accent’s acceptability
as a tool of comedy. The accent had a self-deprecating and demeaning quality that gave
aid and comfort to the Nazis, who were quite capable of demeaning and deprecating Jews
without our help. From 1941 on, the Yiddish accent was slowly, and for the most part,
voluntarily, phased out of show business.122

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Berg was one of the few creators who retained her Yiddish accent and Jewish identity after 1941,
as her radio career indicates. This was not without its battles, as anti-Semitism increased by the
late 1940s and early 1950s during the rise and fall of her television career.
Although she remained involved in Jewish causes throughout her life, her praise of
Franklin D. Roosevelt received criticism partly due to anti-Semitism. Berg, with an
entertainment-meets-education mindset, discussed Roosevelt’s New Deal through Molly
Goldberg in episodes such as “A Pageant in Honor of President’s Day” which aired in April
1933.123 Later episodes mirrored her loyalty to the president and her fundraising efforts for his
Warm Springs Foundation. Some fans wrote to thank her for her actions, but the vast majority
were not pleased with the inclusion of politics in their entertainment. One listener stated that she
listened to the series for “recreation” but was “disgusted” that Berg had used her radio time in
favor of Roosevelt and his foundation. Another disgruntled letter-writer told her to “pipe down
on your Roosevelt advertising propaganda,” as she was losing Republican listeners.124 Despite
Roosevelt’s 70% approval rating at the time, his domestic and global policies remained
controversial to the remaining 30% of the public. The New Deal was often referred to as the
“Jew Deal” due to the number of Jewish cabinet members appointed to his administration.125
Self-promotion and negotiation tactics were key to Berg’s rise in stardom. After curbing
her politics, by 1934 she was on the cover of mainstream entertainment magazine The Billboard,
“The World’s Foremost Amusement Weekly,” with her headshot dominating the page followed
by her name and title: “Author, Creator, and Star of ‘The Rise of The Goldbergs.’”126 Then, in
1936, CBS picked up The Goldbergs as a late afternoon serial that aired from 5:45 to 6:00, five
days a week; Colgate-Palmolive-Peet acted as the show’s main sponsor vis-à-vis a partnership
with the Benton and Bowles advertising agency.127 By 1938, 10 years after her entry into radio,

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Berg received a $1 million, five-year contract with her new sponsors, Procter and Gamble; she
was earning $7,500 a week.128 Unlike several other early radio stars who gave away their rights
to agents, managers, sponsors, studios, and networks, Berg held control over her series by being
the creator, writer, and producer of her work.
To show her willingness to negotiate with the demands of the industry, in a 1938 memo
to advertisers and executives, Berg admitted to refraining from incorporating her political stance
into the series. She acknowledged that she must uphold her contract with her sponsors and “think
of the consumer first.”129 At the same time, to instill her subtle subversion, she also wrote that
the US public wished to keep its distance from the upheaval in Europe, although “the ocean was
getting smaller and smaller by day.”130 Berg then attempted to use less explicit ways to promote
her values.
Thus, later episodes of the series addressed seemingly “controversial” issues in a subtler
manner. Specifically, a series of episodes written at the onset of WWII in 1939 mirrored the
initial Nazi attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses known as Kristallnacht (“The
Night of Broken Glass”). In these episodes, a stone was thrown through the Goldbergs’ window
during their Passover Seder. While this may not have been overtly political, it showed that a
favorite radio family could be a victim of bigotry, just as Jewish families were in Europe and in
the US. Berg accurately foreshadowed the threat of the war, but American isolationism largely
pervaded until the attacks on US soil. Four days after the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7
1941, the country declared war. Promoting the war effort was crucial for any US media, so Berg
followed suit with patriotism. Her son’s character in The Goldbergs was in the army, a persistent
source of pride for the fictional family. Molly often volunteered throughout the series to help

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with the war effort using her domestic abilities. By 1943, 14 years after it first premiered, it
became radio’s most popular daytime show.131
When Berg could not fully express her social and political views in her work, she turned
to other outlets and received profuse praise and requests from women’s, children’s, religious, and
corporate organizations. A 1944 letter from the president of the National Council of Jewish
Women congratulated Berg on the 15th anniversary of the series: “aside from its entertainment
value” it “promoted good will and made a definite contribution to the combating of intolerance,
setting a record that can well be viewed with pride by all who participate in it.”132
At the end of World War II in 1945, US gender norms and media culture called for a
return to traditional gender roles as soldiers arrived home. Women who took on soldiers’ jobs
were instructed to return to their primary roles as wives and mothers. This attitude surfaced in
major male-led industries dominated by affluent white men, especially as the value of the
television business continued to increase for studios, networks, advertising agencies, and
sponsors. Due to this societal shift, as a radio and television star Berg had to reflect these gender
roles in her work and she catered to women in the domestic sphere. In a 1945 opinion column,
the same year the war ended, in the general interest housewife magazine Everywoman, she
penned an article titled “Why I Hate the Term ‘Soap Opera.’”133 Berg claimed the term was a
“derogatory title” and programs that aired during the daytime should not all be assumed to be
soaps.134 She stated that a good serial must be both “entertaining and educational” and should not
be condescending to its audience. Berg went on to write: “the argument that most daytime serials
cater to the distaff side and hence have to serve up sweetness and light, or lush romances, is
fallacious before it gets started.”135

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Berg defended women who did not have the same opportunities she did, those who had to
stay at home and could not engage with the outside world because of their domestic obligations,
like her mother. She stated that radio serials functioned as a means for these women to “get a
broad point of view on subjects of current importance.”136 She argued that a good serial program,
which is not the same as a soap opera, must be rooted in realism and real issues rather than
escapism, noting that The Goldbergs’ “down to earth” nature did not hinder its success. Lastly,
she attempted to answer the question, “Does a radio serial really help people?”:
In the sense that it offers constructive lines of thought and action, yes. Certainly it doesn’t
set itself up as a self-styled bureau for the saving of stymied souls, but by taking on
common problems it can develop perspective for a listener who may not have the
necessary objective himself. Largely it’s a question of analogy. Something which
parallels as an experience of listeners is worked out.137

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From Radio to Television: The Rise and Fall of The Goldbergs and the Lasting Power of the
Blacklist on Berg’s Career (1949–1961)
When Berg first saw a demonstration of television in 1940, she was determined to make
The Goldbergs’ transition to the new medium and show her visual talents after the end of her
radio career. Since televisual style was influenced by theater, her 1948 Broadway play, Me and
Molly, was a strategic move toward entering television.138 Just as Hollywood writer-producer-
directors and stars attempted to gain more control after the decline of the studio system in the
late 1940s, television writer-producers like Berg attempted to take as much ownership over their
work as possible, learning from their cinematic predecessors by installing a cost- and time-
effective production process and differentiating through individual self-branding and promotion
practices to attract fans. Berg essentially did the work of the studio system and future broadcast
era’s funding through direct contact with sponsors, production through writing and performing,
and marketing and branding through publicity—and all in a fairly grassroots manner. She did
this to gain and keep control of her brand and not lose it to studios, sponsors, or networks.
Berg initially hoped her agent would help her make the transition, but television
executives told her the series would not “translate” to television.139 Thus, she decided not to rely
on her agent as a conduit to speak with middleman executives but to approach their boss directly,
which in this case was Head of CBS William S. Paley. He granted her an audition that led to a
series pick-up.140 At this time, though, television was still nascent:

Television was still a baby. The studio was being built around us as we rehearsed and
there were no experts who knew what some other experts told them a survey said the
public wanted. Mr. Paley had ordered an audition. Mr. Paley was the boss. So, there was
going to be an audition.141

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The Goldbergs intersected with the rise of successful variety shows of early television,
from Texaco Star Theater (NBC, 1948–1956) to the vaudeville-inspired Your Show of Shows
(NBC, 1950–1954), in which Berg would appear with Milton Berle as her Goldbergs character,
Molly.142 This mirrors later comedy-creators in both film and television who created work based
on standup characters or personas. The early episodes of The Goldbergs recorded on kinescope
included vaudeville-like sketches. Marc and Thompson assert that early primetime radio and
television programming was dominated by the neo-vaudeville performer as the author in
corporate-sponsored comedy-variety series.143 However, Berg had the skills to transfer to a
vaudeville-like star from her radio days.
Berg’s knowledge as a creative and bureaucratic self-entrepreneurial figure from
vaudeville and radio led to her initial televisual success. While Berg was always the head writer
of The Goldbergs, she began hiring outside writers as early as the 1930s. Despite this, she
retained authorial control over her staff. This was common for showrunners who held greater
power: they shifted from being the initial writer to head writer. Additionally, the nature of
television meant “it was difficult to tell when writer-producers were still working as writers and
when their collaborative work arrangements deprived staff writers of the credit and
compensation they deserved.”144 For example, Michael Morris was a credited Goldbergs script
editor by the 1950s and began writing his own episodes in 1956.145
To maintain her good relations with sponsors, Berg collaborated and complied with their
demands. In the early iteration of the series, Sanka products were emphasized at both the
beginning and end of each episode, showcasing the multi-purposes the product played for the
Goldberg family and potentially the families in the audience. The narrative of product placement
was interwoven seamlessly. This continuity can be credited to Berg, who served as the writer of

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the series’ product placements. Molly Goldberg’s storytelling is embedded at the beginning of
the episode. In the pilot episode, as Molly welcomes viewers, she begins with a narrative that
interweaves the product placement: in her immigrant, Yiddish accent she speaks of the
“restlessness” that everyone, from young people to the elderly, felt on their two-week vacation at
the close-knit Pincus Pines, a location mirroring the Fleischmann’s. This is when her sponsorship
from Sanka comes in, as she suggests Sanka to her fellow holidaymakers and her audience to
help with restlessness and irritability. This establishes Molly as a wise homemaker who shares
vital information on consumer goods and health with her viewers in the same way she does with
her neighbors or family. She boasts that you “can drink as much as you want and as often as you
want” because it only contains 3% caffeine. She then states that Mr. Pincus, the owner of the
summer resort, thanked her for the recommendation and that Pincus’s visitors no longer
complain since consuming Sanka. This presented Molly as a problem solver, which was often
her role in the situational plots of The Goldbergs. The Sanka product placement reappears at the
end of the episode. She makes a direct address plea for “you” to switch to Sanka in a coy
manner, and we see her leave the window. This is followed by the credit title “The Goldbergs,
Written by Gertrude Berg,” giving her the primary authorial authority. Her name and Phillip
Loeb (Mr. Goldberg) as the stars and the rest of the actors’ names are shown, before “Directed
By Walter Hart and Produced by Worthington Miner.” Viewers then see the Sanka can again,
accompanied by its bottle variant.
Berg was aware her series could not function without sponsorship funding and
maintained a negotiable working relationship to sustain her career and the longevity of The
Goldbergs. In an October 1949 episode, “Model Parents,” Molly has a list of other new benefits
of Sanka that she has written down, from not needing to wash the coffee pot when using instant

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coffee to reiterating that it is a “delicious cup” that allows you to sleep due to its lack of caffeine.
She informs the audience that it makes your restlessness and vulnerability “null and void.” This
episode continues with one consistent storyline and less exposition than the pilot. Thus, she
needs Sanka because she does not sleep at night and is irritable and restless. The advertisements
become tongue-in-cheek as she states, “how many times do you have to tell a person to drink
Sanka?” as this will be the 10th time in five episodes that she is telling her viewers. A 1949
article in the trade journal Advertising Agency and Advertising and Selling criticizes the over-
simplicity of Sanka’s chosen dialogue-heavy product placement series, suggesting it can
interrupt Molly’s monologues with additional customer satisfaction and audiovisual
excitement.146 However, the publication ultimately commends the lack of frill and Sanka for
“helping to keep a fine program fine.”147 This concedes to a strong relationship between Berg
and her audience: through Molly as the spokeswoman of Sanka, for not deterring viewers away
from the intimacy of the Goldberg family. Berg’s control over the delivery and writing of
advertising content allowed the showrunner to power the narrative and image of her sponsorship.
This may be a nod to the tradition of the radio serial, along with the effectiveness of Berg’s
persuasion for the product, but it ultimately establishes the mutually beneficial relationship of
showrunner and sponsor.
According to Berg, a representative or two from the sponsors usually came to the set of
The Goldbergs to time the promotions and ensure the message was delivered to their standards:
Sometimes they have suggestions to make about the show. One agency man objected to a
teapot in a kitchen set because the sponsor manufactured coffee. It was a very good point
and it showed that he was paying attention because a microscope was needed to spot the
teapot.148

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Although Berg also stated:
This kind of suggestion was very rare. For the most part the sponsor and agency hardly
bothered me. They would send me the points they wanted incorporated into a commercial
and I would write them. If there were ever changes, they were minor.149

Sponsor intervention was indeed limited when the series was successful. The pilot
episode in 1949 reiterates the themes Berg hoped to instill—Jewish specificity mirrored with the
universal elements of a US family—thus creating an image of a Jewish-American family as part
of the fabric of the country rather than a threat. In the opening scenes, we see the entire Goldberg
family—Molly, her husband, son, daughter, and Uncle David—break the fourth wall and wave
to the camera, fostering intimacy and immediacy with new television audiences. Molly, the clear
protagonist, greets her viewers, who see her only from the shoulders up. Molly wears a much
more informal ensemble when she is in her home, fulfilling her role as a housewife. When Mr.
Jake Goldberg, the patriarch and breadwinner, appears he wears a professional suit and tie and
thick, square glasses; he then interrupts to beg viewers to ask his wife to change her outfit to
something more formal to show their upward mobility. She ignores his plea. Jake’s profession
and affluent ambitions mirror Berg’s Grandfather Harris’ garment business, more closely
aligning the couple with new immigrants to the US or older generations with more traditional
views from “the old country.”
Despite her image as a devoted homemaker, Molly is shown to be more concerned with
prioritizing catching up with the neighbors and tending to the kitchen than Jake’s upcoming
dinner to impress potential business owners. This neighborhood network establishes Molly as a
woman of her community and, perhaps, a bit of a relatable gossiper. She tells her neighbor of her
luxurious vacation, which focuses on another theme throughout the series: upward mobility
through connections and business opportunities for intelligent and hardworking Jewish

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immigrants. Essentially, they communicate that they, too, want to live the immigrant American
Dream of a better life. Molly’s accent is easily understandable to US audiences, yet her grammar
and mechanics are still lacking as she utters phrases such as “the sheets was occupied” and refers
to a “memento” as “momentum.” When serving an upper-class guest she states she will serve the
“hors d’oeuvres,” in which she pronounces the H and both S’s, showing that Molly is not refined
although she is kind and good-hearted. Keeping her Yiddish accent, Molly frequently interjects
“Oy” between her sentences. Her children speak English perfectly, as they were born and
educated in the US.
In the next television episodes of the first season of The Goldbergs in 1948–1949, Molly
and Jake advocate for improvements to their building when a new landlord arrives, showing their
progressive attitude. The fourth episode deals with the less social element of Molly questioning
Jake’s fidelity, a common family sitcom or soap opera trope, although it is handled more
comedically than dramatically. In “Model Parents,” which aired October 10, 1949, the family is
shown as both ordinary and extraordinary, a model for relatable and aspirational sitcom families
in television.
Following this first season of The Goldbergs on television, 1950 would be Berg’s most
successful year and her last as a leading television star. Berg was the first actor to win the Best
Actress Emmy in the award’s inaugural year. Additionally, The Goldbergs (1950) was a
successful made-for-television movie for CBS-TV.150 A Look magazine review stated: “as a
portrait of healthy family life” it is “one of the most refreshing movies in some time.”151 The
review speaks to the universalities of family life, with no mention of Jewish identity.
Berg established much of the initial groundwork for star projects, which television icon
Lucille Ball was known for during her long career. Ball’s series followed Berg’s: My Favorite

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Husband originally ran from 1948 to 1951, followed by I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957), which
was the most-watched series in the US for four out of its six seasons.152 In contrast to the role of
writer-producer or writer-producer-actor, Ball was the authorial star of her program and occupied
the roles of performer and producer. Ball referred to Jess Oppenheimer as the “brains behind”
Lucy, although the exact roles assumed by Oppenheimer are still unknown as writers did not yet
receive residuals. However, his CBS contract granted him 20% ownership of the series of which
he gave 5% to his peers, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr.153 While Oppenheimer and Dotort
of Bonanza were behind-the-scenes figures unknown to the public, Berg and Jack Webb of
Dragnet (NBC, 1951–1959, 1967–1970). were considered stars with writing and producing
abilities by the trade and popular presses.
Several strategies and differentiations led to the starkly different outcomes of Berg and
Ball. Television’s post-World War II dominance is commonly associated with suburban family
and community life, yet The Goldbergs and I Love Lucy featured families in New York City.
Berg and Ball both functioned as the star-protagonists of their respective series, but Ball’s
Christian all-American identity and real-life marriage to her screen husband, Desi Arnaz, helped
further comfort US audiences in contrast to Berg’s independence in the series, promotional
materials, and the industry more broadly. Simply put, Berg held a great deal of individual power
in contrast to the group effort of Lucy. As a result of the program’s popularity, Ball and Arnaz
were considered America’s first television billionaires and first family, although Berg’s series
aired first and she was more involved in the production process than Ball.154 In contrast to Berg
and Goldberg’s foreignness, Arnaz’s character’s identity was arguably not primarily connected
to his Latinness, showing assimilation into American life.155 As a result, he was not a foreign
threat during the Blacklist. Ball also succeeded in not being on the Blacklist, which can be

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attributed to the strength of her star power over Berg’s. While Ball was one of the many famous
Hollywood stars (from Humphrey Bogart to Frank Sinatra to Gene Kelly) to sign an initial
statement against the HUAC, Ball and the notable figures who remain embedded in Hollywood
history pulled back early enough to show their subservience when they became aware of the
consequences.156
When the plausible threat of the Blacklist became evident to Berg in the early 1950s,
Berg understood she had to concede her creative control and power on television. Sadly, her own
attempts to do so came too late. Even so, she was still involved in social causes outside
television. In 1950, she was thanked for her appearance at an event put on by the Philadelphia
Jewish Appeal. The executive director Ephraim R. Gomberg told her, “You have rendered a
great service to the Allied Jewish Appeal and the 45 humanitarian philanthropies which it
embraces. Whenever Jews are in need—in Israel, America, Philadelphia—they join me in saying
thank you for your wonderful help.”157 While 1950 initially marked Berg’s biggest success, it
also marked initial investigations into the broadcast star’s communist leanings began;158 she
continued to be involved in these causes after 1950. A 1951 review of The Goldbergs in
Congress Weekly: A Review of Jewish Interests praised the series’ simplicity and earnestness,
which was attributed to Berg’s “artistic merit as well as for her persisting and mounting
popularity.”159 The author does not deem the series high art or sophisticated in its writing; this is
not a downside but rather a triumph on its own for highlighting the authenticity of urban Jewish
middle-class life across US cities. The author also believed in the benefits of non-Jewish
audiences of the series, both for finding universal threads and understanding the cultural
specificity of the Jewish American.160

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The Women’s League of Israel’s president wrote to thank Berg for attending their 25th
Anniversary Luncheon in 1952. Berg also participated in public events, providing a special
message to volunteer workers for the American Financial Development Corporation for Israel:
State of Israel Bonds in 1953.161 As a constant self-promoter willing to mediate with the
industry, in her memoirs Berg overlooked her turbulent relationship with television sponsors
after 1950 and the end of the first Goldbergs television series in 1951. Nonetheless, the anti-
communist mandate of the Blacklist had already identified Berg as a subversive “communist
fellow traveler” by 1952 due to her association with and support of her television husband.162
When General Foods dropped their Goldbergs sponsorship due to Berg’s support for blacklisted
Loeb, CBS also cut the show, exemplifying the connection between sponsors and networks. The
series returned to NBC with sponsor support for its 1952–1953 season; however, Berg agreed
with the new sponsors that Loeb would no longer be featured. The new format of The Goldbergs
in 1952 saw the episodes shift to shorter 15-minute segments twice a week, in the early evenings.
Berg still attempted to connect with Jewish and non-Jewish viewers in the Blacklist
aftermath, before her series was canceled. This can be seen in acts like an annual Yom Kippur
episode, even in the more Americanized and upper-middle-class Goldberg family. In the 1954
installment, Molly’s accent is barely audible and her grammar has improved but she still inserts
Yiddish-isms like “Oy” into conversation. Robert Harris replaced Loeb as Jake and his accent,
too, had nearly disappeared. Like Berg and many Americans, Molly Goldberg and her family
climbed the social ladder. While she was not affected by what she wore in the 1949 pilot, she
was much more concerned with fashion in 1954. By 1954, The Goldbergs was on the DuMont
network under the sponsorship of Rybutol Vitamins. The Yom Kippur episode incorporated both
product placement and separate commercials, showing the elevation of television as a

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commercial product. A little over midway through the 24-minute episode, a commercial for
Rybutol appears without Molly present.
However, the product placement remains interlaced. Still interwoven with the narrative,
the product placement begins with Molly opening the blinds, her pearls bigger than they were in
the pilot. She speaks about the unpredictable and uncomfortable weather patterns. She declares
that Rybutol will have you “feeling good” and “building up resistance” with a “whole new
feeling of energy.” During this, the shots cut back and forth from the window to her voiceover
over a close-up of the product. This is already more advanced than the late 1940s long shots of
Berg’s sponsored products; the camera pans to Rybutol variations, then back to Molly. In her
typical manner, she suggests spending the money on a gift for friends and urges viewers to try
the vitamins “immediately” with a laugh. Thus, the product placement is interwoven with the
narrative of the series and the nature of Molly’s character.
Despite the influx of Rybutol Vitamins and commercialization, the 1954 Yom Kippur
episode also heavily emphasized religious elements. Molly’s daughter, Rosalie, the picture of the
modern American teenager, asks her devout Uncle David about the Bible. She recalls that she
does not read the Bible as much as she should. The last seven minutes of the episode begin with
the Yom Kippur ceremony. The Rabbi chants while men in the pews read and join him, as the
women sit in a side area in front of a stained-glass painting with a menorah in the center. The
service sequence cuts to close-ups of various attendees, not just the Goldberg family. This shows
a variety of Jewish-Americans and affirms connections with Jewish viewers who were loyal to
the series. Instead of ending the episode with another vitamin promotion, Molly sends God’s
blessings to the viewers from her family before simply saying goodnight as she walks away from
her window.

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Episodes returned to 30 minutes under the DuMont network in 1954. The final season,
from 1956 to 1957, aired in syndication to local stations rather than as a national broadcast. Loeb
was paid a $45,000 settlement in exchange for not taking legal action over his dismissal.163 He
was never hired again because of his reputation and committed suicide in 1956.164 By eventually
firing Leob, moving The Goldbergs to the suburbs, and including content such as Molly going to
a “fat camp” in the episode “Milk Farm,” Berg was attempting to save both the series and her
career through assimilation.
Using outside outlets to establish her message, Berg turned to the press. In a 1956
Commentary profile titled “The Real Molly Goldberg,” she made remarks (in an “unaccented
English,” as the author of the piece recounts) that mirrored her 1938 memo to appease to
sponsors:
I don’t bring up anything that will bother people. That’s very important. Unions, politics,
fundraising, Zionism, socialism, inter-group relations, I don’t stress them. After all, aren’t
such things secondary to daily family living? The Goldbergs are not defensive about their
Jewishness or especially aware of it ... I keep things average. I don’t want to lose
friends.165

The Goldbergs’ brief television run mirrors several turning points in the history of
television. Carol Stabile states that even Berg’s previously strong-willed working-class character
Molly “had been reduced to uttering clichés about the perverted, un-American desires of women
who worked outside the home” and that “no one seemed to notice when immigrants all but
disappeared from small screens.”166 The Goldbergs can be linked to other short-lived “ethnic”
family shows such as I Remember Mama (CBS, 1949–1956), which was based on the book
Mama’s Bank Account by Kathryn Forbes. Forbes became the principal writer of the series
together with Frank Gabrielson, with Carol Irwin as the main producer.167 Mama centered on a
Norwegian-American family in 1910 San Francisco and was sponsored by Maxwell House. It

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featured Peggy Wood, Rosemary Rice, and Dick Van Patten’s acting and television debut. Mady
Christians, who played the titular role of Mama in its original version, did not receive the
television role, presumably because of her involvement in supporting refugees of fascism during
WWII:

Loeb and Christians dismayed advertisers not because of their political views, but
because their presence provoked political controversy and interfered with the illusions of
a world without politics created by their programs. Like the real-life Goldbergs and
Hansens, Phillip Loeb and Mady Christians lived in a world made up of more than
consumer choices, a world where ethnicity connected people to important issues. The
controversy over their histories and the public attention directed toward them threatened
to unmask The Goldbergs and Mama as a created artifact, polarizing the audience and
depriving television of its legitimating power.168

A few other ethnic series also existed on early television. NBC’s short-lived Bonino (1953) was
about an Italian-American family: Ezio Pinza played an internationally-renowned concert singer
who gave it all up to raise his eight children after the death of his wife. Luigi (CBS, 1952)
featured J. Caroll Nash and Alan Reed (who later became the voice of Fred Flinstone), who
impersonated Italian-American characters.169
Regarding the women in television impacted by the Blacklist, including Berg, Stabile
says that within “this small but potentially powerful group of women, many poised to move into
influential positions in the 1950s” but fell under “a powerful backlash against progressives in
media.”170 Post-Blacklist writers who succeeded in television “either agreed with anti-communist
beliefs about race and gender” or were involved in “reproducing images and stereotypes
undisturbing to viewers who found anti-racist images distasteful.”171 In addition to domestic
comedies focused on traditional gender roles, Westerns and police procedurals were considered
Cold War-era primetime genres. This bifurcation of television programming—soaps for women
at home and cowboys and cops for the men when they returned from work—highlights the

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gendered extent of the genre. Of course, the whole family could watch primetime programming
as it was meant to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Even if Berg’s authorial control and industry support were subdued after The Goldbergs
was canceled, she continued to appear as a performer and guest on variety and comedy shows.
These appearances were bittersweet when she used them to express her views. When Berg was
featured in a 1959 episode of Lucy and Desi Comedy Hour entitled “Lucy Wants a Career,” she
said:
We are living in a changing world. Our teacher was talking to us about all the different
cultures—new ideas are really old ones made new. You’d be surprised, Uncle David.
There are many places in the world where the men stay at home and women are the
breadwinners. It’s just not new with us.

By the conclusion of her memoir, Berg is optimistic about these changes in US society. Features
such as a 1960 Look profile spoke of Berg’s past accomplishments and current guest appearances
on the Ed Sullivan and Perry Como variety shows, even if she lost authorial and creative control
over her own series.172
While Berg was uncertain about her future career path in the early 1960s, she hinted at
pitching and promoting her forthcoming 1961 CBS series Mrs. G Goes to College, which she
then called The Freshman. She played a grandmother who attends university and her co-star, Sir
Cedric Hardwicke, played an “impeccably well-mannered professor.”173 Although this series did
air, showing Berg was not completely blacklisted, it only ran for one season due to a lack of
promotion and audience following. Berg had already become a forgotten figure in television
while Ball, by contrast, continued to work in the industry as the first woman studio head and
actress.

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Conclusion
Berg used her authorship in radio and television for more than financial and social
capital. For her, it was a means to defy Jewish-American stereotypes to promote openness and
social and political harmony within the US. When she could not express her political views in
the series during times of censorship, she used her stardom to promote change and progress for
Jews in the US and abroad. As one scholar posits, “there is probably no woman in American
popular culture who has assumed, auteur-like, all the creative and commercial responsibilities
Gertrude Berg managed to perform in a career spanning 35 years.”174 In the decades to follow,
future generations of showrunner-stars would attempt to use the medium of television to promote
understanding and acceptance of underrepresented groups in the US and to encourage liberal
values. While Berg’s career can be seen partly as a cautionary tale due to Blacklist practices
undermining her status, her achievements can also be seen as aspirational. For several
generations, potential television showrunners avoided the medium due to its restrictions. If they
attempted to enter the industry, their voices were often silenced.
The 1960s marked a time when the writer-producer became the norm:
By the 1960s, the writer-producer hyphenate was securely in place as an essential and
unique voice within American television production. Studios and networks realized that
writers who created a series and who became producers were economically desirable
because they would have the determination to ensure the final product was a success.175

George Lipsitz states that Morris, one of the script editors and few additional credited writers for
The Goldbergs who worked on the series for eight years, went on to create Chico and the Man.
Furthermore, this represented:
legitimation through representation of working-class life and commodification through
product-centered plot lines and families divided by market interests. Like their
predecessors, urban, ethnic, working-class shows of the 1970s mixed their civil and
familial vocational primitivism. They held open possibilities for transcending the

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parochialisms of traditional ethnicity and for challenging the patriarchal assumptions of
both extended and nuclear families. 176

The role of the writer-producer may have been cemented in television by the 1960s, but it
was not until the 1970s that progressive, left-leaning scripted programming re-emerged with
series made by Norman Lear and Mary Tyler Moore. Women and people of color were again
featured as protagonists, and head writers and showrunners hired writers to contribute to these
characters and their arcs. As Lipsitz states:
One might conclude that television and American society had no more need for urban,
ethnic, working-class programs after 1958 because tensions between consumerist
pressures and historical memories had been resolved. But the re-appearance of race, class
and ethnicity in 1970s situation comedies like All in the Family, Chico and the Man,
Barney and Miller and Sanford and Son testifies to the ongoing relevance of such
tensions to subsequent mass media discourse.177

Following the work of feminists and their allies in the 1970s, women became writers and
producers and, eventually, writer-producers and showrunner-stars in the 1980s and 1990s.
Examples include Susan Harris (The Golden Girls, NBC, 1985–1992), Linda Bloodworth-
Thomason (Designing Women, CBS, 1986–1993), and Diane English (Murphy Brown, CBS,
1988–1998), although this was mostly limited to white women. While the 1970s marked an
opening for men of color and women in primetime network television, primarily under Lear, this
did not last.
Among women showrunners of the 1980s who gained prominence, English was an
outlier. The following chapter details the non-traditional background that led to her career as a
showrunner, unlike her peers who followed linear paths and reflected the male-dominated nature
of the television hierarchy. While series about single working women emerged in the 1960s and
1970s, surpassing Berg’s ambitions with her first series Effie and Laura, English’s Murphy

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Brown presented a series about a middle-aged, second-wave feminist protagonist that served as a
reflexive commentary on the state of feminism and the television industry. While Berg’s series
was considered autobiographical, this chapter has shown that she omitted to negotiate her place
in television. Berg separated her political causes from her characters and her own ambitious
persona from the personification of the wholesome Molly. Berg pushed back when politics
threatened her series, even if it led to the end of her career and her erasure from popular
television history. The following chapter will discuss English’s openly political stance, on- and
off-screen. Although the 1970s were a time of perceived acceptance of feminism and civil rights,
the presidential nominations of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush indicated the
country’s neoconservative turn. This led to a backlash against second-wave feminism, albeit in a
more subdued form following the cautionary tales of the Blacklist and the careers it ruined,
including Berg’s. Thus, the next chapter will explore the dynamics of English’s politics as the
Murphy Brown showrunner.

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Chapter Two

The Personal Politics, Production Savvy, and Aspirational Second-wave Feminism
of Diane English and Murphy Brown: (1988-2018)

Introduction

Showrunner Diane English rose to dominance with her flagship series Murphy
Brown (CBS, 1988-1998). Despite low ratings in its first season, Murphy Brown gained
momentum and aired on CBS for a decade, although English would leave the series as
showrunner by 1992 due to contract negotiations.178 Murphy Brown placed 36th in the
overall most popular television series by Nielsen ratings in its first year, but within four
years was nominated for 15 Emmy Awards and ranked the third most popular series in
the US.179 By 1992, advertisements for the show averaged $310,000 for 30 seconds and
English had a $40 million multi-series deal with CBS.180 Her journalism and public
television background would influence the workplace setting of Murphy Brown. Berg
used her status as the actor-star to further solidify her role as the authorial image in The
Goldbergs, but English used her business acumen to instill her power as a showrunner
amidst the star system of 1980s television that was dominated by former Hollywood stars
such as Brown’s lead, Candice Bergen. While autobiographical elements of English’s life
can be linked to the series, it is more about her politics and Brown as aspirational
feminist than a personal recreation.
Brown, and by extension English, are emblematic of the second-wave feminism
of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly concerning issues of women’s equality in the
corporate workplace. Considered a precursor and catalyst to the second-wave movement,
Betty Friedan stated in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, that college-educated
suburban housewives required more than their roles as mothers and wives to achieve

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fulfillment in their lives.181 Friedan further praised the working women of the 1930s and
1940s who thrived in male-dominated professions. She writes that at the end of World
War II, women returned home or to jobs based on gender, not potential.182 In 1966,
Friedan wrote the Statement of Purpose for the National Organization of Women,
summarizing as its goals the need to “take action to bring women into full participation in
the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities
thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”183 Workplace equality was indeed a strong
pillar of the movement. As Friedan stated: “We do not accept the traditional assumption
that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and
serious participation in industry or the professions on the other.”184 She also claimed the
importance of childbearing and rearing “is still used to justify barring women from equal
professional and economic participation in advance.”185 Friedan wrote that before
second-wave feminism, “having it all” was “to get married, have four children, and live
in a nice house in a nice suburb.”186 The fatal flaw of the post-feminist climate is an
inability to negotiate a reasonable balance between a woman’s desires to be a wife,
mother, and professional. I will later detail how third-wave feminist activism through
Generation X attempts to rectify this balance and incorporate the inclusion of race,
sexuality, and class.
By the 1970s, with second-wave feminism in the US mainstream, companies were
targeting a new demographic of single working women with disposable incomes – the
typical professional viewer of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). Susan Faludi
wrote that, by the middle of the decade, this ideology became an important tool in
advertising to “neutralize and commercialize feminism.”187 The new turn represented

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“commodity feminism,” a term coined by Robert Goldman. Rosalind Gill summarizes its
use as a means to “capture the ways in which advertisers attempted to incorporate the
cultural power and energy of feminism while simultaneously neutralizing or
domesticating the force of its social/political critique.”188 The protagonist of the Mary
Tyler Moore Show was one of the first true career women on television to break off her
engagement for a job at a television news station. The series details the positive benefits
of Mary’s choice and her rewarding life in the city with her new work family. Mary is
happily single, social, and professionally successful. She also uses birth control and
enjoys the company of men.
Murphy Brown stands in contrast to its precedent, Mary Tyler Moore. Moore is
considered one of the first, and most seminal, series about career women. Murphy Brown
is hardly shown outside of the workplace, while Mary Tyler Moore is shown in a balance
of professional and personal settings. While Mary Tyler Moore begins in 1970 during the
immediate aftermath of 1960s second-wave feminism, with a 30-year-old woman leaving
her fiancé at the altar and starting a new life as a lowly news program employee, Brown
is slightly past 40 years old, already at the top of her field in the late 1980s, and a self-
proclaimed liberal. Mary is more upbeat and optimistic; Murphy’s cynical nature may
show their age difference, but could also reflect the optimism and cynicism toward
feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Mary helps change the world around her
through her abilities, yet her professional and personal foibles are also shown. Although
Murphy is a role model, her imperfections exist offscreen and the modern world around
her is constantly disappointing her integrity and principles.

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In the Mary Tyler Moore Show, even the variance in the sitcoms’ offices shines a
light on contrary power dynamics. Mary’s disgruntled yet benevolent and loveable boss
Lou Grant (Ed Asner) holds the corner office, signaling the highest position. Murphy also
holds the corner office while others have shared desks in the communal area outside her
private room, much like in the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary Tyler Moore ended in its
seventh season in 1976, with Mary being fired along with most of her coworkers
following the hiring of a new station manager, after she has risen to the rank of news
associate producer. It is a bittersweet send-off. Murphy Brown concluded in 1998 after
Murphy finds out she is cancer-free and convinces her fellow journalists to continue with
their program. In Brown, the news series within the show also considers not continuing in
their workplace, which mirrors Moore’s influential finale. Even though Brown ultimately
ends, the continuation of the fictional series suggests an optimistic endurance of the
liberal ideals behind Brown’s politics. Both series also adhere to the value of a workplace
family over a traditional nuclear one, which Murphy Brown pushes even further away
when she turns down a marriage proposal in the series finale. While Mary Tyler Moore’s
journey is about gaining self-confidence and gaining a workplace family in her thirties,
Murphy Brown is about not losing power in the media world once she becomes middle-
aged, which reflects English’s own position to assert power as a showrunner.
Several factors have led to the rise of white women as showrunners since the 1970s,
including movements from these writers to gain more equality, influenced by second-wave
feminism.189 One of the few women working as a writer in the early 1980s, D.C. (Dorothy)
Fontana, stated she changed her name to D.C. to prevent gender discrimination when sending
scripts after she was told “women can’t write these things”:

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See, the women’s movement did open up possibilities for us. It made people aware that a
woman writer walking in the door on an action show was not necessarily Miss Priss or
Miss Doesn’t-Understand-Which-Way-A-Gun-Works, that we could write these stories.
It did do that for us. But I don’t think it raised the glass ceiling very much, actually.190

In contrast, by 1993 English could speak to the benefits of women writers’ abilities: “I'm
reluctant to say that only women can write these kinds of characters… But if you want to
generalize, TV is an intimate medium, and women are often more interested in smaller,
more human stories, which is what TV lends itself to well.”191
The 1980s featured several other women showrunners who came to power and
created and ran successful series about women’s professional and personal lives. A series
like Berg’s Effie and Laura, about two single working women and their friendship,
career, and romantic relationships would not appear until after Laverne and Shirley
(1976-1983, CBS) made its mark. It became a pervasive genre in the 1980s. Some of the
most popular and most critically acclaimed peers to English’s work included Designing
Women (1986-1993, CBS) created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and The Golden
Girls (NBC, 1985-1992) created by Susan Harris. As Marc and Thompson state, with
Berg as a rare predecessor, “it was only during the 1980s that the names of women began
to appear with any frequency in the prime-time credits crawl.”192 Barbara Cordray and
Barbara Avedon created Cagney and Lacey (1982-1988, CBS), the first female “buddy
cop” series. Cordray went on to be promoted to CBS Vice President and was ultimately
the first woman to be president of a major network as CBS President.193 Diane English
created and served as executive producer of Murphy Brown. Terry Louise Fisher worked
with Steven Bochco on the concepts for L.A. Law and Hooperman. After working as a
writer on Maude Harris, a mentee of Norman Lear, created her first series with NBC

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before the success of The Golden Girls. David Marc and Robert Thompson note that Lear
held the “ultimate authorial power” in Maude, but Harris “became identified with the
show as the writer of two of its most controversial episodes.”194 Detailing Maude’s
success in the Nielsen ratings Top Ten during its four seasons, Harris “became perceived
as a hot creative property” and subsequently created Fay, which they declared was one of
the most critically-acclaimed programs of the 1975-1976 season although it was canceled
after three episodes.195 By 1993, although women only compromised 25% of the Writers
Guild, Harris, Bloodworth-Thomason, and English were all considered top women
writer-producers who disrupted “The Old Boys Club” of network television.196 As
M*A*S*H* showrunner Larry Gelbart stated, “that time when white men wrote for
everyone – men, women, blacks – has clearly been corrected, and Diane [English] is
among those chief correctors.”197 Thus, the second-wave feminism of Murphy Brown,
and by extension that of English, problematizes the lack of inclusiveness of the series –
deemed “white feminism.”
English’s Murphy Brown spoke to a demographic that was against the George
Bush-Dan Quayle presidency, particularly women who agreed with second-wave feminist
beliefs. English worked at the intersection of second-wave goals with popular feminism
after the 1970s and 1980s to depict a working woman in the media industry, showing her
autobiographical nature. For Brown, being a single career woman was not a temporary
stage on the way to marriage and motherhood, as shown by her choice to have a child on
her own. This identity and mode of representation, along with the popularity and fandom
the series enjoyed, posed a threat to traditional values. Unlike Berg and Rhimes, English
does not divulge much about her personal life outside of details in features that promoted

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her upcoming projects and instead opted to discuss her business ethos and the premise of
her work. This mirrors the business-like attitude Rhimes first possessed as a showrunner,
and that Berg would switch to when she subdued her political stances to appease
sponsors, fans, and networks. English, unlike Berg and Rhimes, has never written an
autobiography or penned opinion columns and has not willingly been on covers of
magazines or newspapers. However, she has always been unflinchingly forward about
her political views through her series and in the interviews she has conducted. Berg and
Rhimes, in contrast, often resisted offering their full perspective on such matters. In
comparison, English shows a rare lack of self-censorship for a broadcast showrunner.

Early Life

Diane English was born in Buffalo, New York on May 18, 1948, where she was
also raised.198 English describes her upbringing as Catholic and working class: her father,
Robert English, was a power plant technician while her mother, Anne English, was a
housewife during her childhood.199 English traces her comedic beginnings to her
mother’s extended Italian family: “We used to sit around and crack jokes with all my
uncles as sort of a competition.”200 Her competitive nature incubated throughout high
school, when she was both an editor for the newspaper and captain of the girls’ volleyball
team.201 Like many showrunners, her writing output was vast and beyond the newspaper
she also wrote fiction in the form of satirized versions of literary classics.202 She
graduated with straight As from a local private Catholic girls’ school, Nardin
Academy.203 While she admits to her family’s financial woes, she does not discuss her
father’s alcoholism that led to a dysfunctional upbringing.204 Articles on English often
turn to other family members, peers, or colleagues for further insight. In a 1993 New York

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Times feature on her post-Murphy Brown series, Love and War (1992-1995), her brother
Rick English, a Baptist minister in west New York, speaks of their father’s addiction and
his sister’s ambitions.205 Her mother re-married in the 1970s and performed at local
Buffalo supper clubs, keeping her first married name, Diane English, as her stage name
and a connection to her daughter. English’s mother stated: “Because of my interest in
performing, I always encouraged her to have a career in show business.”206
English attended the State University of New York Buffalo State College, where
she first majored in English education with the mindset of a “nice, solid education and
degree to fall back on,” but she really wanted to be a playwright.207 By age 19, during her
sophomore year, she began taking theater classes and working with Warren Enters, a
Tony Award-winning Broadway playwright.208 She would soon serve as his assistant
director for a play while in college.209 After graduating from Buffalo State in 1970, she
taught at an inner-city high school for a year before Enters advised her to move to New
York to pursue playwriting.210
Upon moving to New York, she worked as a secretary at a New York City PBS
affiliate, WNET, then as a story editor for Theatre in America in 1971, which led to her
role as an associate editor for the station’s Experimental TV Lab Project. She also met
her future husband Joel Shukovsky at WNET who was, at the time, a graphic designer
and small advertising agency owner. English became Vogue magazine’s first TV
columnist in 1977, the same year she married Shukovsky.211 She entered the national
PBS market with her first assignment from WNET, writing the TV movie adaptation of
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven in 1980 and earning her first Writers Guild
Nomination. Although she moved to New York to become a playwright, the success of

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her first TV venture and her disillusionment about career mobility in the theater led her
and her husband to move to Los Angeles in 1981 to pursue television. English would
continue with two other made-for-TV films, Her Life as a Man (NBC, 1984) and
Classified Love (CBS, 1986).212 Television movies were often considered a space to
discuss social and political issues, from women’s reproductive issues to gay rights and
the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. They provided writers and creators opportunities to focus
on these issues.213
Entering the network television industry in the 1980s
English’s television career always featured working women in professional
situational comedies. Like most showrunners, her first projects were not always
successful. The first TV sitcom she created, Foley Square (CBS, 1985-1986), starred
Margaret Colin as a single Manhattan District Attorney balancing her professional and
personal life and was canceled after 14 episodes due to low Nielsen ratings.214 She then
worked as a writer and executive producer for My Sister Sam, created by Stephen Fischer
and starring Pam Dawber as a late 20s photographer in San Francisco who suddenly
becomes her 16-year-old sister’s primary carer.215 Sam’s series head writer, Lisa Albert,
later joined English to write for Murphy Brown, while also writing and producing other
successful series such as The Cosby Show and Mr. Belvedere.216
While these series broke multiple barriers, they were strikingly white unlike
several Lear-led 1970s series that were considered progressive for crossing racial and
ethnic borders. This could be for several reasons: writers and creators not being able to
break in after Lear’s hiatus from television without support; the new mandates of network
television; and backlash against discussing race in the new conservative Bush era. Most

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of all, perhaps, the type of feminism exhibited in these series was symptomatic of 1960s
second-wave feminism’s class and racial divide as it originated with white middle-class
and upper middle-class women who were college educated and demanded equal working
rights to men in white-collar industries. Women, including non-affluent white women
and women of other races, ethnicities, and backgrounds who did not have a college
education, likely worked blue-collar jobs during this time to support their families. Work,
by definition, was a necessity for the working classes.
Issues of class, and particularly race, were largely eschewed in 1980s television
programming. While the 1970s were marked for its black representation, it was not
without its white-centered approaches through predominantly white authorship. Herman
Gray states that contemporary images of blacks on commercial television are rooted in
three discourses: “assimilationist (invisibility), pluralist (separate but equal), and
multiculturalist (diversity).”217 He points out series like Julia (starring Diahann Carroll in
the first black female-led network drama), Room 222 (created by James L. Brooks, who
also co-created the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, and Lou Grant with Allan Burns,
and later Taxi), and I Spy (starring Bill Cosby from 1965-1968) as early assimilationist
series in the 1960s and ‘70s that “integrated individual black characters into hegemonic
white worlds void of any hint of African American traditions, social struggle, racial
conflicts, and cultural difference.” Gray asserts that this continued in the ‘80s, from The
Golden Girls, Designing Women, L.A. Law, and Night Court. He goes on to state that
series such as Law, Girls, and Women addressed racial issues, but he maintains that they
were “underwritten and framed by assumptions that privilege individual cooperation and
color blindness.”218 Unsurprisingly, all of these series were created and run by white men

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or women with a primarily white writing staff. For Gray, assimilationist series make
structural racial inequality invisible, although the female-driven series began to address
gendered power structures. The market for these series appeared more significant than
black-centered series, due to the upper middle-class white female TV viewer/consumer
established during the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Pluralist (separate but equal) discursive
series include The Jeffersons, What’s Happening!!!, and Sanford and Son, all projects
under the umbrella of Norman Lear’s production company that began to hire black
writers, executive producers, and showrunners, but their series did not continue into the
1980s.
Murphy Brown
English created Murphy Brown in 1988 and, despite low ratings in its first season, it
gained momentum and aired on CBS for a decade. Before her, Berg represented an
aspirational family amidst The Great Depression, World War II, and issues of anti-
Semitism. In Murphy Brown, English took on a middle-aged career woman at her peak
who was dealing with a conservative government and its backlashes against the 1960s
and second-wave feminism. While English was always publicly and ardently liberal she
still adhered to Cold War US ideology, never delving too far left when discussing her
politics.219 This demonstrates her business intelligence and understanding of her place as
showrunner as bureaucratic author. Additionally, her husband and producing partner
Shukovsky, who handled much of the business and managerial side of their work, once
stated “I'm not anti-union, but I'm also not a socialist.”220 English herself called him a
“brilliant businessman.”221 The partnership between a creative head writer/showrunner
and business-minded executive producer or co-showrunner would become common in

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television as a big business. While Berg largely handled both the business and creative
elements of her work on her own during the early days of radio and television, this model
could not endure as television’s production expectations heightened.
Berg and English had similar determined goals in the representation of their
protagonist. Berg created an amalgam of the ideal Jewish maternal figure and a
supporting family to challenge stereotypes of Jewish immigrants and their American-born
children. Berg could not focus a program on single working women, a demographic
which would take decades to arrive on screen. Berg’s progressive political views were
also subdued after backlash. However, after the success of the civil rights and feminist
movements of the 1960s and 1970s alongside thawing of conservative television
programming, English had the liberty to create a political, single, working woman.
Murphy Brown was considered a pro-feminist, progressive series that proved “women
can have it all” when the titular character became a single mother while still balancing
her television career. This aspirational figure may not have been inherently relatable as a
celebrity journalist, but English had the same desire to defy stereotypes that Berg did. In
this case, the showrunner sought to present the model working woman who is a second-
wave feminist success story. English, and by extension Murphy Brown, were proponents
of 1960s liberal politics, particularly second-wave feminism. By the late 1980s, backlash
against second-wave feminism and a new movement, known as third-wave feminism,
were emerging.
Murphy Brown remains an outlier in network television as a successful and single
middle-aged feminist. In contrast to Murphy Brown, many post-feminist series focus on
the issue of singlehood due to women’s focus on career and high success and related delay

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pursuing romantic coupling. I thus regard post-feminist media as an era beginning in the
1980s, when cautionary tales of second-wave feminism emerged in the mainstream media
and press, as best chronicled in Susan Faludi’s 1992 book Backlash: The Undeclared War
Against American Women.222 One of the starkest critiques of second-wave feminism was
its alleged “overlooking and denigrating [of] the primacy of motherhood in women’s
lives.”223 Reactions against the movement led to “the disturbing post-feminist retreat from
sexual politics to a more conservative pro-family vision.”224 Faludi writes that post-
feminism was first used in the popular press of the 1920s that declared first-wave feminism
was no longer necessary once women were granted suffrage.225 Faludi claimed that
although women could vote, they hardly attempted to actively participate in politics.226 A
similar passivity continues in the apolitical reiteration of post-feminism since the 1980s.
My use of post-feminism as second-wave backlash will be used specifically in
terms of the representation of women and women’s issues in popular media beginning in
the 1980s and continuing to the present day. This backlash is what English worked to
defy throughout Murphy Brown. Negra and Yvonne Tasker argue that beyond the initial
backlash of the 1980s that carried over in the 1990s, 21st-century post-feminism
“anxiously raises the possible consequences of female independence, crudely: emotional
isolation for women and loss of power for men.”227 Post-feminism and third-wave
feminism are different, however. The former is a reaction to feminist movements and the
latter is the next generation of feminist activism.
Amanda Lotz describes two dominant television narratives about working women
in post-feminism.228 The first narrative portrayed women pursuing “a liberal feminist
agenda” by assimilating into male-dominated work environments, yet they “suggested

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women are ill-suited for professional roles or could not be both mothers and career
women.”229 The other narrative represented women who could handle this balance
effortlessly:
Networks depicted female characters who traversed the boundary between work
and home, many of whom were primarily included in a narrative set in the home.
These series rarely told stories about women doing work, despite attempting to
associate themselves with the progressive trend of depicting women as qualified
to work outside home.230

As a showrunner, English aimed to represent what these two narratives fail to show:
women who are chiefly identified as professionals actively participating in the workplace.
The character of Murphy Brown, however, adheres to a “feminist role model”
framework, which “is unequipped to assess the nuances of narrative complexity.”231 Like
Dow’s work on prime-time feminism, my goal is not to argue solely in favor of these
series and their showrunners as purely feminist but to analyze the series as significant
components of post-feminist media studies.
Due to English’s previous success on CBS as a producer, she was able to exercise
creative control when CBS asked: “Does she have to be coming back from a month at
Betty Ford? Couldn’t she be coming back from a week at the spa? Does she have to be
40? Couldn’t she be in her early 30s? And couldn’t she be Heather Locklear?”232 Further,
CBS’s ratings suffered during the majority of the 1980s and, as previously argued,
networks are more willing to take chances on innovative series and creators in times of
crisis and uncertainty.233 The jokes also spoke to a “rarefied” audience English called
“the 10 percenters,” appealing to an intellectual, highbrow demographic.234
Brown is the figure behind a news magazine program meant to be on CBS, like
the network’s longstanding 60 Minutes. In the opening scenes of the pilot, Season 1,

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Episode 1, “Respect,” a sequence of Murphy’s framed front-page magazine covers are
featured amongst a nondescript wall of fame starting with Time’s “Move Over Mike
Wallace” cover, signaling her dominance over the real-life broadcast journalist who is
known for his wide array of interviews on 60 Minutes, where he popularized the news
magazine style of broadcast journalism.235 Brown’s own profile is further proven by a
Life magazine cover with her photographed “on location with the pope” and again with a
Newsweek “Head to Head With The President” cover featuring her next to Ronald
Reagan. She is not only highlighted for her professionalism but for her persona, with a
People cover page titled “Fabulous at 40: Murphy Brown.”236 Gossip magazines are also
highlighted, with the most egregious example being a Star Examiner front page featuring
a paparazzi shot below the headline “Murphy Brown Claims I Had Big Foot’s Baby!”
and an Us Magazine issue stating “She’ll Ask You Anything.” Even Esquire is featured
with its cover asking “Who is Man Enough for this Woman?” After the montage, the
camera zooms out to reveal an office with an Emmy Award strategically placed next to
Brown’s magazine covers and a newsroom workplace with a banner reading “Welcome
Back Murphy!”
The acting begins with Murphy’s peers discussing her Esquire feature story and
predicting her behavior upon arrival, where the audience learns the successful journalist
and celebrity will be returning from the infamous Betty Ford Clinic, an alcohol
rehabilitation destination for the famous. She is clearly flawed from the beginning, but
the series deliberately begins when she is in her “second act” in terms of her career and
age. The series also urges women to stand by their politics and continue to fight for rights
in the workplace even as they approach middle age. Murphy arrives back at work stating

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she has left every vice behind, from alcohol to cigarettes. She then establishes her
workaholic nature by stating that being away from work was like “cutting off her
oxygen.” Murphy’s success is attributed to this work ethic and it again serves as an
encouragement to women who have made their career their life. This pro-career stance
attempts to reject post-feminist claims that women cannot have it all and will ultimately
end up unhappy if they are single but professionally successful. Murphy is sexually
active, social, and a leading national broadcast journalist. She is wounded when the
ratings for her program, fictionalized news series FYI, have dropped. In one of the first
representations of the next generation arriving in the series, a new executive producer is
introduced, 25-year-old Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud) who is straight out of college and
has no working journalism experience. Murphy, who is both educated and worked for
decades to arrive at her position, objects to Miles’ hiring. She goes on to expresses
disdain for her replacement during her time away, former Miss America competition
winner turned broadcast journalist, Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford), who serves as her stark
contrast. Silverberg states that, despite her low intelligence and lack of experience,
women in the 18 to 34 demographic are clamoring for her hair tips. Thus, Murphy also
embodies prestige journalism in an increasingly entertainment-based news cycle. She
opposes what will become of broadcast and cable news, which adhere to the supply and
demand of audiences rather than informing citizens. As English previously worked in
broadcast journalism, her outside knowledge is instilled in her understanding of the state
of news and the type of workplace Murphy occupies.
Corky embodies the women’s lifestyle magazines that came before second-wave
feminism, geared toward housewives and single women seeking husbands, and the

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response to second-wave feminism that led to post-feminism. That is, that second-wave
feminism, and feminism as a whole, have achieved their goals and there is no longer a
need for feminist activism because equality has been reached. Corky’s first feature story,
for example, is an exposé on liposuction. Corky is emblematic of post-feminism in the
media, in contrast to Murphy’s second-wave nature. While there is clearly a baby boomer
and Gen X generational divide between Murphy and Corky, it is not marked by second-
wave and third-wave feminism as Corky’s apolitical nature is more reflective of post-
feminism. Some episodes place the two together to highlight their differences, such as
Season 2, Episode 19, “Bad Girls,” when they go undercover as hookers. Corky’s politics
remain largely ambivalent throughout the series and she can be interpreted as more
apolitical than aligned with any wave of feminism. Yet Murphy, who is always keen to
debate with her peers, finds Corky’s lack of awareness about current affairs to be her
most troubling characteristic. Corky embodies a certain complacency with traditional
gender norms around gender and femininity that second-wave feminism rebelled against.
While Corky is a working journalist, she became one due to her former status as a Miss
America winner and her demographic on the series is younger women who seek beauty
advice over current affairs information.
Despite this, Corky is still part of the workplace environment and the ensemble
cast reflects a traditional facet of democratic and participatory television series where
different individuals with conflicting backgrounds, opinions, and demographics are
thrown together. This was seen previously in The Goldbergs with its range of
generational, immigrant, and American identities. Part of the message behind the series’
progressive nature lay in the protagonist and showrunner’s understanding and open

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nature, even as she stayed true to her core beliefs. The same can be said for Murphy
Brown and Diane English. They adjust to the shifting times, despite their initial stubborn
natures, and only protest when events go against the defining principles of progressivism.
In fact, the nature of progressive politics is to understand changing times while
remembering history’s regressions. However, Murphy’s second-wave politics remain
constant and both older generations (through her mother) and various examples of future
generations (such as Corky) have conflicting politics, or lack thereof, that are essentially
“wrong.”
Diane Negra writes that the 1990s and 2000s are acknowledged as a
neoconservative era “characterized by heightened pressures to define women’s lives in
terms of romance and marriage” and “[have] seen perhaps the most intense cultural
coercion for women to retreat from the workplace since the post-World War II period.”237
She asserts that post-feminist media employs this “retreatism” to the domestic sphere or
traditional gender roles as a respected narrative trope. This mirrors the enforced 1940s
blacklist that women faced in film and television, stemming from the previous backlashes
against women and marginalized groups who were gaining power and influence in the
media world. Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon summarize that “the backlash not
only warns women they cannot ‘have it all’ and must choose between home and career,
but also makes the choice for them by promoting wedded life and domesticity as a full
and fulfilled existence.”238
Murphy Brown is also an unintentional time capsule of the end of an era for
network and print journalism, competing with a 24-hour news cycle of cable news which
launched with CNN (Cable News Network) in 1980 and the rise of the internet in the late

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1990s and 2000s.239 Other non-fiction programming, like talk shows, also shifted in
daytime and prime time with the popularity of The Phil Donahue Show (1970-1996) and
The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986-2011). The Johnny Carson Show (1962-1992) still
presented a traditional talk show, while the first late show premiered in 1993 with the
Late Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) presenting a more anti-establishment,
subversive series aimed at youth staying up late.
In the pilot episode of Murphy Brown the new producer, Miles, provides Murphy
with a coveted interview that she states competition news magazine programs, such as 60
Minutes, 20/20, and The Today Show, all attempted to “win.” Fictional character Bobby
Powell is infamous for a supposed affair he had with the married vice presidential
candidate. The central conflict in the pilot, beyond all the new changes since Murphy’s
arrival, is that Miles guaranteed Bobby would not be asked about the extramarital affair.
Murphy then prides herself on her integrity and never having her “hands tied” during an
interview, signaling the overarching dilemma of the shifts in her program and one of the
greatest critiques of the news industry – its drive for profit and entertainment over truth
and complex journalism. Murphy’s status as a celebrity, and rumors about her former life
when her alcoholism featured in tabloids, also reveals tabloid culture. In the pilot, Bobby
appeals to Murphy by recalling her past reputation as a tabloid target. He suggests that he
deserves dignity when, and if, he speaks on national television. Before the interview
begins, it is clear Bobby’s intentions are to gain profit and entertainment through fame.
As soon as the live broadcast begins, Murphy asks the affair question she was explicitly
told not to as part of Bobby’s agreement, and the screen fades to black to signal a turning
point and cliffhanger for a commercial break. This develops Murphy as a proponent of

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journalism as a profession of integrity, not one to make profits for its interviewees in the
style of tabloid and gossip news. The next scene cuts to a dumbfounded Miles, explaining
that she had to ask as it was both in “her genes” and she “had really bad PMS,”
referencing her gender as a comic excuse for breaking the rules but also as a way to
satirize women’s inability to carry out professional work when their hormones might
interfere. Miles is preoccupied with pleasing the executives of the network and reaching
targeted ratings, while Murphy reminds him that their quality content is what sets FYI
apart. Further, Murphy asks the affair question not only to thwart Bobby’s celebrity
ambitions but to present herself as the intrepid interviewer she is famous for being in her
industry. It reflects the rebellious spirit of second-wave feminists who do not allow men,
like either Miles or Bobby, to dictate their choices in their profession. Murphy constantly
asserts her power as the voice of her program when she is on the air throughout the series,
reflecting English’s stances as a showrunner to instill her perspective and views through
her protagonist.
The series also aims to show that Murphy is not an emotionless feminist who has
lost touch with her sense of empathy. Murphy is shown as professional when she needs to
be but also loyal and compassionate to her coworkers. She does not represent a
monstrous woman who squashes Miles. Although Murphy is seen as tough and
unflinching, firing three assistants throughout the course of one episode and hundreds
throughout the series, she also reveals camaraderie toward her workplace family. In this
case, it is Miles who believes he is “washed up” after the deal is not upheld in Bobby’s
interview. She offers to help him fight to keep his job and when a confused Miles asks
why, Murphy responds “I don’t know, but don’t push it.” In contrast, she refuses to be

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maternal or overly emotional to her team, defying other gendered expectations of women
in the workplace.
Topical political and social elements pertaining to 1989 are further highlighted in
Season 1 and throughout the series, although this is done more subtly after the first
season. This includes an episode on the Cold War (Episode 17, “Moscow on the
Potomac”) in which Murphy participates in a joint newscast with her Soviet equivalent.
Episode 19, “The Unshrinkable Murphy Brown,” shows the intrepid journalist
participating in group therapy after a judge dies of a heart attack during her interview.
The series also delves into strikes and Murphy is shown as a proponent of open dialogue
and negotiations, such as her intermediary position for the technical crew, as in Season 2,
Episode 12, “The Strike.” This mirrors English’s own status as an intermediary as a
showrunner who manages both casts and crews.
While much of Season 1 centered on Murphy and her coworkers’ news stories
and professional careers, it also delved into Murphy’s family. Her affluent and divorced
mother, who she is not close to, visits in Season 1, Episode 15, “Mama Said.” Her mother
is a curator at Philadelphia’s National Art Gallery and is shown as a classist “snob” at
certain pivotal moments, especially in her attitude toward blue-collar workers. This
shows Murphy as much more progressive in contrast. Her mother suggests, for example,
that Murphy check her house painter’s pockets for jewelry, implying he is a thief. Yet she
is still also liberal, saying she visits the White House to see “what damage the Bushes
have done.” This provides an insight into Murphy’s stifled nature and fear of motherhood
and intimacy. Women of the second wave were raised by the “Great War” generation that
enforced traditional 1950s American values through gender stereotypes. Although

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Murphy’s mother is also liberal, her politics are separate from what she believes are
social norms that her daughter should abide by. This adult mother-daughter relationship
shows the generational struggle of baby boomers and second-wave feminists. It also
further reveals Murphy’s struggles and rebellion against the conventions that were
expected of her. Regardless, they make amends by the end of the episode and the episode
uncovers much about Murphy’s stifled relationship with intimacy. For example, she
mentions that they have never said “I love you” to each other. Murphy tells her mother
that she has always been frightened to utter the words to anyone for fear they would not
reciprocate, which leads to both of them finally expressing their love for each other.
These acts of closure for Murphy and her mother, while in her adulthood, foreshadow
that she will be ready to become a mother once she can confront her issues. It also
adheres to the notion that the personal is political and that Murphy’s generation were
wary of motherhood and marriage due to their upbringings. The episode suggests that
Murphy never experienced a true childhood, which accounts for her professional success
but also her personal shortcomings. While her workplace family replace the comfort of
her biological family, moments with her family serve to bring the character, and the
generations watching, closure. At least one episode of each season includes Murphy’s
parents: for example, Season 2, Episodes 10 and 11, “Brown Like Me,” with her father
and his new family alongside her mother after Murphy wins a coveted journalism award.
In Season 4, Episode 6, “Full Circle,” she attempts to find closure in her relationship with
her father upon her mother’s death. Elements of Murphy’s troubled childhood and
separated parents can certainly be connected to English’s past. However, English lacked
the financial prosperity of Murphy and her family. Therefore, these instances of family

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dynamics and closure with parents taps more into the second wave, affluent, WASP
(White Anglo Saxon) baby boomer demographic who are skeptical about marriage and
motherhood not only due to their feminist roots but because of their personal histories.
Murphy’s Love Life and Motherhood
Throughout the series, Murphy is shown as still attractive and seeking romantic
and sexual pleasure. Murphy’s status as a middle-aged feminist does not make her
asexual or unattractive to potential suitors. Her confidence, beliefs, and power are what
make men attracted to her. While younger men such as Miles are intimidated by her, she
has several suitors of her own generation and hints of her past celebrity flings are
frequently mentioned throughout the series. This defies the concept of the second-wave
feminist as a “man hater” or out to emasculate the other sex. Murphy’s sexuality and
confidence is an integral part of her character, offering another defiance of several
stereotypes of middle-aged women and second-wave baby boomer feminists.
Murphy’s ability to not only be sexual but to fall in love is also explored in the
series and her romantic interest is her intellectual and political equal. By Season 1,
Episode 4, “Signed Sealed, Delivered,” the professional and personal collide as Miles
assigns Murphy to interview her ex-husband (of five days), radical activist Jake
Lowenstein (Robin Thomas).240 She met him at the 1968 Democratic National
Convention at which they protested, were maced, and were arrested together. After the
judge sentenced and released Murphy and Jake, he married the two. While Murphy is
usually secretive about her short-term relationships and sexual dalliances to her
coworkers, she opens up to her team in this episode. She explains her arrest and
following marriage to her coworkers, even if it was twenty years ago, because they never

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knew she was married or once in love. Miles does not believe she can maintain her
professionalism during the interview. Jake sends her a drive-in movie theater speaker
from their honeymoon, another nostalgic symbol of Murphy’s longing for the 1960s. At
the site of her usual pre-interview meetings, the owner states he has never seen her
nervous before (from her broadcast conversations with [Henry] “Kissinger” and [Dan]
“Quayle.” Yet as soon as she sees Jake, she states “I want him” and their attraction and
longing are palpable. Both are shown in conflict as their feelings unfold. Jake suggests
they have sex to “get it out of the way.” However, despite Murphy’s attractions she does
not turn “girl-ish” nor is she seen giggling, and she does not give in to his advances while
at work. It is integral to show that, despite her longing, she does not lose her
professionalism while in the workplace. She then hosts Jake for dinner at his home and
adds a sweatshirt over her form-fitting dress to evade any potential sexual tension.
Eventually, the two begin to argue and they almost have sex. Murphy admits that she
“loses a little bit of herself” when she’s with him. She asks him to leave, saying she will
provide interview preparation via mail or phone in order to avoid him beforehand and
keep her professionalism intact. Then, right before the interview is aired live, Jake
suggests they try to work harder at their relationship. While she is stirred, she retains her
demeanor in the interview. This attitude again serves as a role model framework for
handling romantic relationships in the workplace, so women will not fall subservient and
risk their careers for a man. After the two debate over his activist involvement in Peru, he
asks her to marry him “hypothetically.” It is also significant to note that it is Jake who
breaks the professional and personal border, not Murphy. Once the segment is finished,
they attempt to find a wedding date but their opposing schedules lead to another fight

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regarding their inflexibility, which leads the two to kiss. Murphy states she would be
happy with five days with Jake every 20 years. In episodic sitcom style the next episode
does not acknowledge the relationship, as if the five days are over for the next 20 years,
at least.
Murphy’s relationship to children and motherhood is established as early as the
first season. While she is initially reluctant toward children, her natural compassion is
eventually seen and proves that her feminist side does not mean she loathes children or
does not have any maternalistic nature. In the next episode, “Murphy’s Pony,”
elementary school students walk into the workplace office and she proclaims her dislike
of children. In contrast, Corky says she loves kids and notes how difficult it must be for
Murphy because she does not have a romantic partner and is likely no longer ovulating.
This speaks to the stereotype of second-wave feminists’ anti-maternal nature. When a
group of siblings who appear to be abandoned by their family linger in the studio,
Murphy is initially frustrated by them but softens by the next day. As a woman from
Social Services picks them up, Murphy has clearly become attached and is on the verge
of tears as she says goodbye to them. She decides to take them home with her for
Christmas Eve so they will not be alone and takes them shopping for toys. When their
mother returns, Murphy writes them a check and says to call if they ever need anything.
Murphy feels alone but soon recovers to take her perpetual house painter, Eldin, the
closest thing she has to a live-in partner, to the FYI Christmas office party.
Murphy exhibits maternal longings in the following episode, “Baby Love,” to
prove the complex nature of her desires. After a pregnant friend encourages her to pursue
the idea of having a child, she visits a sperm bank under the guise of writing a story and

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is recognized as a famous journalist by the receptionist. The visit to the sperm bank
informs the audience that the modern, albeit wealthy, woman has various options if she
wants to have a child. Marriage is not the only way to become a mother if they do not
want to be a wife. Murphy then considers enlisting her coworker Frank to be the father,
but decides to wait for the chance to have a child with someone she loves and could even
possibly marry. By Season 3’s finale and Season 4’s opener, the three-part “Uh Oh,”
Murphy is pregnant by her ex-husband, the only man she ever loved. Due to their clear
frictions, she does not want to raise the child with him. This links back to Murphy’s own
childhood and parents’ divorce, as she does not want the next generation to grow up with
a married mother and father simply because that appears to be the social norm. Second-
wave feminism also made divorce and working mothers less taboo. Murphy’s aspirational
motherhood speaks to women who may want to have children, but not in a traditional
sense. It suggests they do not have to be rushed into becoming pregnant or sacrifice their
career to become a mother. Again, Murphy’s perspective comes from a heightened state
of privilege. Yet, within this 1980s power career women context, it encourages women to
achieve social and professional mobility. While Murphy was born rich and affluent,
English was not and her neoliberal work ethic to become a successful television
showrunner is reflected in Brown.
Murphy does not let her pregnancy challenge her professional goals. Instead, it
shows her newfound balance and constant professionalism. Murphy chooses to raise the
child on her own and her workplace family often assists her in the traditional role her
romantic partner would have taken during pregnancy and child rearing. While she does
not marry in the series, retaining her proud singlehood, she eventually embraces

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motherhood. This aims to show that feminist women are not against being mothers and
they can achieve that personal goal on their own terms. Later in the series, her pregnancy
also speaks against post-feminist rhetoric that suggests working women regret not having
children when they chose their career first. Murphy’s professional and personal
achievements thus show she can, indeed, have it all. In this case, motherhood and her
career are all she wants.
The day after the pregnancy episode aired, Dan Quayle criticized the lack of
family values exhibited in the series and named it a contributing factor to the country’s
loss of traditional “family values:”

It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown – a character who
supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman –
mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just
another ‘lifestyle choice.’241

As a Los Angeles Time retrospective on the series stated regarding the
significance of the subsequent conflict:

The comments sparked one of the most bitter chapters in the 1990s culture wars,
with Murphy’s fictional bundle of joy a wedge issue in that year’s presidential
election. Social conservatives rallied behind Quayle and accused English of
cultural elitism. Liberals called Quayle a hypocrite for vilifying unwed mothers
while also opposing abortion rights.242

English spoke publicly against Quayle’s accusations, even going so far as to mention
abortion rights which she had not depicted on Murphy Brown. This shows she had
potential restrictions in the series and could have been a reason she departed the series
after Season 3: “If the vice president thinks it's disgraceful for an unmarried woman to
bear children (out of wedlock), and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a

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child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.”243
While English addresses the dire political issues of reproductive rights and single
mothers, her post-Murphy Brown series attempt to be more in touch with issues of class.
Later seasons of Murphy Brown show the career woman thriving as a single mother.
However, in Murphy’s case single motherhood is not the crisis it is for unwed, teenage,
impoverished women who are pregnant. Murphy is rich, famous, and has the financial
means to manage single motherhood. Further, Dow asserts that the narrative and
discourse around Murphy’s pregnancy itself was conservative. Her coworkers chastise
her sexual promiscuity when she is not sure who the father is. She only briefly considers
abortion, a common trope in television to show the option is considered but “storytelling”
is used as the reason to continue the character’s pregnancy.244 Despite English’s political
nature, she claimed she did not think it would bring controversy:
I wanted to challenge Murphy. She couldn’t keep a plant alive. How’s she going
to have a child? I just thought it was good storytelling. It never occurred to me
that in that day and age that it would be some sort of a taboo.245

Since the two-part 1972 episode of Maude, “Maude’s Dilemma,” when the
middle-aged protagonist decides to have an abortion, few television series showed their
principal characters having abortions until the 2000s: Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001-2005),
Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006-2011), Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005-), Private Practice
(ABC, 2007-2013), Scandal (ABC, 2012-2018), Parenthood (2010-2015), Girls (HBO,
2012-2017), Jane the Virgin (CW, 2014-2019), Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (CW, 2015-2019),
and GLOW (Netflix, 2017-). All these series were created and run by women except for
Six Feet Under, run by Alan Ball, and Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, which were
created and run by Jason Katims.

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After Murphy Brown: Post-Feminist Series
Third-wave feminism ideals emerged in 1990s television and marked a shift away
from the second wave’s emphasis on advancing careers, contending that the work of
second-wave feminism was done and women had reached career equality. However,
issues of sexual harassment culminating in Anita Hill’s 1991 congressional hearing,
regarding Clarence Thomas’ advances toward her, were said to “revitalize” the new wave
of feminism.246 Third-wave feminism, through its 2000 Manifesto, both acknowledged
and agreed with the core values of the second wave while expanding ideas into the 1990s
dissented from 1960s views.247 Third-wave feminism and the post-feminist backlash
often viewed the second wave as anti-motherhood and anti-feminine. This connection is
one reason why post-feminism as a backlash and the third wave as a movement have
been conflated. It should also be noted that both second- and third-wave feminism were
essentially “mainstream” feminisms which aligned with the most affluent white women
who could rise against the power of white men.248 However, the third wave was not often
represented outright in television programming; that is, women did not often engage with
or discuss gender inequality or politics. Thus, apolitical post-feminism, along with
commodified ideas surrounding the pro-sex and pro-feminized culture of the third wave,
was the standard in series from Ally McBeal (1997-2002, Fox) to Sex and the City (1998-
2004, HBO). Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey postulate that the “anti-maternalist”
and “anti-male” stigma of second-wave feminism led to the onset of the “superwoman
syndrome,” an expectation that “women can and should do everything and do it well—
work (and work out), mother, make love.”249 Post-feminist rhetoric suggested that

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second-wave feminism failed and becoming a “superwoman,” like Brown, was
impossible, stressing career women’s unhappiness without a husband or children.250
Premiering in 1997 on Fox, David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal led to the 1998 Time
magazine cover asking “Is Feminism Dead?” A lineup of the black and white faces of
three historical public persona feminist figures (Harriet Tubman, Betty Friedan, and
Gloria Steinhem) was followed by a color photo of the fictional character Ally McBeal.
The series postulated that a professional career could not make a woman happy. The
series begins with the eponymous star on her first day of work as a lawyer at a prominent
firm. Professional success is eschewed when she learns her new coworkers are her former
Harvard Law School boyfriend and his fiancé, causing her to spiral out of control
personally and professionally. This return to the gender power balance is frequently
expressed in post-feminist television by representing the unhappiness and unfulfillment
of single career women. Ally McBeal focused on the story of a recent Harvard Law
School graduate with a job at a top law firm but her feminine preoccupations often
thwarted her abilities as a practicing lawyer despite her excellent qualifications. Although
she frequently handled cases dealing with sexual harassment and unrepresented women,
feminism never played an actual part in her life. She regularly discussed her love life with
her token sassy black roommate, whose profession as an attorney is downplayed.
Scholars such as L.S. Kim have provided case studies of the series that summarize its
stance as a “strange attempt to coalesce “pro-woman” and “anti-feminist” in a false
feminism that opposes feminist goals.”251 That is, the series deliberates a post-feminist
discourse in which female empowerment and a muddled feminist identity are identified
through an emphasis on “lifestyle and attitude rather than politics and activism.” 252

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The end of Murphy Brown in 1998 coincided with a new era of women-centered
series which were not created or run by women. This programming focused on
protagonists with successful careers but unfulfilling love lives and the pursuit of romantic
closure in addition to an ambivalence toward marriage and motherhood, from Ally
McBeal to Sex and the City. This new era also marked a shift in cable programming and
discourse about a golden age of television focused on male showrunners who were
considered auteurs due to high production values and a “cinematic” look, narrative
complexity that did not acknowledge its origins in the serialized nature of soap opera, and
anti-heroes from David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999-2007, HBO) to Shawn Ryan’s The
Shield (2002-2007, FX) and David Weiner’s Mad Men (2007-2015, AMC) to Vince
Gilligan’s Breaking Bad (2008-2013, AMC).
Indeed, by 1998, Sex and the City (based on Candace Bushnell’s novel and
created by Melrose Place’s Darren Starr) shifted representational gears in a series about
successful, childless, single thirty-something women in New York City, from a lawyer to
a publicist to the head of an art gallery to a sex columnist. The episodes focused on the
narrative of star Sarah Jessica Parker as the columnist Carrie Bradshaw, who shared her
and her friends’ sexual misadventures. Critics initially hailed the series for its Generation
X, third wave, sex-positive approach and emphasis on women discussing sexual pleasure.
Women are rehabilitated when they find a life of marriage and motherhood. In Sex and
the City, Miranda is the most educated of the group and is also the only woman lawyer in
her office. She is portrayed as ultimately cynical toward romantic relationships although
she is the first character to have a child and get married, subsequently making sacrifices
for her career. With short red hair and a wardrobe of unflattering pantsuits, she is also

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negatively portrayed as the least attractive and least feminine of the group, with men not
pursuing her very often throughout the series. By later seasons City gained a huge
following and used high fashion product placement heavily, which led to critiques of the
show as a post-feminist consumerist regression from its initial progressiveness about sex
and single women in their thirties and forties.
Post-feminist popular media is frequently influenced by bourgeoisie beauty
standards and consumerism and Sex and the City is one of the most discussed series
employing this combination. It originated as a series representing career women in
Manhattan on the verge of middle age who were single and satisfied and was considered
ground-breaking for its portrayal of independent women with sexual desires. The series
also ultimately emphasized the need for heterosexual dependency, which eventually
becomes a dominant narrative that overshadows careers, female friendships, and even
consumerism. Lotz writes that Sex and the City represents “the first generation of television
characters who assume the benefits secured by second-wave feminism activism, and new
career possibilities lead many of them to need to reconcile their independence with their
desire for romantic relationships.”253 The women of Sex and the City discuss their
relationships and problems while eating brunch, shopping, and attending parties but are
rarely shown working. Although they all have stimulating jobs as a publicist, journalist,
lawyer, and art dealer, their professional lives are never depicted unless they correlate with
their personal or social sphere. By not representing gender inequality in education and the
workplace, post-feminist television suggests that feminism is no longer necessary as
workplace equality already exists. Concurrently, by not representing women participating
in the workplace, post-feminist series also imply a career is not a truly important facet of a

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modern woman’s life. Series such as Sex and the City automatically place their heroines in
coveted positions without giving their professions any significant value or meaning. Jane
Arthurs analyzes City’s downfall by stating “its shared culture of femininity provides an
alternative to heterosexual dependence but its recurring promise of a utopia of fulfilled
desire always ends in disappointment, only for the cycle of consumption to begin again
next week.”254
Roseanne as Murphy Brown’s antidote and the 2018 revivals of Roseanne and
Murphy Brown
By 1992, due to the syndication of Murphy Brown, English’s husband and
producing partner stated they never had to work again.255 However, both continued their
production company where English supervised series. Hilary Devries of the New York
Times spoke of the success of Murphy Brown:

Like that of any comedy series that captures an era – “I Love Lucy" in the 50’s,
“All in the Family" in the 70's, “Cheers" in the 80’s – the success of “Murphy
Brown” can be traced to an alchemy of individual creativity and larger social
trends.256

As part of English and her husband’s smart business decisions they severed ties with
Murphy Brown after Season 3 to start their own independent production company, as
syndication for the series was split between them and Warner Brothers.257 As English left
Brown after Season 3, the showrunner’s authorial control was evidently not needed to
maintain success and no evidence of fan loyalty toward English is documented. When
former Cheers writer-producer (among other credits) Ken Levine was asked for his
thoughts on NBC’s firing of Dan Harmon, Community’s infamous showrunner, after an

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ongoing battle with the network over control of the series he created and produced in
2012, he wrote a blog post:

Networks have been firing showrunners for years. You just never heard about it.
Before social networks and the internet, showrunners were essentially invisible.
Just names in the credits. Now showrunners have become quasi-celebrities
themselves, which I think is a good thing. Only 70% of the viewers think Joel
McHale makes up those funny things he says instead of 90%. But the point is, this
isn’t precedent setting. It’s always easier to fire writers over actors.258

He goes on to mention that it is common for series to end without the original creator:
Even WEST WING when Aaron Sorkin was sacked. Even MASH when Larry
Gelbart quit. MASH is a perfect example. If they could replace the genius of
Larry Gelbart with a couple of knuckleheads like me and my partner and the show
still survived, then you know it’s pretty bulletproof.259

Levine concluded that networks have the power to fire showrunners at any time and that
public opinion (through social networks and internet) would be the only force to change
this. This is why showrunners, who often begin their TV careers as writers, attempt to
gain as much ownership as possible by becoming producers as well.
While the assertion around the history of networks firing showrunners is valid,
showrunners were not always the anonymous figures Levine claims they are. Actors are
not the only TV figures to gain brand name recognition. Like film directors and
screenwriters, showrunners can take on heightened status and levels of economic and
cultural capital. While the term “television showrunner” became a branded non-credited
industry title in the trade press of the 1980s, I maintain that the position clearly always
existed in the industry, beginning with radio as the earlier broadcast system.260 They even
became quasi-celebrities, or full stars, long before the digital era. Showrunner fandoms
are documented through popular press features, public appearances, their proximity to

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series’ leads, award accolades, and social and political outreach. They also often delve
into acting in their own series, especially if they have the training and consider the work
to be autobiographical. Just as showrunners existed as early as radio, Berg’s case study is
evidence that they gained celebrity status. While showrunners in the era of social media
are indeed more visible and acknowledged than ever, several of the most senior writer-
producer hybrids transcend industry acknowledgement, from cult followings and
subcultural capital to mainstream public personas. I note this distinction because
showrunners with subcultural status in the network era often do not have long careers due
to broadcast TV being dominated by the aim of gaining the highest number of viewers to
yield mass profits from advertisers and sponsors. Therefore, their series are canceled and
often forgotten without reruns or syndication. This is why common histories of
progressive, artful programming are closely associated with the rise of niche casting and
cable programming for specific demographics, where these syndications can be aired for
targeted audiences (e.g. Star Trek on the Sci-Fi network) over the logic of Nielsen ratings
and Least Objectionable Programming (LOP) for the traditional, white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant family. Showrunners, like other influential media creators and stars with
subversive views, have also become enemies of the state. However, early celebrity
political activism was rooted in the US government who initially enlisted Chaplin, Mary
Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and William S. Hart for a tour asking Americans to invest
in war bonds.261 The influence of radio stars was also visible when Bob Hope, Bing
Crosby, and Jack Benny performed for the Office of War Information (OWI) while Burns
and Allen also performed for a War Bond Campaign.262 The transition to early
progressive radio and television programming was thwarted by several factors:

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McCarthy’s Blacklist, a post-World War II crisis in masculinity when women took over
the workforce that led to a return to traditional gender roles, and the industry’s move
toward the lowest risk programming that was cheap to make and would yield the widest
audience through Least Objectionable Programming (LOP). This mandate, with some
exceptions, lasted until the 1970s. Creative development teams such as MTM
Productions incorporated innovation with standard conventions, which appeased the
industry’s understanding of new demographics of viewers who aligned with feminism
and civil rights. These new series thus began showing single women, black families, and
new workplace programming that reflected the decline or delay in the US nuclear family.
Second-wave feminism’s impact on women writers led to their demands for greater
access to the industry as creatives and executives, including as showrunners, and this
further yielded new representations and feminist readings of programming. However,
stars were initially reluctant to publicly share their own views to avoid dividing fans or
upsetting studios.263 Broadcast showrunners are even more restricted within the confines
of television’s LOP. Unfortunately, any deviation from these norms either behind the
scenes or on screen is seen as “diversity” rather than as a realistic picture of the makeup
of the US population. The need for the buzzword of diversity is seen as good for the
media industry business. Diversity incentives come in waves, based on increased
awareness of social justice in the mainstream rather than a consistent effort to properly
represent the rich, eclectic fabric of the country through race, class, region, ethnicity,
sexuality, gender, and other cultural specificities.
Devries cites that Brown, along with Roseanne, marked a “growth of
feminism.”264 In many ways, however, Roseanne (ABC, 1988-1997) stands in stark

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contrast to Murphy Brown. It was, and still is, one of the few series to focus on a working
class, traditionally blue-collar family, starring Roseanne Barr as the eponymous
protagonist who did not attend college and worked service jobs throughout the span of
the series. While Barr was not the showrunner, the series was based on a standup persona
she created. The original conflict between Barr and the series’ first showrunner, Matt
Williams, and its producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Warner, is indicative of not only the
complex ecosystem television had become by the 1980s but also the reason behind stars
wanting producer credits and upholds Levine’s theory that the showrunner is less
powerful than the star. Barr gave an ultimatum to choose between her and Williams after
13 episodes (out of an ordered 22), leading Carsey and Werner to keep her, the star. In
the series Roseanne works at a plant while raising her children, the opposite of the
aspirational career woman and model mother of other ‘80s series like The Cosby Show or
Growing Pains. While the Conner family was always on the brink of poverty, they
eventually found stable jobs. Future showrunners like Joss Whedon and Chuck Lorre
were early writers of the show. Holistically, the series was ambivalent about addressing
politics, like most series of its time. It tackled issues such as birth control, accepting a gay
family member, and abortion, which led to the belief it was progressive. An Atlantic
article wrote that the series “was aggressively critical of low wages and big business.”
The Season 1 finale features Roseanne leading a strike with her coworkers, jokingly
comparing herself to Norma Rae. Roseanne laid down the problems of the working class
and her position but the series critique never suggests a solution, besides the upward
mobility we begin to see in the Conner family after Season 4.

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Holistically, the series was ambivalent about addressing politics, like most series
of its time. It tackled issues such as birth control, accepting a gay family member, and
abortion, which led to the belief it was progressive. An Atlantic article wrote that the
series “was aggressively critical of low wages and big business.” The Season 1 finale
features Roseanne leading a strike with her coworkers, jokingly comparing herself to
Norma Rae. Roseanne laid down the problems of the working class and her position but
the series critique never suggests a solution, besides the upward mobility we begin to see
in the Conner family after Season 4. The apolitical nature of the show would foreshadow
Barr’s first time delving into politics three years after the finale.
In 2010, Barr announced she was running for US President under the Peace and
Freedom Party, with her plan to “speak on behalf of unions, women, and their issues in
the workplace as well as their reproductive rights, single-payer health care, homeowners
facing foreclosure, active Service People and veterans, and the rights of LGBT
Americans.”265 Then, during the 2016 presidential election campaign, Barr’s status as an
independent shifted when she expressed support for Republican candidate Donald
Trump. After several controversial tweets, before deleting her entire history in December
she wrote: “4 those who wonder-back in the day when I was called a ‘liberal’ by
journalists, I used to answer-‘I’m not a Liberal, I’m a radical’ & I still am-I voted Trump
2 shake up the status quo & the staid establishment.”266
Conclusion
While both Barr and English used their series to illustrate social and political
issues they felt needed to be addressed in US television, they also used their protagonists
to represent the struggles of working women in the industry. As Barnet Kellman, one of

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Brown’s directors, stated, the series was written from English’s gut and
autobiographically and was “about a woman wanting to achieve the things that she
wanted and the obstacles that were in her way.”267 In contrast to Barr’s shift in public
opinion, English’s politics remained consistent on- and off-screen and she never hid her
past, identity, or ambitions. Both Roseanne and Murphy Brown were revived in 2018 by
the drive of their principal authors/creators in Barr and English with the intent of
showcasing polarizing points of view on the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump
and his administration. In the same year, when a feature interview on English was
released by Buffalo News, her mother, Anna Sardella, was 92 years old and living in
Buffalo, continuing to encourage her daughter to go on writing for television.268 The
article stated English was “financially secure” and that “she [didn’t] need to work” or
“write.”269 Her morning routine was recounted wherein she watched morning news and
believed she had something to say about the role of women and media.270
In retrospect, Murphy Brown, as one of the few series of the time meant to
symbolize feminism, was restrictive in its focus on English’s second wave, 1960s-
nostalgic views reflective of the Boomer generation that gained success and affluence
after their formative rebellious years. As a result, the Boomer generation became the new
establishment while Generation X and Y (millennials) would soon respond to their
politics of representation. English was unable to become a franchise showrunner after
leaving Murphy Brown and attempting three new series that had little success: Love &
War (CBS, 1992-1995), Double Rush (CBS, 1995), and Ink (CBS, 1996-1997). Neither
was the CBS revival of Murphy Brown in 2018 renewed after its first season. In spite of
this, Murphy Brown could still be considered aspirational for the young girls and women

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who watched the series. It left a lasting impression on future women showrunners,
particularly Tina Fey. The 30 Rock episode, Season Six, Episode 18, “Murphy Brown
Lied To Us,” portrays protagonist Liz Lemon (played by series showrunner Tina Fey)
rethinking adopting a baby with her new partner while still working as showrunner of the
fictional series-within-a-series The Girlie Show and dealing with the child-like costars
Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski). She laments that
Murphy’s aspirational workplace family served as her support system, in contrast to Liz’s
dysfunctional 21st century coworkers.
English and Brown’s role model framework stand in stark contrast to the abilities
of Shonda Rhimes. She used the success of her first original series, Grey’s Anatomy
(ABC, 2005-), as an anchor to pursue other series and eventually established ABC’s
Thursday night lineup based on several series from her production company, Shondaland.
Rhimes initially remained apolitical and pro-multiculturalism through colorblind casting,
stating she was part of a post-feminist and post-civil rights generation. After the success
of her signature series style and her online presence, she adhered to the quasi-celebrity
status Levine describes in the post-network digital era.271 Murphy Brown and Grey’s
Anatomy share similarities in that they both indicate that capable working women can
handle their professional and personal independence. As a result, their male counterparts
are shown as confused and threatened. However, post-feminist culture is not always
inherently anti-feminist. It can often skew feminist ideology and is generally apolitical by
highlighting lifestyle choices as pro-woman. It “celebrates female agency and women’s
powers of consumption” but ultimately “works to commodify feminism via the figure of
woman as empowered consumer.”272

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The following chapter will focus on Rhimes, the first black woman to be a
showrunner for a successful network prime-time drama and to become a franchise
showrunner. While Rhimes enforced colorblind casting to include multiculturalism and
onscreen diversity, the practice has been criticized for its lack of cultural specificity. The
following chapter will thus focus on Rhimes’ ability to enter the television industry as a
showrunner without extensive past experience and sustain her career from network TV to
the streaming platform Netflix, allowing more creative and financial freedom. She
became the franchise showrunner English could not by initially subduing her potential
onscreen politics to gain industrial control and using the context of online, social media-
based paratexts to assert her views.

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Chapter Three
From Self-Promotion to Social Justice: Shonda Rhimes and Paratexts
Introduction

The discourse surrounding Shonda Rhimes’ impact on television is frequently
linked to on- and off-screen diversity. Rhimes has however expressed her distaste for the
word in favor of the term “normalizing” as a means of not othering authentic
multiculturalism: “As if it is something [...] special. Or rare. As if there is something
unusual about telling stories involving women and people of color and LGBTQ
characters on TV.”273 Despite incremental advancements for black television
professionals in the 2000s, Rhimes’ success as a black woman showrunner sparked
enthusiasm and optimism for several rising writers which led one journalist to describe
the impact as the “Shonda Rhimes Effect.”274 When Rhimes entered the television
industry in 2005, inclusivity was not a priority for executives. ABC executives told
Rhimes that Grey’s Anatomy’s (ABC, 2005–) protagonist Meredith Grey’s casual sexual
encounter was “unrealistic”:
I remember having an early discussion at ABC with people who no longer work at
the network before Grey’s was picked up, where I was sort of brought into a room
and a bunch of older guys told me that nobody was going to watch a show about a
woman who had casual sex and threw a guy out the night before her first day of
work, that that was completely unrealistic and nobody wanted to know that
woman. And I remember sort of sitting in that meeting and thinking, “wow, they
don’t know anything that’s going on in the world right now.”275

Representing black protagonists was also a challenge, as such representation has
been historically sparse since early television. Since the decline of black-centered series
in the 1970s; the end of a handful of successful network series in the 1980s to 1990s,

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such as The Cosby Show (CBS, 1984–1992) and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (NBC,
1990–1996); and the closure of the UPN and WB networks in 2006, black writers and
actors were more likely to be featured as supporting staff or characters in multicultural
ensemble casts with white leads.276 Statistics suggested that black-centered series on
network television were not likely to survive more than a season: from Get Christie Love
(ABC, 1974–1975) to a string of series by Frank Reid including Frank’s Place (CBS,
1987–1988), Snoops (1989), and Linc’s (Showtime, 1998–2000), shows centered on
black characters did not have long runs. Although the latter series managed to last for two
seasons, the beginning of premium cable original programming dominance in the late
1990s was not a viable entry point for black showrunners. As Du Brow observed in a
1990 Los Angeles Times article, the lack of black-centered representation on television
was “statistical racism, plain and simple.”277 Furthermore, “if dramas about black
families fail in the ratings, the networks fall back on their dreadful, unspoken belief that
white viewers don’t want to watch a series about black reality.”278 Du Brow notes that
only a handful of black drama series have existed in television history including NBC’s
Tenafly (1973), NBC’s Harris and Company (1979) starring Bernie Casey, CBS’s
Palmerstown, U.S.A. (1980-1981) produced by Norman Lear, James Earl Jones’s Paris
(CBS, 1979), and Brewster’s Place (ABC, 1990) which was cowritten by Maya Angelou
and starred Oprah Winfrey.279
As a 1990 cover story of The Crisis titled “Blacks and the Mass Media” states,
“even though Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby are Hollywood’s biggest money makers in
their respective mediums, they are looked at as exceptions to the rule, and their successes
have not yet led to widespread opening of doors to blacks.”280 In some circumstances,

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exposure to systemic racism in the media industry was considered a benefit. An
affirmative action officer interviewed for the Writers Guild said conversation was a good
entry point.281 Stanley Robertson, the first black movie executive and first black network
executive in Hollywood, said racism and sexism were rampant and that not giving up and
building relationships was essential:
You’ll find racism and sexism anywhere you go. If you’re black, you’ll not be
treating equally in any industry! Not even on college campuses. It’s a racist
society. What you have to do is get a good education and be prepared to work a
long time for the remuneration you deserve.282

This is essentially how Rhimes proceeded with her career.
With her first original series, Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–), Rhimes became the
first black woman showrunner with a hit US prime-time drama. As a “first kind”
showrunner, Rhimes negotiated her goals for creative freedom and representation.283
Along with financial ambitions, she often initially adhered to a neoliberal “pulling-up-
bootstrap” mentality in her career yet acknowledged larger-scale systemic issues for
women working in television.284 Rhimes maintained both business acumen, with
negotiation tactics over content in her series, and a signature writing style and
protagonists. Unlike Berg and English, Rhimes did not focus on a culturally-specific
demographic through a family or workplace. Instead, she cultivated the multicultural
workplace prime-time family, first with white protagonists and later with the first black
female lead, Kerry Washington in Scandal (ABC, 2012–2018).
This chapter focuses on Shonda Rhimes as a showrunner who functioned as a
bureaucratic author working within the confines of network television during the rise of
post-network television. Rhimes employed colorblind casting and multiculturalism to
present a diverse yet apolitical ensemble cast, while easing into political and socially

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subversive content on- and off-screen as she gained more success, from Grey’s Anatomy
to Scandal. The chapter highlights her persona as initially post-feminist and post-race and
emphasizes its move toward pro-feminism and participation in online grassroots social
justice movements through her careful use of Twitter, activism, and personal statements
and profiles. In these ways, Rhimes epitomizes the potential of a clever showrunner in the
digital era.
Rhimes’ career may initially appear ambiguous and ambivalent toward
progressive values; however, she learned to establish herself based on ratings and name
recognition and subtly incorporated elements of inclusivity that would appeal to both a
predominantly white audience and other viewers by adding black, Latinx, Asian-
American, and LGBTQIA+ characters on the margins of her white protagonists. While
the first stage of her career may have been strategic and subdued, it was through this type
of negotiation that she gained access and authority within the restrictions of broadcast
television. The restrictions for Rhimes were particularly strong when considering the
history of black men and women’s limited roles in television, both on- and off-screen.
Thus, Rhimes proves to be a rare case of intersection between identity as a showrunner
and the methods employed to gradually gain freedom through a keen understanding of
the bureaucracy of the television landscapes and the benefits of the participatory culture
of Black Twitter.
This chapter will highlight Shonda Rhimes’ work as a showrunner for the ABC
network from 2005 to 2018 through to her current transition to the streaming platform
Netflix. In the beginning of her career, while running her first ABC series, Grey’s
Anatomy (2005–), Rhimes adhered to post-race, post-feminist rhetoric through her public

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persona and use of techniques such as colorblind casting, a casting practice that does not
specify race or ethnicity when selecting an actor for a role. This partly conveyed a fantasy
based on meritocracy, which subsequently eschewed issues of inequality and cultural
specificity. However, it was an early step for Rhimes’ inclusive representation,
contrasting the standard of white casts. Rhimes was not always vocal about addressing
issues surrounding race and gender, on- or off-screen. In a 2014 interview, she stressed
that she did not want to be defined by these elements:
I find race and gender to be terribly important; they’re terribly important to who I
am [...] But there’s something about the need for everybody else to spend time
talking about it [...] that pisses me off.285

Rhimes also noted that when reviewing a speech that honored her as “the most powerful
black female showrunner in Hollywood,” she removed “black” and “female,” explaining
that a white male showrunner would not be identified by his race or gender.286 These
kinds of identity politics have become a defining component of Rhimes’ public persona:
she demands not to be defined by her race or gender and publicly criticizes prejudices
that reduce her, and others, to these qualifiers. In addition to blind casting, Rhimes’
shows arguably embody progressive liberal politics by often featuring interracial and
same-sex couples without discussion of racial inequalities or prejudice. Critics and
academics have addressed how Rhimes as a public figure and her shows Grey’s and
Scandal only touch lightly on issues of race, with the exception of a few scenes; most
notably, a March 2015 Scandal episode entitled “The Lawn Chair.” As previously
mentioned, in early interviews Rhimes adhered to neoliberal rhetoric.
In an article about colorblind casting in Grey’s, Kristen Warner quoted Rhimes’
self-proclaimed post-feminist, post-race attitude in a 2006 interview:

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I don’t think anybody is colorblind in this world, do you know what I mean? I
think I’m a product of being a post-feminist, post-civil rights baby born in an era
after that happened, where race isn’t the only thing discussed. And I just felt like
there’s something interesting about having a show in which your characters could
just be your characters.287

The initially-proclaimed post-feminist, post-race mentality appears to be a means to
assimilate and adapt to the network landscape. Over time, as she gained more success,
Rhimes’ public views shifted visibly alongside a wider public conversation around race
and gender in America. Her early politics contrasted with her later social media and
public image on Twitter as part of the Black Twitter community to establish self-
promotion and visibility for her series Scandal (2012–2018) and emergence in the social
justice movement without censorship. After establishing Grey’s Anatomy as a critical and
commercial success, Rhimes used her public standing alongside her Grey’s spinoff and
second series, Private Practice (ABC, 2007–2013), to pose challenges to racist and sexist
attitudes in broadcast television. Rhimes’ attitude mirrors that of Berg, curbing her
politics to maintain favor with audiences, sponsors, and networks. Rhimes’ behavior,
seen as “strategic ambiguity” by Ralina L. Joseph, can be linked to a historical trajectory
of black men and black women in particular functioning in US mainstream media
culture.288 Christine Acham addresses this practice of resistance—namely, working on
the fringes of the mainstream—as a tactic historically utilized by black women working
in mainstream network television.289 As both Jones and Acham assert, African
Americans’ use of alternative modes of communication has a complex historical
trajectory.290 Acham chronicles how African-American television performers became
more openly political by the late 1960s and 1970s, and how black women in television
have used other media such as magazines to more directly address social and political

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issues. She highlights how Diahann Caroll of Julia and Esther Rolle of Good Times used
media content to “produce counternarratives to combat the cooptation of the television
shows by a white-controlled industry.”291 These actors acknowledged that they did not
always agree with their representations or the narrative decision-making in the series they
worked on and provided paratexts to alert readers to the issues that mattered to them and
the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. One persistent problem of representation is
addressing racial difference and its complexities, or the choice to normalize non-white
characters to convey a sense of universal characters ultimately adhering to a white
identity. Caroll acknowledged this dilemma by stating that “at the moment, we’re
presenting the white Negro. And he has very little Negro-ness.”292 Decades later, Rhimes
works within the same white-controlled industry where little has changed in terms of
white males being in positions of power. Even so, Rhimes continues to extend her agency
and authorship as a showrunner. Black women showrunners were essentially non-existent
during Caroll’s time and remain rare today.
By 2013, Rhimes was a network showrunner ahead of diversity demands, during a
new era of heightened political and public attention to diversity amid the Black Lives
Matter movement and what Sarah Banet-Weiser called a time of “popular feminism”
commodified by mainstream media.293 Yet Rhimes experienced failures after Grey’s,
with her first series as the anchor, and she also had the freedom to end Scandal by its
seventh season rather than wait for cancelation.294 Inside the Box, a series she created for
ABC in 2010, was not picked up by the network after the pilot premiere.295 Responding
to a fan asking if the network was “crazy or what,” Rhimes tweeted “No hope. We loved
it. ABC is crazy and or what.”296 Off the Map, a Shondaland project executive produced

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by Rhimes, was canceled by ABC after its first season in 2011.297 Subsequently, Rhimes
stated, “Very sad about losing Off the Map. Very excited about new show Scandal. ABC
giveth and ABC taketh away,” expressing her frequent dismay at being at the mercy of
the network and ratings for her series to continue.298 In 2012, she sold the Gilded Lilys
pilot to ABC but it too failed to receive a pick up.299 Even after the success of the
network’s Thursday night Shondaland lineup of Grey’s, Scandal, and How To Get Away
With Murder (HTGAWM), ABC canceled Rhimes’ original series The Catch after its
second season in 2016.300
Rhimes also attempted to assist web series showrunner-star Issa Rae with a pilot
project for ABC in 2013, I Hate L.A. Dudes, which did not go through.301 Unlike Rhimes,
Rae did not feel the need to conform to the network’s expectations:
I was eager to please and that made my voice kind of irrelevant, and the reason
they brought me in the first place was to have something to say. I had to realize I
have a specific point of view, I have a specific story to tell, and I need to tap into
that.302

Eventually, Rae’s series Insecure (2013–) was picked up by HBO. Rae attributes her
inspiration and the success of her initial independently-produced web series The Mis-
Adventures of Awkward Black Girl (YouTube, 2011–2013) to Rhimes’ creation and
connection of Scandal to its fanbase online:
She paved the way for so many of us. Scandal, starring Kerry Washington,
legitimized the online audience and the online voice in a completely different
way. And so, yes, I definitely look to her for inspiration for just starting a
movement.303

After 2013, Rhimes’ approach eventually became part of a broader attempt by
broadcast television (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) to adapt to the post-network era and cable
premium standards. While the Big Four networks struggled to compete with cable and

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then streaming platforms, Rhimes appeared more cognizant and in touch with the
changing television industry. With an ability to mobilize her fanbase on Twitter and
uncensored expression of views, her status as a social justice activist and public persona
heightened.
In 2015, Rhimes and Rae were featured on the cover of Essence magazine’s
“Game Changers” issue along with Debbie Allen, Ava DuVernay, and Brok Akil.304 By
2018, Rae stated that the changes in viewers’ expectations were reflected in on-screen
freedom for black creators like her and “a constant desire to appeal to a broad audience
that I don’t necessarily feel today.”305 Rhimes’ role as a leader in the movement for
diversity is so strong because she has remained at the forefront of these representations,
while series like Black-ish (ABC, 2014–), Jane the Virgin (CW, 2014–), Empire (FOX,
2015–), and Fresh Off The Boat (ABC, 2015–) have ushered in a new era of network
shows that are starting to represent the actual makeup of American families. While
Scandal first appeared to be a pop-culture component of Black Twitter, Rhimes and the
series’ cast and crew strived for more, joining conversations about rather than serving as
a distraction from the realities of social issues. By the time Scandal was released, a wave
of cable dramas based on white, predominantly affluent anti-heroes had gained critical
acclaim following the initial rise of such series in the late 1990s. These series, from The
Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) and The Shield (FX, 2002–2008) to Mad Men (AMC,
2007–2015) and Breaking Bad ( AMC, 2008–2013), were all created by male
showrunners who were considered television auteurs in popular discourse, as evidenced
in Brett Martin’s 2014 book Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution:
From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad.306

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Meanwhile, a surge of anti-heroines also emerged in the television landscape,
characters primarily developed by women showrunners. For example, Jenji Kohan
created Showtime’s Weeds (2005–2012), a show focused on a suburban mother turned
marijuana dealer turned “queen” pin, until the series foreshadowed the legalization of the
drug. Next, Kohan adapted Piper Kerman’s memoir into one of Netflix’s first women-
centered series, Orange is the New Black (2013–2019), featuring an affluent white
protagonist alongside a developing ensemble cast of women of various ethnic, racial,
social, national, sexual, and social identities. While Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang
were early prototypes for Rhimes, Olivia Pope became one of these anti-heroines and a
rare example on network television.
Yet, in 2013, before the shift Rae describes and the resurgence of interest in
diversity in response to cultural critics and social justice activists, and as a seemingly
good business strategy and marketing tool in the industry, Rhimes used colorblind casting
in an attempt to change the tide of these predominantly white, upper-class
representations.307 Rhimes, who came from an affluent Chicago family, sought upward
mobility and ambition as a storyteller for network television. As an outsider since her
formative schooling (she states she was often the only black woman in her classes or
writing rooms), her principal goal as showrunner was for her series to reflect the diversity
of the US and encourage those from marginalized groups to achieve the same success she
had.308 This aspirational goal led to her tendency toward colorblind casting, which is one
of the biggest critiques of her work and its post-racial politics. However, like other black
women personalities before her, she used her power as a mainstream network showrunner

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to speak to grassroots issues and become a dominant figure in a black community who
supported social justice causes.309
As with Berg and English, Rhimes led with the ambition to move beyond being a
staff writer on other series and create her own stories so she could achieve creative (and
financial) authorship and ownership of her work. Her 2015 New York Times best-selling
memoir, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person,
serves as a limited autobiography based on her career and role as a mother. It also
functions as a self-help guide to achieving goals, with book descriptions such as “In Year
of Yes, Shonda Rhimes chronicles the powerful impact saying yes had on every aspect of
her life―and how we can all change our lives with one little word. Yes.”310 Rhimes
chronicles how she achieved her success: growing up as a shy, introverted child prone to
making up stories; pursuing a liberal arts education at the Ivy League Dartmouth College;
negotiating her goals while fighting the confinements of broadcast television; and
ultimately realizing the toll her self-professed workaholic lifestyle took on her personal
life, ability to maintain a healthy weight, and depression.
Biography

Shonda Lynn Rhimes was born in January 1970 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up
in Forrest Park South on the city’s outskirts, an area now known as University Park. Her
mother, Vera, was a university administrator and her father, Ilee, obtained a Master’s in
Business Administration, held several academic postings in the Chicago area, and
became the Chief Information Officer of the University of Southern California (USC) in
2007 until he retired in September 2013.311 Rhimes is the youngest of six children—she
has two older brothers and three older sisters312—and points out that “Hollywood is a

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bizarre place [where it is] easy to lose touch with reality [but her] host of siblings” keeps
her grounded.313 Rhimes describes her childhood as nurturing her desire to tell stories:
When I wanted to play with the cans in the pantry for hours on end, my mother
didn’t tell me to stop messing around with the food and go somewhere else to
play [...] Instead, she declared it a sign of creativity, closed the pantry door and let
me be. You have her to thank for my love of long-form serialized drama.314
Rhimes also describes how the pantry world she created was “serious” on the level of
HBO’s fantasy-adventure Game of Thrones.315 However, she explains that the premium
cable network was not a viewing option during her childhood:
This was not HBO. This was the suburbs in the 1970s. We didn’t need reality TV
because TV was real. Nixon was going down. As Watergate played out on the
tiny black and white set my mother had dragged into the kitchen and balanced on
a chair outside the pantry doors, my three-year-old imagination made a world of
its own.316
The showrunner credits this internal storytelling as the beginning of her drive toward
fiction and her introverted nature. She was so engrossed in her own imagination that she
preferred it to interacting with others: “I felt safer in the pantry. Freer in the pantry. True
when I was three years old. And somehow even more true at forty-three.”317 Rhimes
attended private school at Marion Catholic High School in Chicago Heights.318 She
volunteered as a candy-striper at a local hospital as a teenager, claiming an early interest
in observing the field of medicine.319 Rhimes attended Dartmouth College, an Ivy League
institution, where she majored in English and film studies and directed the Black
Underground Theater Association.320
Upon graduating from Dartmouth, she gained success in advertising and spent her
free time watching television series whose writing she admired (e.g., thirtysomething).
Then, at the age of 22, she decided to study film.321 Several features on Rhimes indicate
she set out to receive her MFA in screenwriting at USC’s film school when she heard it

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was more difficult to be accepted there than Harvard Law School. While at USC, she was
awarded the coveted Gary Rosenberg Writing Fellowship and quickly gained industry
opportunities after graduating in 1995.322
Early Career Interest in Black-Centered Storytelling

Rhimes’ early interest in black-centered storytelling is often overlooked, but it
indicates her negotiation in representation as a bureaucratic author, as can be seen
through her eventual colorblind casting over cultural specificity as a showrunner. It is
also telling that mainstream network television was not in the market for black-centered
series until after the success of Rhimes’ shows. Since Rhimes’ involvement with
Dartmouth’s Black Underground Theater as an undergraduate student, she held a
penchant for black-centered storytelling. While working as a production assistant after
graduate school, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith expressed interest in producing her
film When Willows Touch. Unfortunately, Miramax pulled the funding when the star,
Omar Epps, dropped out of the project.323 Rhimes recalls that, at the time, “apparently
there wasn’t a big market for black films set in the Jim Crow South about a body rotting
in a cornfield.”324 Used to success, Rhimes briefly questioned her career path and
considered medical school before beginning work as a research assistant on the HBO
documentary Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream. She also wrote a romantic comedy script
during this time for a film titled Human Seeking Same, which was purchased by New
Line but never made.325 Soon after, she was asked to write the 1999 Dorothy Dandridge
biopic that earned its star, Halle Berry, a Golden Globe Award. Afterward, Rhimes was
hired to write a script for pop star Britney Spears which became the 2002 movie

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Crossroads. It earned $37 million at the box office, more recognition for Rhimes, and a
house in Beachwood Canyon that she refers to as “the house that Britney bought.”326
Shift in Content and Early Career as Showrunner: Negotiating with Networks and
the Rise of Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2006–2019; Netflix, 2020–)

In 2019, Grey’s Anatomy became the longest-running US medical prime-time
drama.327 Since its premiere in 2006, and as her flagship series with the most popularity
and widest appeal, Rhimes has fused the genre with soap opera love triangles and lies
along with socially-relevant content that is either intrinsic to the protagonists’ identities
or part of the conflict in the series. Another clear intent was foregrounding multifaceted,
complex career women who were straddling professional ambitions and personal
conflicts, both in their love and family lives, as well as their health. Having established
these central tenants by Season 3, Rhimes expanded to include LGBTQIA+ characters
and relevant issues along with other women’s reproductive rights and an array of topics
from a progressive viewpoint across the show’s 15 seasons.
In 2003, Rhimes’ first pilot and proposed television series about a group of young
war correspondents never aired due to the realities of the US invasion of Iraq. Like Berg,
the first series Rhimes created was not an appropriate choice for its time. As she recalls:
It was about a very strong, competitive women who really enjoyed covering war.
And it didn’t get made because we were kind of at war and they felt it was
inappropriate to see people really enjoying covering war when real soldiers were
dying. And I thought to myself, “well, I really enjoyed writing this pilot
experience. I’d love to do it again.”328

Like Berg, Rhimes attempted to defy stereotypical narratives based on race,
ethnicity, and gender. Moreover, Grey’s Anatomy reveals moral ambiguity within
characters and imperfections that do not adhere to a “feminist role model” framework,

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such as the one adopted in Murphy Brown which Amanda Lotz argues produces “narrow
conversations” and “is unequipped to assess the nuances of narrative complexity.”329
Grey’s presents both personal flaws and sociopolitical shortcomings whereas Berg’s
series places Molly Goldberg as the protagonist and role model. As a bureaucratic author
wanting to gain initial entry and eventual success in the industry, Rhimes employed
cultural negotiation by asking what kind of series would interest ABC’s CEO Bob Iger
and discovering he was looking for a medical show. Subsequently, she simply shifted the
type of competitive career for her characters based on the network’s interest (i.e., from
war correspondents to surgeons), which incidentally aligned with her own passion and a
career she briefly considered:
I thought, “well, that’s right up my alley,” because I love watching all those
surgeries on those cable channels, and I think all this stuff is really interesting,
and I had been a candy-striper in high school. And so, I really kind of tried to
apply those kinds of women—the kind of women that I had been really interested
in, women who were really competitive and who loved their jobs more than
anything—to the world of surgery.330

Rhimes’ self-professed workaholic nature mirrors the lives of her protagonists:
highly intelligent, ambitious, and successful career women who struggle to balance their
work and personal lives, particularly in terms of commitments to romance and traditional
concepts of motherhood. Like Rhimes’ own persona, her protagonists embark upon
careers in predominantly white, male-dominated, coveted high-ranking and high-paying
professions. They are imperfect protagonists with moral ambivalence, particularly when
it comes to love and sex, reflecting the influence of HBO’s Sex and the City rather than
earlier career women series that positioned their protagonists as role models.
In 2006, Rhimes publicly identified her outlook as post-race and post-feminist and
focused on narratives around women’s empowerment. However, feminist media studies

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scholars suggest equality is not achieved solely through representation and discourses of
empowerment, and post-feminism focuses on neoliberal individualism whereas social
justice is concerned with groups and communities. Drawing on Rosalind Gil’s definition
of post-feminism as a “sensibility that shapes everything from productions to media
representation to digital media,” Banet-Weiser asserts that this sensibility “authorizes the
individualism of women more than anything else.”331 The post-feminist rhetoric rings
especially true for Rhimes herself, as one of the few female showrunners when Grey’s
premiered, and in the early days of Rhimes’ Twitter persona upon the release of Scandal
in 2012 as a promoter of her work and distinct brand.
Banet-Weiser writes, “post-feminism and interactivity create what I would call a
neoliberal moral framework, where each of us has a duty to cultivate a self-brand.”332
Rhimes adhered to this framework at the start of her career, either by choice or necessity.
Rhimes presented her women characters’ empowerment partly through sexual positivity,
in the vein of Sex and the City. However, Rhimes also wanted to show successful, smart
women characters in the workplace, like the legal dramedy Ally McBeal (FOX, 1997–
2002). Like McBeal, Grey’s rarely showed the misogyny many women face in
competitive fields such as law and medicine. In both shows, the audience meets the
protagonist after she has completed her schooling.
Working within the limitations of the television industry after her commissioned
works gained greater success than those based on her own ideas, Rhimes first needed to
fight the battle over representing women’s agency, sexuality, and professional
determination. She did not yet have the freedom of a premium cable showrunner on HBO
or Showtime, or even a basic cable creator on AMC, where networks allow greater

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liberties regarding content. As Banet-Weiser observes about the post-feminist paradigm
of the late 1990s and early 2000s, “while post-feminism claims to be inclusive, women
and girls of color and the working class are often excluded from the ‘can-do’ category,
racialized and classed identities are always already ‘at risk’ of falling into the ‘can’t do’
category.”333 From the time Grey’s premiered, Rhimes appeared dedicated to making
women, both white and of color, a part of the “can-do” category. Even so, she adhered to
post-feminist individualism with her work on Grey’s by retaining an apolitical mindset.
While Berg transformed the subject of single working women into a traditional
family sitcom, Rhimes changed their working context by situating them in competitive
careers. However, she faced battles from the outset. In the pilot for Grey’s, “A Hard
Day’s Night”, Meredith Grey wakes up for the first day of her surgical residency after a
one-night stand with Derek Sheppard, a stranger she later finds out is her superior at the
hospital. Rhimes had to convince reluctant ABC executives to allow the representation of
her protagonist’s sexual agency. Thus, the episode begins the morning after a one-night
stand that Meredith has no interest in pursuing further, with her telling Derek to leave her
home despite his flirtations. Rhimes’ dramedy genre hybrid employed medical procedural
drama elements of series such as ER and fused them with the influence of Sex and the
City’s women protagonists speaking freely about their sexuality and sex lives, resulting in
a workplace series in which the protagonists focus on their careers above their love lives
and the ruptures between these conflicting goals and desires. Further, Rhimes’
protagonists thrive in their careers, avoid romantic relationships while pursuing their
sexual desires, and eschew marriage and motherhood as goals. Within the scope of

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heteronormative protagonists, Rhimes also includes interracial relationships as well as
gay and lesbian romances.
The pilot episode of Grey’s establishes Rhimes’ women protagonists’ proclivity
toward avoiding initial views of romance beyond sex, and male counterparts who
commonly approach love and marriage first and persist. After briefly re-exchanging first
names, Meredith tells her one-night stand that her home was formerly her mother’s and
she plans to sell it. In this example, she claims, “We don’t have to do the thing, exchange
details, pretend we care.” Yet, Meredith being late for her first day of work initiates the
tension of the protagonist’s penchant for self-sabotage and undeniable chemistry with her
mysterious one-night stand, Derek, who does not want to leave her. Here, conventional
gender roles are reversed: the woman is not needy or insecure after the sexual encounter;
she is the one attempting to leave it as one-time, random, sexual pleasure. Conversely, the
man, who is also her senior, equates their sexual chemistry to romance. The pairing of a
younger woman and older man also reveals a generational divide between sexual
promiscuity and monogamy.
The flirtations between Meredith and Derek, and his persistence in asking her out
on dates, which she dryly refuses—to the point of accusing him of sexual harassment in
Season 1, Episode 2, “The First Cut Is The Deepest”—are all meant to serve as verbal
foreplay. On the other hand, viewers can potentially see this de-emphasis of romance as a
cynical foreshadowing of Rhimes’ views on romantic closure. Certainly, some 13 years
later, Derek’s persistence would be taken more seriously amid #metoo and #timesup, in
which high-powered men in the entertainment industry are being reprimanded for the
imbalance of power when sleeping with an inferior. What distinguishes Meredith and

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Derek’s relationship, even amid the #metoo era, is that they meet before they know their
professional situation and Derek does not perennially sleep with interns. Meredith is the
exception, which means the risks involved indicate true love rather than an abuse of
power. Even when Derek is eventually killed in the series, Rhimes has an ambivalent
perspective on her fans’ desire for the central love story of her series:
The decision to have the character die the way that he did was not a difficult one
in the sense of what were the options? Either Derek was going to walk out on
Meredith and leave her high and dry, and what was that going to mean? That was
going to suggest that the love was not true, the thing we had said for 11 years was
a lie and McDreamy wasn’t McDreamy. For me, that was untenable.334

Later in the first season, when Meredith softens and has fallen in love with Derek,
colleague Miranda Bailey warns them both that Meredith will be resented by her peers
and Derek will be reported if he uses his personal connections for professional favors.
Additionally, Meredith’s peer Cristina Yang embarks on a sexual relationship with
African-American heart surgeon Preston Burke, the first of many of Rhimes’ colorblind
romances to match her colorblind casting. Like Meredith, Cristina is in no rush for
commitment. When Preston asks what their relationship is, she coyly responds with “You
want a definition?” Thus, both Meredith’s and Cristina’s lack of romantic goals
throughout the series serve to defy traditional expectations of women protagonists with
regard to monogamy, marriage, and motherhood.
While Miranda Bailey is often the character critics believe to be Rhimes’
mouthpiece in Grey’s, the ambitious Cristina Yang is more autobiographical:
I gave her my ambivalence about marriage. I gave her my passion for work. I
gave her my love for something greater than romance, something that draws her
focus more than any guy—a creative genius floating forever out of reach that she
will never stop trying to capture. Her true love? Her soulmate? Her MFEO [meant
for each other]? Surgery.335

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Rhimes often stresses that her protagonists’ love for their career and related ambitions
trump romantic notions. She observed that Cristina’s character was a goal to aspire to, as
she represented freedom. Like Rhimes, the fictional character is viewed as ambitious and
cut-throat but is also considered the “First. Only. Different”: a recurring term to identify
those in underrepresented groups who were the first of their ethnic or racial background
to achieve success in their chosen careers.336 By including characters of diverse
socioeconomic and racial backgrounds in Grey’s ensemble cast, implying that anyone can
become a doctor, Rhimes’ casting and characters signify a belief in neoliberal
meritocracy. Contrastingly, audiences saw little of the lives of the show’s senior black
doctors.
Rhimes’ signature mode of authorship is the representation of a diverse cast
through blind casting and multiculturalism. On Grey’s she became known for her use of
multiculturalism with an ethnically diverse cast that was predominantly achieved through
the practice of “blind casting”; that is, not issuing casting calls based on race, a practice
rooted in post-race ideology. Rhimes explains her reasoning for this was inclusiveness:
The goal is that everyone should get to turn on the TV and see someone who
looks like them and loves like them. And, just as important, everyone should turn
on the TV and see someone who doesn’t look like them and love like them.
Because perhaps they will learn from them. Perhaps then they will not isolate
them. Marginalize them. Erase them.337

Within the workplace series, blind casting also suggests meritocracy for the
diverse characters; however, this meritocracy is utopian and apolitical and caused little
controversy or reason to consider the potential for subversion. With Grey’s taking place
primarily in the hospital and without a sense of the characters’ external worlds, we rarely
see the realities of their socioeconomic backgrounds or cultural specificities. Again, this

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is to make them all appear equal as they enter their careers. Kristen Warner has argued
that Rhimes’ use of blind casting as an effort to promote equality and diversity among
television actors led to an erasure of racial complexities, on par with the colorblind
rhetoric of post-race ideology.338 Warner notes that a few years before Grey’s premiere,
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and National
Association for Latino Independent Producers had threatened to boycott US television
networks for their lack of diversity in original programming. Warner argues that with
Grey’s, ABC realized “they could make casts more racially diverse without having to
acknowledge difference.”339 Warner views this mentality as dangerous:
[Rhimes’] investment in normalizing nonracialized characters exemplifies the
liberal individualist discourse of a post-racial America. In this revisionist history,
all the sins of the past are absolved in the heroic efforts of a few dissidents during
the Civil Rights era.340
The success of Grey’s allowed Rhimes the freedom to develop Scandal. Although
the series also held a multicultural ensemble cast, its protagonist was the first black
woman to star in a prime-time drama since Snoops in 1990. Moreover, no previous hour-
long prime-time series with a black woman as its protagonist lasted more than a year,
with Get Christie, Love! running from 1974 to 1975. Scandal premiered seven years into
the success of Grey’s, yet Rhimes’ labor on Twitter reveals how her second original
series did not have a guarantee of longevity if it did not also produce sufficient ratings for
ABC.
Grey’s was a ratings success since it became a mid-season replacement. It stayed
within the top 10 prime-time broadcast dramas for overall Nielsen viewership during its
first five seasons from 2005 to 2008, fluctuating between the second and third spot for
viewers under 50 years old.341 By its sixth year, it reached number one and remained

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there for another two years. It briefly dropped down to second place during the 2012–
2013 season, before returning to the top spot in 2013–2014. Grey’s has remained at
second or third for its timeslot and demographic since then.342 While Rhimes touches on
mass shootings, terrorism, and other topical issues throughout, LGBTQIA+ and women’s
reproductive rights are most commonly at the forefront of the series.
Scandal

Based in Washington DC, the series follows Pope’s job as a “fixer.” While
Rhimes used blind casting in Grey’s and in her later series’ ensemble casts, she stated
explicitly that she wanted Olivia Pope to be black:
Being an African-American woman felt, to me, like there were certain things
about that job that would leave her as being the only black person in the room a
lot of the time, and there were ways in which she would be treated that I felt were
very specific to the black experience. We did an episode where she walks into a
room, and the client immediately assumes that Abby—who is sort of the tall,
white redhead who she works with—is Olivia Pope, simply because she’s the
white woman in the room, versus the black woman in the room. And, you know,
that’s a thing that’s happened to me; and there were things about it that I thought
were very interesting.343
Additionally, Rhimes used her target audience in Grey’s online presence and a
burgeoning subculture of black audiences on Twitter to promote the success of both
series as part of her brand and following. The racially-charged elements of Scandal are
not foregrounded the way gendered elements are in Grey’s. Along with Rhimes’ own
career shift, with two prime-time shows to her name, the series moves toward a bigger
boss protagonist rather than a new resident intern mirroring a burgeoning showrunner’s
first original program. Similarities between Scandal’s protagonist Olivia and Grey’s
Meredith include professional ambition and personal problems in love. Yet, instead of
first seeing Olivia in a “lowly” intern position she is introduced as a high-powered and

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well-established Washington fixer who leads her own crisis management company,
Olivia Pope and Associates (OPA). Her company is run by lawyers (and a former CIA
operative, Huck) but is not a law firm, as they “manage crises and save reputations.”
Scandal is a prime example of autobiographical elements and personal investment
from the showrunner, which is met with a balance between appealing to its black women
viewers and a universal (white, middle-class) network audience. This section will first
detail the generic, narrative, and thematic components of the series as they relate to race,
gender, politics, and media. It then focuses on the black fans of Scandal on Twitter and
their significance in terms of active participation on the social media platform leading to
the series being picked up for more seasons and Rhimes’ own role as a promoter of the
series and its issues.
Just as affairs, medical morals, and lies escalated in Grey’s, murder, lies, political
and media cover-ups, and ambiguous morality heighten with each season of Scandal.
While Grey’s frequently dealt with life or death situations that led to major changes in the
protagonists’ lives, in Scandal situations lead to major life or death cliff-hangers and
changes in US politics. The show’s story format also changed. As critic Mary McNamara
observed, “narratively and philosophically, Scandal is simply insane, and that insanity is
precisely what makes it so tweetable.”344 Rhimes began her proclivity toward outlandish
plot twists in Grey’s. Set in the nation’s capital, Scandal added an element of political
intrigue to Rhimes’ signature mixture of brilliant women with successful careers and
messy personal lives while establishing the series as a thriller/night-time soap opera
hybrid.

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In addition to Rhimes’ own autobiographical inspiration Scandal was loosely
based on the career of Judy Smith, a black woman who worked under the Republican
administration of George H. W. Bush and was instrumental in assisting crisis
management during Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence
Thomas. As Deputy Press Secretary, Smith claimed that the allegations were
“unfounded.”345 Hill became a symbol of sexual harassment victims, or survivors, after
Thomas went on to serve as a Federal Circuit Judge without any repercussions from the
hearing. Hill became a public figure after she came forward during Thomas’ screening
process and left politics to become a law professor.346 Smith remained a political insider,
but an outsider beyond DC, which demonstrates both the clandestine nature of her work
and the increased visibility political and public figures have gained in the digital era.
While first establishing her future career as a political crisis manager working against a
victim of harassment, Smith entered the competitive field of US politics as an outlier who
had to first work within the system to gain independence from it; as with Rhimes in
Hollywood. Following Smith’s work in the White House, she became the CEO of her
own crisis management team; however, the company was not benevolent. Although she
took Monica Lewinsky as a client when Lewinsky became a public pariah due to her
affair with President Bill Clinton, she also worked for morally ambiguous or ethically
corrupt criminals from NFL quarterback Michael Vick, who regained his reputation after
being imprisoned for abusing dogs for fighting and gambling purposes, to British
Petroleum following their industrial devastation to the Gulf of Mexico.347 This makes
Smith an astute political player and businesswoman who entered the private sector, but
her choice of clients appears largely dictated by financial gain. In Scandal, Olivia also

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previously worked for a (fictional) Republican president and went on to form her own
famous crisis management firm.
Rhimes’ creative liberties are rooted in Olivia’s sense of moral righteousness.
This is frequently challenged and questioned throughout Scandal, as her company’s
priority is to protect the client. Like a corporate law firm, they make their primary profits
from wealthy citizens but also take on cases “pro bono” when encountering situations
Olivia believes warrant her assistance. Notably, it is Smith’s professional career, not
personal life, that is adapted in Scandal; that is, the series has Olivia involved in an affair
with the Republican president she formerly worked for, which was not the case for Smith.
Smith’s own apolitical nature and neoliberal drive to succeed in Washington reflect
Olivia’s, Rhimes’, and black women’s potential challenges in conservative, white-driven,
professional environments.
Scandal: “Olivia Pope is as amazing as they say. And I’m not a baby lawyer. I’m a
gladiator in a suit.”

The new setting in Scandal was much less utopian than Grey’s, although
presenting Olivia as flawed in her personal life and excellent in her professional
endeavors balanced the soap-like drama and the simultaneously cautionary and
aspirational aspects of Rhimes’ leading characters. Besides Olivia, the OPA cast of
characters was blind cast and is racially and ethnically diverse, with a black woman
protagonist as the boss (Olivia), black OPA associate Harrison (Columbus Short), and a
Latinx operative (Huck, played by Guillermo Diaz), while the remainder are
predominantly white. After working all night for a new client, Quinn asks Harrison if her
new coworkers or boss have personal lives, to which he responds they do not because
they are “gladiators in suits.” The next morning, Olivia is called into a meeting with the

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White House Chief of Staff, Cyrus (Jeff Perry), on behalf of the (Republican) President
Fitzgerald Grant III (Fitz, played by Tony Goldwyn) to “shut down” a political aide who
accused him of an affair. She asks if this is true, referencing Bill Clinton’s and John
Edwards’ past affairs. Cyrus reassures her that it is not in his nature and that she knows
him. Perry, who previously played Meredith’s father in Grey’s, is the first of several
actors to reappear in Rhimes’ other series.348
As the series progresses, the romantic love between Olivia and Fitz is tarnished.
Eli Pope (Joe Morton) tells his daughter that she was foolish to believe she and the
president could be together and the scrutiny of being his mistress would ruin her
professional and personal lives. He then reiterates a saying he taught her in one of the few
racially-charged moments in the series: “You have to be twice as good as them to get half
of what they have.” Previously, during a fight between Olivia and Fitz, she likens their
affair to Thomas Jefferson and his former slave Sally Hemming; it is only briefly
mentioned in a moment of fury when Fitz claims Olivia “belongs” to him. Infuriatingly,
he tells Olivia to “aim higher” toward Chief of Staff or Secretary of State, calling her
attempt to become First Lady “mediocre.”
Scandal’s last seasons mirrored the soap-like nature of Grey’s while its first
seasons combined elements of prime-time soap, such as Rhimes’ signature love triangle,
with the political thriller episodic elements of “fixing” a political scandal. Consequently,
Scandal had fans asking “Who is sleeping with who?” as they had while watching Grey’s
in addition to asking “Who is trying to kill who for sleeping with who?”, reflecting the
show’s high stakes twists. The story was neither specific to a black experience nor a

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black woman experience and there was little discourse surrounding these topics at the
start of the show’s success.
Nielsen and ABC’s Failed Sync App: Before Rhimes Conquered Twitter

When Grey’s first premiered, digital engagement and social media were relatively
new. After gaining success in its first few years, Rhimes came out in support of the 2007–
2008 writer’s strike which was heavily focused on unpaid additional labor for network-
commissioned online content.349 Rhimes’ choice to use Twitter as a form of unpaid labor
to promote her series did not extend to staff writers; however, online self-promotion
across social media platforms soon became the norm for many stars and some
showrunners, or their social media and publicity teams. Rhimes became a first adopter in
this regard, realizing the potential of Twitter to support viewers watching her series as
they aired in real-time and thus satisfying the ratings requirements of ABC. Twitter,
which launched in 2005, became a powerful tool for television audiences, especially
when watching a first-run episode filled with answers to cliff-hangers and spoilers.
Rhimes simultaneously cultivated a larger and stronger fanbase through this method of
direct contact, which was quickly emulated and co-opted by other individuals, networks,
and companies.
Few television networks initially realized Twitter’s potential for marketing and
engagement with audiences and when Nielsen and ABC attempted to create a second-
screen engagement platform, it failed. In contrast, the initial and continuing success of
Rhimes’ Scandal is likely to be linked forever to the social media outlet and second-
screen engagement. Social media was used widely before the rise of second-screen

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engagement, but social media use grew considerably following the ascendance of mobile
application technologies (apps).
In October 2011, Nielsen issued a report claiming that “40% of tablet and
smartphone owners use them while watching television.”350 Nielsen and ABC released
the Grey’s Anatomy Sync iPad app four months later in February 2011.351 This was one
of the media industry’s first attempts to take control of the second screen through
interactive fan exchanges to promote first-run viewings and boost ratings. However, what
Nielsen and ABC did not realize was that social media was not necessarily a complete
disruption or distraction from watching a series.
The 2011 Grey’s Anatomy Sync app promoted a forced, fabricated, and isolated
fandom through second-screen engagement that contrasted with the subsequent
development of Twitter fan social interactions with Rhimes and the stars of her next ABC
series, Scandal. Certainly, ABC and Nielsen were wise in attempting to tap into Grey’s
fans, given the high number of users interacting with second screens. However, the first
time they initiated the iPad Sync app technology in 2010, the same year the iPad was
released, was with My Generation, a new series that was canceled after two episodes.352
Contrastingly, Grey’s already had a built-in fanbase. The commercial that introduces the
Grey’s iPad app asks if viewers are “ready to change the way to watch television.” It
features a 20-something white woman (arguably the series’ key demographic) alone on
her couch with her second-screen tablet synced as she watches a new episode on her first
screen. The commercial highlights features such as trivia questions, checking-in
verifications for the fairly unsuccessful GetGlue, behind-the-scenes footage, photos and
tidbits, and connectivity with other fans via social media. Because of the live-ness and

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audio-recognition, the app supposedly only worked when watching a first-run episode.
External fan sites remarked that it also worked when watching a DVR-recorded episode,
although perhaps with fewer features, which further promoted first-run viewings.353
Despite changing methods of watching television, networks such as ABC still measure
their success primarily on ratings based on first-run statistics, thus explaining the strong
push to watch on premiere night. As Karen Buzzard writes, Nielsen’s “parent companies
had attempted a single-source ratings initiative, tying TV viewing to product purchasing,
the Mecca of many advertisers and marketers, but both ventures failed.”354
Further commenting on the app, Sarah Atkinson states that “[t]he commercial
imperative of the use of the second screen in this particular context manifests through the
Lexus advertisements which intercut the show and are rendered inactive by the app.”355
This mirrors the typical traditional television watching experience, in addition to the
series’ mirrored content. Ultimately, as Hye Jin Lee and Mark Andrejevic assert, “ABC’s
experiment with Nielsen’s media synch app turned out to be a failure because many
viewers complained that the continuous flood of information from the app was distracting
them from watching the show.”356 They state that the ABC Oscars Backstage Pass
second-screen app was a success, concluding that “what the industry learned from ABC’s
second-screen app experiments is that these apps do work but that their features need to
vary depending on ‘the show’s tone, pace and style.’”357 Further, despite some
connections to social media interaction, the Grey’s app was essentially isolated, as shown
in the commercial—a woman alone in her living room engaging, with little passion, on
both screens. The significance of Rhimes’ use of Twitter was the engagement with an
online community.

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Understanding the relationship between 21st-century television practices and
Twitter beyond an industry view is also useful when considering theories around
showrunners’ involvement in the convergence era. The mainstream accessibility of
Twitter has opened understandings around fandom as a practice that is no longer
affiliated with more obscure message board fandom, but is something for everyone who
uses the social media platform. As Henry Jenkins writes:
The age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic
modes of reception. Not every consumer interacts within a virtual community yet;
some simply discuss what they see with their friends, family members and
workmates. But few watch television in total silence and isolation. For most of us,
television provides fodder for so-called water cooler conversations. And, for a
growing number of people, the fodder has gone digital. 358

Rhimes’ executive producer and frequent co-executive collaborator Betsy Beers
(who takes on the business aspects of Rhimes’ series) also likens Twitter to a water
cooler for series’ creators, stating “Now everybody’s watching shows in a different span
and rate. The great thing about Twitter is that you can always find a community.”359 The
failure of the Grey’s Anatomy Sync and similar apps demonstrates that the industry
cannot always control how fans interact with the complementary content presented.
Further, the isolated nature of the app interaction in contrast to the social nature of
Twitter proves theories around convergence, fandom, and participatory culture as vital to
understanding media consumers in the digital era. As Jenkins observes, “for years, fan
groups seeking to rally support for endangered series have argued that networks should
be focused more on the quality of audience engagement with the series and less on the
quantity of viewers.”360 If Twitter’s potential was not highlighted and quantified through
Scandal’s fans, the series could have been canceled.

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The Power of Twitter: From Self-Promotion to Social Justice

Scandal did not initially tackle race issues or truly address Olivia’s race.
Nonetheless, with a more visible fanbase, Washington and Rhimes’ partnership as star
and showrunner—in contrast to showrunner-star hybrid personas—tapped into both black
woman television audiences and Twitter users. Rhimes realized that black audiences on
social media were responding positively to Olivia, so she took to Twitter to encourage
established fans of Grey’s and other prospective viewers to watch Scandal. At the time of
the series’ inception, Black Twitter was mostly a virtual community focused on pop
culture. A 2009 study from the Pew Research Center indicated that African-American
women were the demographic most likely to use Twitter.361 Scandal also appears to be a
personal and professional allegory for Rhimes, as she is a black woman operating within
a white, male-dominated profession that cares little about changes in the field. While
Twitter is one of the largest tech platforms, Black Twitter functions as a grassroots media
subculture of its own. As Therese Tierney states:

Social media provides opportunities for marginalized groups to create tactical
communities, finding modes of survival by using and subverting the media
infrastructure of the dominant culture. Within the context of activism,
marginalized groups leverage social media to create a space of discourse for
planning and organizational efforts.362

Popular online critic and persona Feminista Jones has defined Black Twitter as:

[A] collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have
created a virtual community that participates in continuous real-time
conversations. When they work together, this collective is proving adept at
bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes.363

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Journalist Brittany Julious described the interlinked, two-fold pleasure of
watching Scandal for Black Twitter users:
There is nothing greater in television watching right now than live tweeting with
other Scandal fans. Last night I joked that the return of Scandal was a return to
the “Black Girl Twitter” community I loved so deeply. Without provocation, we
all began watching and talking about the show as it aired. My timeline explodes
with chatter about the show, its characters, the clothing, and the music as it airs.364

The Scandal content shared with fans on Twitter was not entirely unlike that of
the Grey’s Anatomy Sync app; however, the presentation as a form of social media
interaction and sense of community between fans and stars is what drives the success of
Twitter and the show. The information comes directly from Rhimes’ cast and crew—a
behind the scenes selfie tweeted by Washington is much more appealing to fans than a
staged promo photo. Also, Twitter can be accessed at any time, unlike the app, and
Rhimes and her team consistently engage with fans throughout the week leading up to the
premiere of a new episode.
As a paratext, Twitter has allowed Rhimes to express her views on race, gender,
and other social issues more freely than through her network television shows. While she
initially used Twitter as a promotional self-branding tool for Scandal, she later utilized
the platform and other paratexts to convey her resistance politics on issues surrounding
race and gender. In the process, Rhimes contributed to a newfound demand for social
justice. My reference to paratexts draws on Jonathan Gray’s media-specific definition,
which is adapted from Gerard Genette’s literary origins. Here, “paratexts” refers to all of
Rhimes’ additional, accompanying texts outside her primary body of work; that is,
outside her television series.365 In this section, I will outline Rhimes’ unprecedented use
of Twitter as a promotional tool and how she became part of the Black Twitter

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community by supporting the ethos behind the Black Lives Matter movement and
attempting to give marginalized groups a greater voice. Reflecting her own political
position, Rhimes has used the platform to elevate the views of marginalized groups.
Before Twitter, media producers had less direct contact with audiences, particularly in the
form of real-time conversations. Social media has provided an immediacy to these
interactions, facilitating dialogue between content creators and fans. When discussing
interactions between producers and loyal viewers, Gray nearly predicted the exchanges
that Twitter would eventually foster between producers and audiences:
Writers rarely prove wholly responsive to their fans, in part due to issues of
chronology (once the fans are watching any given episode, numerous subsequent
episodes have already been filmed), in part due to conflicting fan desires, and in
part due to personal creative intuition and impulses, but many nevertheless realize
the importance and interaction of dialogue.366
Certainly, this interaction on Twitter is unprecedented. Despite a lackluster
reception and poor ratings in its first season, Scandal went on to dominate Twitter in a
novel way. While Berg had access to subcultural outlets for viewers, the opening of the
digital sphere allowed Rhimes direct access to her fanbase while retaining the power of
her own views, which on Twitter are not siphoned through interviews or other secondary
sources. Jenkins has described two types of media power: the first is “media
concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network
television” and the second “comes through collective intelligence, where a message gains
visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics.”367 Jenkins
elaborates:
Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values.
Grassroots media will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that
everyone has a chance to be heard. Innovation will occur on the fringes;
consolidation in the mainstream.368

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He qualifies these remarks by saying this explanation may be too orderly. I use Jenkins’
argument here to establish the different voices Rhimes uses on Twitter (with the
platform’s links to grassroots movements such as Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter)
compared to network television.
At the outset of Scandal and Twitter’s fusion in 2012, Rhimes primarily used the
social media platform as a promotional tool to create popular momentum around the
series. Rhimes achieved this momentum through her branding technique of directly
connecting with fans. Examining second-screen engagement from Grey’s to Scandal
uncovers the changes a showrunner familiar with social media can enact, considering the
success Rhimes’ series gained by addressing what her fans crave. Social media and fan
engagement were not a priority for Grey’s, a series that premiered the same year Twitter
was established and Facebook was still limited to college students, but it was an absolute
priority for Scandal. Fans tweeted about Scandal with such passion and attention to detail
that television critic Willa Paskin was able to recount an entire episode’s narrative solely
from reading live tweets.369 Scholars have previously discussed the disruptive nature of
episodic network era television, the serial quality of post-network shows on cable, and
the binge-watching habits Netflix and Amazon promote by streaming series. Similarly,
we should interrogate how showrunners and networks consider their projects alongside
social media in this digital post-network era by asking: Are narratives being driven by
Twitter? Can a thriving social media presence help boost other television series’ ratings?
What does this direct interaction between media creators and consumers mean for the
future of television content? This chapter only begins to draw on how the transition from
a series like Grey’s to Scandal demonstrates the changing practices of television

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watching in the past, present, and future. By 2014, Nielsen reported that 84% of
smartphone and tablet owners used their second screen while watching television on their
first screen (up from 40% in 2011, as previously cited).370 Soon, Nielsen and other
industry analysts could not ignore the strong correlation between television viewership
and Twitter engagement.
Scandal and Twitter
In October 2013, Nielsen began documenting television Twitter ratings (i.e., the
number of interactions about a show between social Twitter users) and Scandal debuted
at number one on the list.371 This leads to the question if Grey’s, among other non-
Rhimes’ shows, was already a hit for eight years before, why did Scandal top the Nielsen
Twitter chart? Scandal and Twitter are so intertwined that many have argued the social
media platform saved the series from cancelation. In 2013, television critic Mary
McNamara called the series “the show that Twitter built.”372 Initially, Scandal’s
popularity appeared cult-like, but grassroots online fandom soon became more
widespread. While consumer shifts from TiVo/DVR to online streaming platforms have
caused a decline in traditional appointment television, networks are yet to move beyond
their focus on viewer numbers. Still, Rhimes utilized the quality of Twitter engagement
with Scandal fans to ignite a popularity that led to traditional appointment watching and
higher ratings for Scandal. A surge in the show’s popularity, visible in a rise in Twitter
and standard ratings, is mostly credited to Rhimes’ clever understanding of social media
and her audience. Rhimes recognized that her steady pre-existing Grey’s fanbase would
stay on for Scandal if it meant engaging with her and her cast, while also providing
catchy, tweetable moments and quotes for followers turning on their first and second

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screens in real-time. Prime-time “must-see” television was redefined with social media
through Rhimes’ branding, which was not yet officially affiliated with ABC. Thus, the
show’s shock factor and life or death cliff-hangers were perfect for Twitter interactions.
Just as Nielsen began to accumulate Twitter ratings and recognize the correlation
between television viewing and Twitter engagement, networks began incorporating social
media into their marketing tactics. Appropriation of successful grassroots or independent
methods, such as Rhimes’ Twitter involvement, was co-opted by ABC to emphasize and
expand the momentum of the elusive social media platform on which they had previously
failed to engage with fans. Many network shows now include a hashtag on the bottom
right side of their first screen (such as Scandal’s #WhoShotFitz and HTGAWM’s
#WhoKilledSam), encouraging audiences to tweet along. In fall 2014, this was most
evident in ABC’s #TGIT (Thank God It’s Thursday) promotion, which centered on
Shondaland’s three-show lineup. In a September 2014 Variety interview Twitter’s head
of global media and agency research, Anjali Midha, stated that Rhimes and her series’
cast and crew members have their Twitter integration “down to a science to a certain
extent.”373 Notably, the celebrity factor was crucial in this equation. Midha showed that a
tweet from the official Scandal account could create a 7% increase in Twitter discussions
about the series, while a tweet from a star like Washington bolstered that figure to
64%.374 Like Rhimes, Washington soon began to discuss issues surrounding race, class,
and privilege in America in her more in-depth interviews. Unlike the black stars of 1970s
prime-time shows like Caroll and Rolle, Washington was working in unison with the
message proposed by her primary content creator, Rhimes.

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Initially, ABC and Nielsen seemed unaware of the potential of Twitter and second
screens to facilitate viewer engagement or, as already noted, failed to grasp how to reach
audiences. For this reason, when Rhimes and her cast and crew first began encouraging
fans to tweet along with them during Scandal and Grey’s, the interaction appeared
genuine. This perception can be understood in relation to Banet-Weiser’s theory of how
brand cultures are “increasingly formed around discourses and practices traditionally seen
outside the market, in authentic spaces” and “self-branding is seen not as an imposition
of a concept or product by corporate culture but rather as the individual taking on the
project herself as a way to access her true self.375
Speaking Up Off-Screen

In a September 2014 New York Times review of ABC series HTGAWM,
Alessandra Stanley opens with the statement: “When Shonda Rhimes writes her
autobiography, it should be called ‘How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black
Woman.’” The article goes on to praise the creator, head writer, and showrunner of
ABC’s series Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, and Scandal for her stereotype-defying
black woman characters, from Grey’s Miranda Bailey to Scandal’s Olivia Pope and
HTGAWM’s Analise Keating. Stanley’s piece, and most notably its lead, caused a media
backlash and raised questions about her journalistic integrity. Critics argued that while
claiming to focus on Rhimes’ nuanced representations of black women, Stanley had
reduced Rhimes to a racialized, gendered stereotype while eschewing fact-checking and
writing a review of a television series Rhimes did not even author. Many of Rhimes’
friends, fans, and colleagues, as well as journalists, rushed to her defense on social media
and in numerous think pieces, calling Stanley’s piece unequivocally racist.376

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For one of the first times in her career Rhimes commented on her own identity,
displaying an unprecedented but merited indignation. Rhimes initially used Twitter to
express her reaction publicly.377 Then, in a Hollywood Reporter cover story a month after
Stanley’s piece, Rhimes said:
In this world in which we all feel we’re so full of gender equality and we’re a
post-racial [society] and Obama is president, it’s a very good reminder to see the
casual racial bias and odd misogyny from a woman written in a paper that we all
think of as being so liberal.378

From Blind Casting to Cultural Specificity: Scandal, “The Lawn Chair,” and Black
Lives Matter On-Screen

The March 2015 Scandal episode “The Lawn Chair” provided closure to
surrounding justice and violence. The episode refers directly to the recent killing of
unarmed black boys and men by police officers, such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner,
and Tamir Rice.379 In the storyline, a white male police officer is eventually arrested and
tried after Olivia reveals that the officer unlawfully killed a black teenager. Not unlike
Grey’s function as a feminist fantasy, the episode achieved what America’s criminal
justice system had yet to do: charge a police officer for wrongfully killing an unarmed
black youth.380 In the episode, Olivia is hired by state police to appease demonstrators
who are protesting the young man’s killing, but she comes to sympathize them and
eventually uncovers the truth about the young man’s death. The episode arguably reflects
Rhimes’ desire to take a stand on a pressing social and political issue in the killing of
unarmed black men by law enforcement officers. The episode showcases Olivia’s power
to effect meaningful change for the dead victim, his father, and the impoverished black
community. The activism Rhimes has expressed on social media and beyond shows how
her views and influence can contribute to effecting change for the less privileged.

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“The Lawn Chair” also became known as the #BlackLivesMatter episode in
reviews that followed. This was not due to the episode’s content but because Rhimes’ and
Scandal cast and crew members themselves used the hashtag on Twitter. This
underscores the importance of paratexts in understanding media texts and their authors’
intent. On their official website, Black Lives Matter is described as “a movement, not a
moment,” alluding to the ephemeral nature of social media. The movement’s co-founder,
Alicia Garza, writes:
I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my
sisters, as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was
post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George
Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed. It was a
response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also,
unfortunately, our movements.
Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where
Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an
affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our
resilience in the face of deadly oppression.381
Rhimes has expressed her interest in discourses surrounding equality and representations
in television. After the publication of Nellie Andreeva’s 2015 Deadline article, which
posed the question of a limit on television series focused on ethnically diverse
Americans, Rhimes was at the forefront of the outraged public response. Soon after, a
Huffington Post headline—“Shonda Rhimes (And Everyone Else) Slams Deadline Piece
On TV Diversity”—further identified the showrunner as a key player in standing up
against racism in the industry and defending the need for diversity.
Today, mainstream media sources write articles based on celebrities’ Twitter
responses to a topical or monumental news story or event. When a celebrity like Rhimes
links to and cites the ethos of grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter, the
potential to infiltrate the mainstream and initiate sociopolitical change is exponentially

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ignited. As noted in Stanley’s New York Times piece, Rhimes is an active participant who
interacts with journalists, fans, and peers to hash out social and political issues.
While Rhimes uses Twitter to convey her views, she is quick to assert that
activism must extend beyond social media. In a 2014 speech for her undergraduate alma
mater, Dartmouth College, Rhimes encouraged Dartmouth graduates to be more involved
in their communities: to volunteer, to participate, and ultimately to be active rather than
passive members of society.382 Rhimes initially sought to affirm female empowerment on
an individual basis, depicting strong friendships like Meredith and Cristina’s bond on
Grey’s. The two characters shared an understanding of rugged female individualism and
determinism, unlike the post-feminist, feminized practices of Sex and the City’s main
characters. Since Grey’s, Rhimes’ public ethos on gender and racial inequality has
become more politicized and wider in scope in mainstream media. On Twitter, Rhimes
maintains a balance of lighthearted popular feminist posts and politically provocative
content. As more women showrunners gain their own series, profiles on Rhimes no
longer position her as one of the only women, or only black women, spearheading her
own shows. Instead, Rhimes is now praised as a trailblazer and powerhouse leader among
women showrunners or showrunners as a whole. Even so, the sense of community
remains among the still relatively few, yet powerful, women showrunners. A Ms.
Magazine 2015 cover was titled “Women Who Run the Show” but featured only Rhimes
on the cover. Her piece read, “Shonda Rhimes: Making TV Look Like the Rest of the
World.”383
Over time, with its potential as a grassroots platform to increase awareness for
social justice, Twitter has proven itself a viable tool for social and political change.

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Highly aware of the significance of her fanbase, Rhimes took to Twitter to utilize her
brand and encourage viewers to engage with her and her cast and crew. Rhimes not only
adapted to the social justice element of the social media platform but allowed the voices
of her fans and others on Twitter to shape how she wrote about and discussed issues
surrounding race, gender, privilege, and sexuality. Rhimes transformed her public
persona from a post-feminist neoliberal individual into a member who embraces, and
becomes part of, a prominent social justice movement initiated online. She always held
progressive liberal views, serving as a committee member for Planned Parenthood and,
like Berg, staying involved in organizations and causes she felt a personal allegiance with
to support and foreground them with her star power.
However, these views became formed fully through America’s shift from post-
feminism to popular feminism, from pervasive post-race attitudes to a new era of social
justice and renewed calls for civil rights. Rhimes now carries the torch as one of the few
women with a mainstream network television audience who is trying to bring all these
issues together. Given her unprecedented success throughout her 10-year career as a
showrunner, her legacy will match that of Norman Lear, Barbara Corday, and Barbara
Avedon in using television and social media as platforms to reflect larger political and
social issues and effect change. Despite the investment viewers and fans have in her
protagonists’ love lives, Rhimes is not interested in happy endings and romantic closure.
Meredith Grey and Derek Sheppard were the first, and perhaps last, of her characters to
represent “true love,” as Derek’s death was the only way the showrunner could maintain
this arc.384 As previously stated, her battle in Grey’s was to reveal the open sexual lives,

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professional ambitions, and lack of desire to become a wife and mother, mirroring her
own views and influence from cable programming such as Sex and the City.
Conclusion: Looking Toward Netflix’s Potential

Rhimes’ Netflix deal includes Grey’s shift from ABC to the streaming platform,
as well as new original content over which she has more creative freedom. On a larger
scale Netflix has attempted to monopolize, or at the very least become the top player in,
the streaming wars with Hulu, Amazon, and 2019 additions Apple TV+ and Disney+.
This competition more closely mirrors the domination of broadcast networks than the
niche-casting of premium cable channels and acquiring top franchise showrunners such
as Rhimes illustrates how the branding of showrunners functions as a crucial signifier
amid recognition and followings in the contemporary television industry.
In 2018, Rhimes did not renew her contract with ABC. Instead, she signed a
multi-million dollar deal with Netflix and achieved the two-fold goal that showrunners
have always strived for: greater financial and creative freedom.385 After the deal was
announced, Rhimes stated she was the “highest paid showrunner in television.”386 Initial
reports of the partnership estimated the deal to be worth $100 million, although she
denied this figure.387 Under her eponymous production company that instilled her status
as a franchise showrunner, Shondaland, Rhimes’ first original Netflix series, Bridgerton,
will premiere in 2020.388 Rhimes will also transition Grey’s to Netflix. Fourteen years
after the premiere of Grey’s and seven years since Scandal’s debut, she has asserted how
on-screen and off-screen inclusivity is not just benevolent or socially right, it is also
profitable. From describing her first interaction with ABC executives in 2005 to her 2019
statements, Rhimes has progressed from a quiet to vocal proponent of this form of off-

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screen accountability for on-screen production. When showrunner Lena Dunham was
criticized for her representation of whiteness and affluence in her HBO series Girls
(2012–2017), Rhimes suggested it was the network that should be scrutinized:
I don’t know if there is a responsibility on the part of the creator, I mean there is a
responsibility on the part of the network. It’s very interesting to me that HBO
didn’t say: why isn’t the show more diverse? We believe in diversity, so why
don’t we make this show be more diverse? I think that’s where I lay the fault.389

In 2019, she stated that on-screen diversity was a “simple matter of economics” as
television programs that are “more diverse and have more inclusive casts are getting
higher ratings than shows that don’t […] it just makes more money. So it’s a very simple
way of having it accepted very easily.”390 Rhimes argued that systemic change within the
television industry must be practiced by challenging its innate sexist and racist prejudice,
not just within conversations of on-screen representations. This simple visibility, which
was first asserted through blind casting, is not empowerment and did not inherently signal
a shift in industrial television practices. Rhimes’ further elaboration demonstrates her
embodiment of both the bureaucratic and socially-conscious showrunner:
If the work that you're putting out there has been put out there by a bunch of
people who look like you, and you haven't run it through a filter of who is
missing, who haven’t we spoken to, who is not sitting at our table, there's a
problem. Get comfortable with the idea that maybe you're going to be
uncomfortable and have to add people to the table, bring people in, creatively
speak to other people and bring in different voices. That's the best way to make a
change.391

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Conclusion
This project was not initially a historical one.
In fact, when I first proposed it in 2013, it was meant to capture a specific
moment in time for women showrunners, personal politics, and self-identity, along with
diversity and inclusion in the early 2000s. Only a handful of women showrunners had
reached public persona status at that point; Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Mara Brok Akil,
Shonda Rhimes, and Lena Dunham were household names and, later, a new generation of
showrunners emerged including Issa Rae, Abbi Jacobson, and Ilana Glazer. At its core,
the project was meant to defy the critical and academic emphasis on men showrunners as
auteurs and their anti-hero series as superior to the vast majority of television due to their
elusive “cinematic” quality. This signifier of quality is still not definable in a tangible
way beyond production values and gendered, class-based hierarchical taste values.
Further, the praise of serialized narrative complexity was a primary component of
television since its radio beginnings, but this historical element has been erased from
discourse due to its roots in the soap opera genre. For me, women’s genres, stardom,
representation, and reception practices were already established in the field of television
and feminist media studies while women’s authorship, particularly as showrunners, was
largely overlooked or underexplored.
Along with the erasure of soap opera’s serialized nature from television history in
popular press and academics delving into TV without a foundation in television studies, I
noticed that women’s work and labor was also eschewed for histories of male writer-
producers. My dissertation on contemporary women showrunners had already been
drafted during work on my various courses, conference materials, and publications, but

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witnessing non-television scholars, students, and audiences captivated by the discourse
around the golden age and the general lack of awareness of television before the late
1990s and early 2000s caused a shift in my research and future writing. As I entered my
PhD after a BA in Art History and Journalism and a rigorous Film Studies MA, my
project shifted into a concept that would not only explain one particular moment in time;
this occurred thanks to my experiences learning from a variety of television historians
and scholars with roots in cultural studies, feminism, and critical race theories. The
abundance of popular press articles praising visibility and representation did not match
the systemic change within the industry that women showrunners aimed toward. My new
goal for the dissertation would thus be to explore how history repeats itself within
practices of inclusion and exclusion of women in the television industry, discourses of
precarious diversity, and the type of messages showrunners wanted to, and could, convey
during specific moments in US cultural history. A full-length cultural history of the
showrunner was too wide in scope, thus I developed an approach that could connect the
threads of opportunities, innovation, successes, backlashes, and failures in my individual
case studies as reflective of the industry’s capricious nature toward women showrunners.
The politics of representation had yet to be viewed through the lens of
showrunners. I became interested in women showrunners in history who had visible,
documented frictions with the industry and national attitudes. Through archival, textual,
and discursive analysis, I investigated how they curbed their behavior and often used
more subtle ways of subverting the status quo both in their work and with their public
personas. The nature of women showrunners as creators who had to balance their social
and political content with the status quo made them particularly rich case studies for my

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argument of showrunners as bureaucratic authors. Interviews, trade press articles, and
biographies of men in the industry were largely consistent unless they were part of a
marginalized group. My research also uncovered how rare non-white male showrunners
were in TV history and that they continue to be rarer than women showrunners.
However, women showrunners, like actors and stars, had to carefully manage their image
based on various audience and industrial expectations including those of a wide variety of
mass audiences and fans, advertisers, studio and network executives, and an entire cast
and crew.
Looking back at the initial dissertation proposal, I suggested investigating the
“emerging” streaming platforms of Netflix and Amazon when they pushed their original
content and every network, cable channel, or streaming platform was vying for a flagship,
or token, woman showrunner. What would occur was a domino effect of woman
showrunner-led series across broadcast, cable and streaming. Screenwriter Elizabeth
Merriweather was showrunner of the Zooey Deschanel-led ensemble comedy New Girl
from 2011 to 2018. Mindy Kaling helmed The Mindy Project on Fox from 2012 to 2015,
and it was later canceled before being picked up by Hulu from 2015 to 2017. Following
Showtime’s Weeds (2005-2012), Kohan was commissioned to embark on the new Netflix
platform and explore new ground in women’s representation with Orange is the New
Black, premiering in 2013 and ending its seventh season in 2019. Jill Soloway’s
Transparent premiered soon after on Amazon in 2014, concluding in 2019 with a feature-
length finale in lieu of a fifth season. After being Gilmore Girls’ showrunner from 2000
to 2006 on the WB, Amy Sherman Palladino briefly worked on the first season of
Bunheads (2011-2013) on ABC Family (now Freeform) until its cancelation after Season

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1. She went on to a revival with Amazon’s Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon, 2017),
which garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards. Programs that began as
independent web series self-distributed on Youtube, like Abbi Jacobson and Ilana
Glazer’s Broad City (Comedy Central, 2014-2019) and Issa Rae’s Insecure (HBO, 2016-
), seemed to challenge the critiques of Dunham’s monolithic Girls as representational of
millennial women’s identities.

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Mara Brok Akil’s Girlfriends (UPN, 2000-2008) and Being Mary Jane (BET, 2013-2019) were
also recognized once she signed an overall deal with Warner Brothers in 2017. While Glazer,
Jacobson, and Rae’s success do shed light on opportunities in the digital era, competition
continues to increase due to content saturation, the structures of the streaming platforms
mirroring big businesses in film and TV, increased conglomeration and monopolization, and the
challenges surrounding gaining a show.
In 2019, streaming platforms like Netflix that originally appeared to cater toward niche
casting, especially in their original revival of beloved cult series, looked strikingly different.
Since Netflix’s explosion of new material and cancelations of series with smaller viewing
numbers alongside strides in representation and visibility, the platform is starting to mirror the
industrial decision-making of the Big Three. Netflix’s goal was to become the new TV, which
indicated that inclusivity would be overlooked in favor of maximum profits. In the ecosystem of
media industries where fan reactions are vital, new voices must be supported to foster future
waves and generations of independent women producers along with other under-represented
groups. The intent of independently funded media, from the examples of Abbi Jacobson and
Ilana Glazer and Issa Rae, functions as a trajectory toward on- and off-screen inclusivity and
future battles within the industry must continue this trajectory to enact changes.
Beyond cable and streaming platforms and the few series like Rhimes’ and Fey’s on
broadcast TV that delved into these topics within the early 21st century, the industry was
beginning to represent the complexities of not only gender, sexuality, and feminism but also
race, ethnicity, identity, generational divides, and national identity. Network family series began
to emerge with Black-ish (ABC, 2014-), its college sequel Grown-ish (Freeform, 2018-), and
prequel Mixed-ish (ABC, 2019-) which collectively established Kenya Barris as a formidable

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showrunner, one of the few who was also a black man, leading to his Netflix deal. Ryan
Murphy’s success with Nip Tuck (2003-2010, FX) and Glee (Fox, 2009-2015) followed by the
failure of his most personal series, The New Normal (NBC, 2012-2013), led to a multiple
franchise anthology series on FX consisting of American Horror Story (2011-), American Crime
Story (2016-), Feud (2017-), and 9-1-1 (Fox, 2018-). After the cult following of short-lived series
Popular (WB, 1999-2000), about social hierarchies in high school and college, and Scream
Queens (2015-2016), his first Netflix venture was about an over-eager closeted gay high school
student determined to be class president: The Politician (2019-).
Further, global and globalized programming began to be coproduced and created on these
streaming platforms rather than just distributed. Transnational series blurred the lines between
English-speaking series. Amidst utopian hopes for these new series with the freedom, newfound
knowledge, and public acknowledgement of their creators and showrunners, the industry reality
was that a diversity and inclusion bubble had burst. What seemed like (and was promoted as) a
national socially- and politically-conscious mandate was part of the industry’s attempt to tap into
new talent, diversity, and inclusion as trends. Netflix and other streaming services like Amazon
and Hulu did not function as competitors to niche programming or public service TV but as
monopolizers of content. Streaming was not new TV; it attempted to be new TV. For future
directions of this dissertation in monograph form I will connect the utopian hopes of radio to
early TV to streaming, and their subsequent commodification.
With Gertrude Berg, her pro-FDR praise and cautionary tales of World War II were met
with fan letter backlash that led her to use social rather than political issues. Her first series,
Laura and Effie, failed because of the limitations around representing single working women in
broadcast media. While The Goldbergs worked to erase stereotypes of Jewish immigrants and

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their children, the untimely nature of McCarthyism and the Hollywood Blacklist led to the end of
Berg’s unprecedented authorial control as an early radio and TV showrunner. Despite her
attempts to implement her skills as a bureaucratic author, which previously worked, the Blacklist
would keep women and marginalized groups from positions of power in television for decades.
The 1970s saw a renewal, largely through the support of allies such as Norman Lear who hired
women and black men to work as writers and create their own shows under his production
company. Once Lear sold his company, these TV professionals had few opportunities to continue
in the field. The 1980s experienced a resurgence of women showrunners who were
predominantly white and dealt with middle-class representations. Amongst this group, outlier
Diane English emerged from her broadcast journalism experience to become one of the most
successful showrunners of the next decade with Murphy Brown, a series that sought to defy the
rhetoric of post-feminist backlash by presenting an aspirational second-wave role model who
broke stereotypes while continuing to uplift 1960s feminist ideals. By the end of Murphy Brown
in 1998 and English’s failed attempts at new series, Sex and the City and Ally McBeal dominated
women-centered shows. McBeal contended that a prominent, upcoming lawyer could not find
satisfaction in her life without romantic love. On one hand, the third-wave sex positivity of Sex
and the City ushered in unprecedented representation for single women’s sexuality and desires
within the new liberties of premium cable. On the other, the series eventually turned into a
consumerist-driven legacy that ultimately valued romantic closure and social mobility,
eschewing its protagonists’ initial professional achievements. At the root of these issues was the
lack of offscreen representation: men were the showrunners for significant programming about
women’s experiences. HBO’s next women-centered program, Girls (2012-2017), created by and
starring Lena Dunham, would bridge issues of post-college millennial women’s malaise, sex

160

lives, and bodies. The discourse surrounding representation in the series marked a new turning
point by 2013 in which several women showrunners, including those from marginalized groups,
were able to enter network, cable, and streaming platforms to exemplify a greater variety of
representation on- and off-screen. Some called this the “Shonda Rhimes Effect,” due to the
showrunner’s precedent for attention to social issues and diverse ensemble casts assembled
through color blind casting.392
Meanwhile, Shonda Rhimes, who had been subtly building her Shondaland empire on
ABC since Grey’s Anatomy (2005-), carefully climbed the ladder in broadcast television. She
created the hit series Scandal (2012-2018) with a black woman protagonist by engaging with
Twitter fans and went on to sign with Netflix in 2018. After over a decade as a bureaucratic
author that led to her career as a franchise showrunner, she began to express her political views
about race, gender, class, and topical issues in an unprecedented manner. By 2019 she could
finally appeal to the television industry, on the newfound proven economic as well as the
political and social significance of systemic change, to allow a variety of showrunners from
marginalized groups the opportunity to have their own platforms.393 If past women showrunners
wanted to expand their power to support others, it was not a visible trajectory in the same way
male showrunners could mentor and foster upcoming creators, producers, and executives.
Rhimes gained the power to speak for not only the expansion of her own career, but those of
future generations of showrunners to allow their progressive perspectives and representations
onscreen. This rare chance could finally allow for greater equality within the television industry.
The future of this project will discern how this potential can be harnessed and, based on history,
how long it can endure.

161

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6 Rebecca Sun, “88 Percent of Showrunners are White, WGA West Finds,” Hollywood Reporter, April 29, 2019,
accessed April, 29, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wga-west-releases-first-inclusion-report-card-
1205673.
7 Writers Guild of America West, “WGAW Inclusion Report Card: 2017-2018 TV Staffing Season,” accessed April
29, 2019, https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/the-guild/inclusion-and-equity/WGAW_Inclusion_Report.pdf
8 Ibid.
9 Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity, “Behind-the-Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writers
Rooms,” March 2019, accessed April 12, 2019, https://womeninfilm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/TTIE-
Diversity-Report-2019-Web-Version.pdf
10 Caldwell, Production Culture, 15.
11 Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 11.
12 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press,
2010).
13 John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other
Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
14 Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2014), 9.
15 Mark Crispin Miller, “Introduction,” in The Hidden Persuaders, ed. Vance Packard (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing,
2007), 10.
16 Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, Kevin Sanson,eds., Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future
of Film and Television (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014);
Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi. eds., MTM ‘Quality Television,’
(London: BFI Publishing, 1984).
Henry Jenkins, “‘Do you enjoy making the rest of us feel stupid?’: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the the
trickster author, and viewer mastery,” in David Lavery, ed., Full of secrets: Critical approaches to Twin Peaks,
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 51-69.
Catherine Johnson, ed., Branding Television (London: Routledge, 2012).
Dereck Johnson,ed., From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels (London: Routledge, 2018).
Horace Newcomb, and Robert S. Alley. The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with
Creators of American TV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Laurie Ouellette, "Citizen Brand: ABC and the Do Good Turn in US Television,"
in Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, edited by Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-
Weiser (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), 57-75;
Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press), 2010.
17 Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1973): 75–85,
https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/14.3.75
18 Catherine Grant, “Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship,” Feminist Theory 2, no. 1
(April 2001): 113–30.
19 Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (The
Politics of Intersectionality) (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).
20 Sean P. Holmes, “The Hollywood Star System and the Regulation of Actors’ Labor, 1916-1934,” Film History 12,
no. 1 (2000): 97–114.
21 Ibid.
22 Miranda J. Banks, The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
23 Banks, The Writers, 16.
24 Ibid.
25 Muriel G. Cantor, The Hollywood TV Producer, His Work and Audience (London and New York: Routledge,
1971).
26 Banks, The Writers, 20.
27 Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, Berkeley and Los Angeles: (University of California
Press, 2000).

172

28 Mollie Gregory, Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed
Hollywood, 1973-2000, (London: St Martin's Press, 2002).
29 Gregory, Run The Show, 67.
30 Gregory, Run The Show, 90.
31 Ibid.
32 Meredith Baxter, Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering, (New York: Crown Publishing, 2011),
130.
33 Baxter, Untied, 130–1.
34 Jane M. Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana, Chicago and
Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
35 Gregory, Run The Show, 200.
36 This record was surpassed by Tyler Perry’s House of Payne (TBS, 2006–2012) with 254 episodes, and Family
Matters’ 215 episodes following closely behind.
37 Gregory, Run The Show, 7.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Gregory, Run The Show, 8.
41 Gregory, Run The Show, 12.
42 Ibid.
43 Gregory, Run The Show, 156.
44 Gregory, Run The Show, 238.
45 Gregory, Run The Show, 319.
46 Gregory, Run The Show, 273.
47 Gregory, Run The Show, 310.
48 Gregory, Run The Show, 315.
49 Gregory, Run The Show, 362.
50 Lisa de Moraes, “‘Scandal’ Tops Premiere of Nielsen’s Twitter TV Ratings,” Deadline, October 3, 2018, accessed
August 13, 2018, https://deadline.com/2013/10/scandal-tops-premiere-of-nielsens-twitter-TV-ratings-605429/
51 Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Visual Storytelling and Screen Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2018),
122.
52 The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia, “The Goldbergs,” accessed July 7, 2018,
http://www.museum.tv/eotv/goldbergsth.htm
53 Michele Hilmes, “Never Ending Story: Authorship, Seriality and the Radio Writers Guild,” in A Companion to
Media Authorship, eds. Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson (New York and London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 181–
199.
54 Ibid.
55 Hilmes, Radio Voices, xviii.
56 “The Goldbergs March On: A famous 17-year old radio family is an immediate hit on television, Life, April 25,
1949, 59. Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center,
Syracuse.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Murray, Hitch Your Antenna, 55.
61 Charles Angoff, “The Goldbergs and Jewish Humor,” Congress Weekly: A Review of Jewish Interests, March 5,
1951, Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
62 Look, “Molly Goldberg: Busier than Ever,” Look, March 1, 1960, 50a. Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse
University Library, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
63 Susan Murray, Hitch Your Antenna To the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (New York and
London: Routledge, 2005), 61.
64 Miranda Banks, The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (New Brunswick and London:
Rutgers University Press, 2015), 140.
65 Carol A Stabile, The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018),
Kindle.
66 Gertrude Berg and Cherny Berg, Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg (Whitefish, MT: 1961,
republished 2011), 1.

173

67 Glenn Smith, “Something On My Own:” Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929-1956, (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2007), 16.
68 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 32
69 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 30.
70 Stefan Kanfe and Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish
Vacationland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
71 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 77
72 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 77
73 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 100.
74 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 127.
75 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 133.
76 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 16.
77 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 19.
78 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 19.
79 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 36.
80 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 18.
81 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 48.
82 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 49.
83 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 49.
84 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 12–13.
85 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 141.
86 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 22.
87 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 166.
88 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 158.
89 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 24.
90 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 159.
91 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 160.

93 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 27.
94 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 27.
95 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 23.
96 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 29.
97 Smith, “Something On My Own,” 231.
98 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 31.
99 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 3.

101 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 18.
102 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 18.
103 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 40.
104 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 19.
105 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 18.
106 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 33.
107 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 35
108 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 44 and 57.
109 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 170.
110 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 35.
111 Ibid.
112 Sulamith Ish-Kishor, “Interesting People: Gertrude Berg Has Made ‘The Rise of The Goldbergs’ a Popular Radio
Feature,” The Jewish Tribune, October 16, 1930, 7. Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library,
Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Ish-Kishor, “Interesting People,” 7.

174

117 Hilda Kassell, “An Off-Stage View of Molly Goldberg,” American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, October 21,
1932, 415. Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center,
Syracuse.
118 Broadcast Encyclopedia, “The Goldbergs.”
119 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 46.
120 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 42–43.
121 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 76–77.
122 Carl Reiner, My Anecdotal Life (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 56–57.
123 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 79.
124 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 79–80.
125 Ibid.
126 The Billboard, October 20, 1934. Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special
Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
127 Broadcast Encyclopedia, “The Goldbergs.”
128 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 44–45 and 64.
129 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 81.
130 Smith, “Something on My Own,” 76.
131 “Soap Operas,” Cue, August 7, 1943, 10, Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special
Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
132 Mrs. Joseph M. Welt to Mr. Frank Marcus, George Evans Company, October 19, 1944.
133 Gertrude Berg, “Why I Hate The Term Soap Opera,” Everywoman, February 1945, 28. Gertrude Berg Papers,
Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
134 Ibid.
135 Ibid.
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid.
138 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 195.
139 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 206.
140 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 207–211.
141 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 209.
142 Weber, “Goldberg Variations,” 113.
143 Marc and Thompson, Prime Time Movers, 84.
144 Catherine L. Fisk, Writing For Hire: Unions, Hollywood and Madison Avenue (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2016), 134.
145 Michael Morris, The Goldbergs scripts collection, (Los Angeles, California: Writer’s Guild of America West,
1957).
146 Advertising Agency and Advertising and Selling “Whenever Top Executives Confer,” Advertising Agency and
Advertising and Selling, June 1949, 26, Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse University Library, Special
Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
147 Ibid.
148 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 216.
149 Ibid.
150 Look, “Look Movie Review: Molly,” Look, February 27, 1951, 90. Gertrude Berg Papers, Box 54. Syracuse
University Library, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.
151 Ibid.
152 Barry Monush and James Sheridan, Lucille Ball FAQ: Everything Left to Know About America’s Favorite
Redhead (Milwaukee, WI: Applause Cinema Books, 2011).
153 Banks, The Writers, 119–122.
154 Miranda Banks, “I Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer,” in How To Watch Television, eds. Ethan Thompson and
Jason Mittell (London and New York: New York University Press), 244.
155 Mary C. Beltran, “The Good Neighbor on Prime Time: Desi Arnaz and I Love Lucy” in Latina/o Stars in U.S.
Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009),
40–61.
156 Tim Gray, “FBI, the President and Russia: Hollywood Blacklist Parallels to D.C. Today,” Variety, June 8, 2017,
accessed November 12, 2018, https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/fbi-hollywood-blacklist-huac-1202434517/.

175

157 Ephraim R. Gomberg to Molly Goldberg, March 23, 1950, Gertrude Berg Papers, Correspondence Scrapbook
No. 2 (Special Letters) 1932-1954. Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.

159 Angoff, “The Goldbergs and Jewish Humor.”
160 Ibid.
161 Gertrude Berg Papers, Correspondence Scrapbook No. 2 (Special Letters) 1932-1954. Syracuse University
Library, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse.

163 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990), location 900, Kindle.
164 Lipsitz, Time Passes, location 900.
165 Weber, “Goldberg Variations,” 122.
166 Stabile, The Broadcast 41, location 457.
167 Internet Movie Database, “Mama,” accessed November 12, 2018, http://Imdb.com/title/tt0041039.
168 Lipsitz, Time Passes, location 905.
169 Weber, “Goldberg Variations,” 120.
170 Stabile, The Broadcast 41, location 234.
171 Stabile, The Broadcast 41, 286.
172 Look, “Goldberg: Busier than Ever.”
173 Berg and Berg, Molly and Me, 246.
174 Weber, “Goldberg Variations,” 113.
175 Banks, The Writers, 166.
176 Ibid.
177 Lipsitz, Time Passes, location 1035.
178 Devries, “Laughing Off.”
179 Devries, “Laughing Off.”
180 Ibid.
181 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 5-20.
182 Friedan, Mystique, 21-29.
183 Friedan, “‘The National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose,’” National Organization for
Women official website, accessed October 1, 2018, http://www.now.org/history/purpos66.html.
184 Ibid.
185 Ibid.
186 Friedan, Mystique, 7.
187 Faludi, Backlash, 76.
188 Rosalind Gill, “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising,”
Feminism and Psychology, 18, no. 35 (2008), 39.
189 Mollie Gregory, Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed
Hollywood, 1973-2000, (London: St Martin's Press, 2002).
190 Gregory, Run the Show, 6.
191 De Vries, “Laughing Off.”
192 David Marc and Robert Thompson, Prime Time Movers, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 84.
193 Jonathan Handel, “Writers Guild Foundation Elects Barbara Corday as New President,” The Hollywood
Reporter, May 21, 2011, accessed November 8, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/writers-
guild-foundation-elects-barbara-203854
194

195 Marc and Thompson, Prime Time Movers, 86.
196 Devries, “Laughing Off.”
197 Ibid.
198“Diane English - Biography,” IMDB, accessed October 2, 2018,
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0257606/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm.
199 Hilary De Vries, “Laughing Off The Recession,” The New York Times, January 3, 1933, accessed October 3,
2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/03/magazine/laughing-off-the-recession.html.
200 De Vries, “Laughing Off.”

176

201 Ibid.
202 Ibid.
203 Ibid.
204 Ibid.
205 Ibid.
206 Ibid.
207 Tim O’Shei, “‘Murphy Brown’ creator Diane English sets sights on return to TV,” Buffalo News, published May
14, 2016, updated January 25, 2018, accessed October 3, 2018, https://buffalonews.com/2016/05/14/murphy-brown-
creator-diane-english-sets-sights-return-tv/.
208 Ibid.
209 Ibid.
210 The Diane English Script Collection [1988- 1995], Archives & Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler
Library, SUNY Buffalo State, accessed October 2, 2018,
https://library.buffalostate.edu/ld.php?content_id=28197818.
211 De Vries, “Laughing Off.”
212 IMDB, “English – Biography.”
213 David Craig, "Calling Western Union: The Cultural Mission of Television's Message Movies,"
Journal of Popular Film and Television, June 18, 2014, 60-70,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01956051.2013.805117.
214 Tim Brooks and Earle F. Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-
Present, Ninth Edition, (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 486.
215 IMDB, “My Sister Sam,” accessed October 3, 2018 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090487/.
216 Albert also gained WGA awards for her work as a writer-producer on the AMC series Mad Men (2007-2015), a
series centered on a Madison Avenue anti-hero, but with a strong supporting female cast and predominantly women
writers, with Matthew Weiner as the showrunner.
217 Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004). 9.
218 Gray, Watching Race, 33.
219
220 Devries, “Laughing Off.”
221 Ibid.
222 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1992).
223 Faludi, Backlash, 87.
224 Ibid.
225 Faludi, Backlash, 50.
226 Friedan, Mystique, 35.
227 Negra and Tasker, Interrogating Postfemnism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007), 4.
228 Amanda Lotz, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2006),144-164.
229 Lotz, Redesigning, 145.
230 Ibid.
231 Lotz, Redesigning, 175.
232 Meredith Blake, “25 Yeas Later, looking back at ‘Murphy Brown,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 2013,
accessed October 3, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-xpm-2013-dec-23-la-et-st-murphy-brown-
20131223-story.
233 Ibid.
234 Ibid.
235 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/business/media/mike-wallace-cbs-pioneer-of-60-minutes-dead-at-93.html
236 Box 1 / Folder 1, The Diane English Script Collection [1988-1995], Archives & Special Collections Department,
E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.
237 Diane Negra, ‘“Quality Postfeminism?” Sex and the Single Girl on HBO,’ Genders Online Journal, Issue 39
(2004), accessed October 1, 2018, http://www.genders.org/g39/g39_negra.html .
238 Benjamin Brabon and Stephenie Genz, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2009), 55.

177

239 Rachel Doepker, “CNN Launched 6/1/1980,” The Library of Congress Business Reference Services, March
2009, accessed October 4, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/rr/business/businesshistory/June/cnn.html
https://www.loc.gov/rr/business/businesshistory/June/cnn.html.
240 “Signed Sealed, Delivered,” Box 1 / Folder 2, The Diane English Script Collection [1988-1995], Archives &
Special Collections Department, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.
241 Los Angeles Times, “92 Republican Convention.”
242 Doepker, “CNN Launched.”
243 Time Magazine, “Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown.”
244 Dow, Prime Time, 150.
245 Ibid.
246 Deborah Sontag, “Anita Hill and Revitalizing Feminism,” The New York Times, April 26, 1992, accessed
November 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/26/nyregion/anita-hill-and-revitalizing-feminism.html
247 Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, “Third Wave Manifesta,” in Manifesta (New York:Douglas &
McIntyre Ltd, 2000), 278-281.
248 The waves of feminism model, since first wave feminism that isolated black women suffragettes, often ignored
issues surrounding class, race, and ethnicity. Yet this is also why mainstream feminist’s waves aligns with
mainstream commercial network television.
249 Ibid, 88.
250 Ibid, 88.
251 L.S. Kim, ‘“Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television,” Television New Media,
November 1, 2001, http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/2/4/319.full.pdf+html.
252 Lotz, “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes,”
Feminist Media Studies 1, no. 1 (2001), 110.
253 Lotz, Redesigning Women, 108.
254 Jane Arthurs, “‘Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating postfeminist drama,’” Feminist Media
Studies, 3, no.1 (2003), 94.
255 De Vries, “Laughing Off.”
256 Ibid.
257 Ibid.
258 Ken Levine, “Dan Harmon’s firing: My take,” The World As Seen By a TV Comedy Writer, May 21, 2012,
http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2012/05/dan-harmons-firing-my-take.html?m=
259 De Vries, “Laughing Off.”
260 David Wild, The Showrunners : A Season Inside The Billion-Dollar, Death-Defying, Madcap World Of
Television's Real Stars, (New York: Harper Collins 1999).
261 Steve Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 19-20.
262 Susan Murray, Hitch Your Antenna To the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom, (New York and
London: Routledge, 2005), 29.
263 Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 19-20.
264 Ibid.
265 Peace and Freedom Party: California's Feminist Socialist Political Party, “Roseanne Barr for President,” Peace
and Freedom Party: California's Feminist Socialist Political Party, October 16, 2010, accessed November 1, 2018,
http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/component/content/article/106-2012-november-election/1017-roseanne-
barr-for-president.
266 Patrick Healy, “Roseanne Conner Has Become a Trump Supporter. Just Like Her Creator,” The New York Times,
March 27, 2018, accessed November 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/arts/television/roseanne-barr-
trump.html .
267 De Vries, “Laughing Off.”
268 O’Shei, “return to TV.”
269 Ibid.
270 Ibid.
271 Levine, “Harmon’s firing.”
272 Ibid, 2.
273 Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person (New York, NY:
Simon & Schuster, 2015), 234-235.

178

274 Camille Collins, “The Shonda Rhimes Effect,” The Root: Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture, May 31,
2011, accessed October 10, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/the-shonda-rhimes-effect-1790864161
275 Kelly Lawler, “Shonda Rhimes Knows Where This ‘Scandal’ Will End,” NPR, November 7, 2013, accessed
October 5, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2013/11/07/243515839/shonda-rhimes-knows-where-this-scandal-will-end.
276 Ibid.
277 Rick Du Brow, “TV Continues to shy away from black dramas,” Los Angeles Times, June 11. 1990, 4. Black
Film Center/Archive, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana.
278 Ibid.
279 Ibid.
280 Erwin Washington, “Blacks and the Mass Media,” Crisis, June/July 1989, Vol. 96, No. 6, 38. Black Film
Center/Archive, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana.
281 Washinington, “Mass Media,” 36.
282 Ibid.
283 Rhimes, Yes, 252 and 254.
284 Rhimes, Yes.
285Lacey Rose, “Shonda Rhimes Opens Up About ‘Angry Black Woman’ Flap, Messy ‘Grey's Anatomy’ Chapter
and the ‘Scandal’ Impact,” The Hollywood Reporter, October 8, 2014, accessed October 10, 2018,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shonda-rhimes-opens-up-angry-738715.
285 Ibid.
Rose, “Rhimes Opens Up.”
286 Rose, “Rhimes Opens Up.”
287 Kristen Warner, “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy: Shonda Rhimes on Her ‘Post-Civil Rights Post-
Feminist’ Series,” Television and New Media, September 2014, 7.
288 Ralina L. Joseph, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity, (New York:
New York University Press, 2018).
289 Chritine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2004).
290 Jones, “of activism,” and Acham, Televised.
291 Acham, Televised, 110.
292 Ibid, 114.

293 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham: Duke University Press,
2018).
294 Ashley Ray-Harris, “Scandal is going out on its own terms-and not a moment too soon,” The A.V. Club, May 24,
2017, accessed October 12, 2018, https://tv.avclub.com/scandal-is-going-out-on-its-own-terms-and-not-a-moment-
1798262239
295 Shonda Rhimes. No hope. We loved it. ABC is crazy and or what. RT @Lulla_dnes Is there any hope left re
Inside The Box pilot ? Is ABC crazy or what ?, December 7, 2009, accessed October 13, 2018,
https://twitter.com/shondarhimes/status/6443222544
296 Ibid.
297 Colin Daniels, “Shonda Rhimes ‘very sad’ over ‘Off The Map’ axe, Digital Spy, May 14, 2011, accessed October
13, 2018, https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a319486/shonda-rhimes-very-sad-over-off-the-map-axe/
298 Ibid.
299 Danielle Henderson, “Is Shonda Rhimes the most powerful woman in television?” The Guardian, May 14, 2014,
accessed October 17, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2014/may/14/shonda-rhimes-
scandal-tv-diversity-showrunner-davis
300 John Koblin, "Netflix Signs Shonda Rhimes in Counterpunch to ABC and Disney," New York Times, August,
14, 2017, accessed October 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/business/media/shonda-rhimes-netflix-
deal.html
301 Sydney Scott, “Issa Rae Opens Up About Shonda Rhimes Show That Never Happened,” Essence, April 27,
2017, accessed October 14, 2018, https://www.essence.com/entertainment/issa-rae-voice-diversity/
302 Ibid.
303 Ibid.
304 Essence, “Shonda Rhimes, Ava DuVernay, Debbie Allen, Mara Brock Akil and Issa Rae Cover Essence’s “Game
Changers’ Issue,” Essence, April 13, 2015, accessed October 15, 2018, https://www.essence.com/celebrity/shonda-
rhimes-ava-duvernay-debbie-allen-mara-brock-akil-issa-rae-essence-cover/

179

305 Henry Chu, “Issa Rae Talks About Her White Audience, Shonda Rhimes and Male Nudity,” Variety, October 17,
2018, accessed October 27, 2018 https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/issa-rae-insecure-hbo-shonda-rhimes-male-
nudity-1202982674/

307 Kat Stoeffel, “Shonda Rhimes Cure for Hollywood’s Racism,” The Cut, December 18, 2013, accessed October 3,
2018,
https://www.thecut.com/2013/12/shonda-rimes-two-step-cure-for-hollywood-racism.html.
308 Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person (New York, NY:
Simon & Schuster, 2015), 10.
Acham, Revolution Televised.
310 Rhimes, Yes.
311 USC News, “USC seeks new chief information officer,” USC News, April 29, 2013,
https://news.usc.edu/49905/family-matters-30/.
312 National Public Radio, “Shonda Rhimes on Running 3 Hit Shows and the Limits of Network TV,” National
Public Radio, November 11, 2015, accessed November 4, 2018,
https://www.npr.org/2015/11/11/455594842/shonda-rhimes-on-running-three-hit-shows-and-the-limits-of-network-
tv.
313 Rhimes, Yes, 5.
314 Rhimes, Yes, 18.
315 Rhimes, Yes, 19.
316 Ibid.
317 Ibid, 19.
318 National Public Radio, “Shonda Rhimes on Running 3 Hit Shows and the Limits of Network TV,” National
Public Radio, November 11, 2015, accessed November 4, 2018,
https://www.npr.org/2015/11/11/455594842/shonda-rhimes-on-running-three-hit-shows-and-the-limits-of-network-
tv.
319 National Public Radio, “3 Hit Shows.”
320 Zac Hardwick, “Shonda Rhimes ’91, ‘Scandal’ Producer to Address Graduates,” The Dartmouth, April 21, 2014,
accessed November 4, 2018, http://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2014/04/shonda-rhimes-91-scandal-producer-to-
address-graduates.
321 Wilson Hunt, “Rhimes Turns Up.”
322 Wilson Hunt, “Rhimes Turns Up.”
323 Ibid.
324 Stacey Wilson Hunt, “‘Grey’s Anatomy’s’ Shonda Rhimes Turns Up the Heat in New Series ‘Scandal,’” The
Hollywood Reporter, June 26, 2011, accessed November 4, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/greys-
anatomys-shonda-rhimes-turns-205721.
325 Ibid.
326 Ibid.
327 Ibid.
328 Ibid.
329 Lotz, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2006), 175.
330 Ibid.
331 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York and London: New
York University Press, 2012), 61.
332 Ibid, 56.
333 Banet-Weiser, Authentic, 85–86.
334 Sydney Bucksbaum, “Shonda Rhimes Finally Explains Why Derek Had To Die on Grey’s Anatomy,” E! News,
March 4, 2015, accessed September 13, 2018, https://www.eonline.com/fr/news/683273/shonda-rhimes-speaks-out-
on-mcdreamy-s-grey-s-anatomy-death-it-wasn-t-easy-or-fun.
335 Rhimes, Yes, 279.

180

336 Rhimes, Yes, 252 and 254.
337 Ibid, 235.
338 Warner, “The Racial Logic.”
339 Ibid, 6.
340 Ibid, 7.
341 Josef Adalian, “How Grey’s Anatomy Toppled ER As Prime-Time TV’s Longest-Running Medical Drama,”
Vulture, February 28, 2019, accessed February 28, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/greys-anatomy-er-
medical-drama-record.html
342 Ibid.
343 Kelly Lawler, “Shonda Rhimes Knows Where This ‘Scandal’ Will End.” NPR, November 7, 2013, accessed
October 5, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2013/11/07/243515839/shonda-rhimes-knows-where-this-scandal-will-end
344 Mary McNamara, “‘Scandal’ Has Become Must-Tweet TV,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2013, accessed
November 7, 2018, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/11/entertainment/la-et-st-scandal-abc-social-media-
20130511/2.
345 Timothy M. Phelps, “From the archives: The Thomas Charge: Law professor told the FBI he sexually harassed
her,” Newsday, October 6, 1991, accessed November 13, 2018, https://www.newsday.com/from-the-archives-the-
thomas-charge-law-professor-told-the-fbi-he-sexually-harassed-her-1.6162090.
346 As sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace became a resurging topic in the media, HBO produced a TV
film about Hill’s experience of testifying in front of the Supreme Court and Washington playing the lead.
347 Neely Tucker, “D.C. Insider Judy Smith is basis for ABC drama ‘Scandal,’” The Washington Post, July 30, 2012,
accessed November 8, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/dc-insider-judy-smith-is-basis-for-
abc-drama-scandal/2012/03/29/gIQAbT8JlS_story.html?utm_term=.27c82f05679e
348 In addition, the former White House aide in Scandal, Amanda Tanner (Liza Weil), returns in Shondaland’s
HTGAWM, a series that was created and is run by a former writer for Rhimes, which she produced as part ABC’s
Thursday Night #TGIT lineup.
349 Joy Press, “Is Civil War Brewing in the Writers Guild?,” Vanity Fair, August 1, 2019, accessed November 8,
2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/08/wga-election-agency-writers-guild-infighting.
350 Nielsen, “40% of Tablet and Smartphone Owners Use Them While Watching TV,” Nielsen, October 13, 2011,
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2011/40-of-tablet-and-smartphone-owners-use-them-while-watching-
tv.html.
351 The Shondaland Source, “New Grey’s Anatomy ipad App!” The Shondaland Source, February 1, 2011, accessed
October 13, 2014, http://theshondalandsource.com/new-greys-anatomy-ipad-app.
352 Doug Aamoth, “ABC’s ‘My Generation’ iPad App Follows Episodes in Real Time,” Tech Land Time online,
September 17, 2010, accessed October 12, 2014, http://techland.time.com/2010/09/17/abcs-my-generation-ipad-app-
follows-episodes-in-real-time/.
353 The Shondaland Source, 2011.
354 Karen Buzzard, Tracking the Audience: The Ratings Industry from Analog to Digital (New York: Routledge,
2013), 67.
355 Sarah Atkinson, Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences (London: Bloomsbury Press,
2014), 83.
356 Hye Jin Lee and Mark Andrejevic, “Second Screen Theory: From The Democratic Surround to the Digital
Enclosure,” in Connected Viewing: Selling, Sharing and Streaming Media in a Digital Age, eds. Jennifer Holt and
Kevin Sanson (New York: Routledge, 2014), 42.
357 Ibid.
358 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2006), 26.
359 Shelli Weinstein, “How ‘Scandal’ Paved the Way for ABC’s Twitter-Based Marketing Strategy,” Variety,
September 22, 2014, accessed November 8, 2018, http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/scandal-twitter-shonda-rhimes-
tgit-abc-shondaland-1201311282/.
360 Weinstein, “Paved the Way.”
361 Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, and Aaron Smith, “Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009,” Pew Research
Internet Project, October 21, 2009, http://www.pewinternet.org/2009/10/21/twitter-and-status-updating-fall-2009/.
362 Therese F. Tierney, The Public Space of Social Media: Connected Cultures of the Networked Society (New York
and London: Routledge, 2013), 101.
363 Feminista Jones, “Is Twitter the new underground railroad of activism?” Salon, July 17, 2013, accessed October
10, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2013/07/17/how_twitter_fuels_black_activism/.

181

364 Brittany Julious, “Twitter, fandom and why ABC’s ‘Scandal’ Matters,” WBEZ Chicago, October 3, 2013,
accessed March 12, 2015, http://www.wbez.org/blogs/britt-julious/2013-10/twitter-fandom-and-why-abcs-scandal-
matters-108838.
365 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Text (New York: New York
University Press, 2010).
366 Ibid, 112.
367 Henry Jenkins, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 1
(2014): 35.
368 Ibid, 35.
369 Willa Paskin, “Can I Watch Scandal By Only Reading Twitter?,” Slate, November 8, 2013, accessed October 14,
2018,
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/how_we_watch_tv/2013/11/scandal_and_twitter_can_you_watch_abc_s_drama_o
nly_on_social_media.html.
370 Ibid.
371 Lisa de Moraes, “‘Scandal’ Tops Premiere of Nielsen’s Twitter TV Ratings,” Deadline, October 7, 2013,
accessed October 14, 2018, http://deadline.com/2013/10/scandal-tops-premiere-of-nielsens-twitter-tv-ratings-
605429/.
372 McNamara, “‘Must-Tweet TV.”
373 Shelli Weinstein, “How ‘Scandal’ Paved the Way for ABC’s Twitter-Based Marketing Strategy,” September 22,
2014, http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/scandal-twitter-shonda-rhimes-tgit-abc-shondaland-1201311282/.
374 Ibid.
375 Banet-Weiser, Authentic, 57.
376 Melissa Maerz, “Shonda Rhimes, Viola Davis on Alessandra Stanley's ‘angry black woman’ piece and race in
Hollywood,” Entertainment Weekly, September 3, 2014, accessed October 15, 2018,
https://ew.com/article/2015/09/03/shonda-rhimes-viola-davis-angry-black-woman-piece/.
Emily Nussbaum, “Where is Olivia Pope when you need her?” The New Yorker, September 23, 2014, accessed
October 15, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/olivia-pope-need.
Margaret Sullivan, “An Article on Shonda Rhimes Rightly Causes a Furor,” The New York Times, September 22,
2014, accessed October 10, 2018,
https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/an-article-on-shonda-rhimes-rightly-causes-a-furor/.
377 Rose, “Rhimes Opens Up.”
378 Ibid.
379 Daniel Funke and Tina Susman, “From Ferguson to Baton Rouge: Deaths of Black men and women at the hands
of the police,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2016, accessed October 12, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-
police-deaths-20160707-snap-htmlstory.html#2014
380 Latoya Ferguson, "Scandal's police brutality episode was TV wish fulfillment writ large," The Guardian,
March 6, 2015, accessed October 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2015/mar/06/scandal-police-brutality-episode-lawn-chair-shonda-rhimes-wish-fulfillment
381 Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Black Lives Matter, accessed September 6,
2018, http://blacklivesmatter.com/a-herstory-of-the-blacklivesmatter-movement/.
382 Shonda Rhimes, “‘91 Commencement Address,” June 8, 2014, Dartmouth College, accessed May 15, 2015,
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~commence/news/speeches/2014/rhimes-address.html.
383 Dani Klein Modisett, “The Women Who Run The Show,” Ms., May 8, 2015, accessed October 30, 2018,
https://msmagazine.com/2015/05/08/the-women-who-run-the-show/.

385 Chris Gardner, “Shonda Rhimes on her Netflix Deal: “I Am the Highest-Paid Showrunner in Television,” The
Hollywood Reporter, October 16, 2018, accessed November 4, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-
reporter/shonda-rhimes-talks-netflix-pay-at-elle-women-hollywood-awards-1152606.
386 Gardner, “Highest-Paid Showrunner.”
387 Earlier in 2017, Ryan Murphy also agreed to a five-year deal with Netflix, ending his relationship with the Fox
network and their cable channel FX. Murphy claimed his deal was worth $300 million, while Greg Berlanti stayed
with Warner Brothers Television, and the CW network, for a reported $400 million.
388 Lesley Goldberg, “Shondaland's First Netflix Series Will Arrive in 2020,” Variety, July 10, 2019, accessed July
10, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/shondalands-first-netflix-series-will-arrive-2020-1223524

182

389 Sarah Springer, “’Grey's Anatomy' creator, actress discuss media diversity,” CNN, May 22, 2012, accessed
October 15, 2018, https://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/22/greys-anatomy-creator-and-actress-discuss-media-
diversity/
390 Rhonda Richford, “Shonda Rhimes Talks Increasing Diversity Onscreen: ‘It's a Simple Matter of Economics,’
Hollywood Reporter, June 20, 2019, accessed June 20, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shonda-
rhimes-screen-diversity-simple-matter-economics-1220065
391 Ibid.
392 Camille Collins, “The Shonda Rhimes Effect,” The Root: Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture, May 31,
2011, accessed October 10, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/the-shonda-rhimes-effect-1790864161
393 Rhonda Richford, “Shonda Rhimes Talks Increasing Diversity Onscreen: ‘It's a Simple Matter of Economics,’
Hollywood Reporter, June 20, 2019, accessed June 20, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shonda-
rhimes-screen-diversity-simple-matter-economics-1220065

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Asset Metadata

Creator Marghitu, Stefania (author)

Core Title Women showrunners: authorship, identity and representation in US television

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 05/07/2020

Defense Date 03/04/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag authorship,Cinema and Media Studies,feminist media studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,radio history,showrunners,television,television history,television representation,television studies

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Acham, Christine (committee member), Holt, Jennifer (committee member), Imre, Aniko (committee member)

Creator Email ohstefania@gmail.com,smarghitu@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-301327

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