Seven female directors gathered for a panel hosted by FX Networks on Wednesday to talk about their professional experiences. One of the main topics of conversation? The catch-22 most new episodic helmers find themselves in, the “We can’t be your first” roadblock.
“I could not get an episode of television,” recalled “Scream Queens” and “American Horror Story” director Maggie Kiley, per Variety. Even though she had shorts and indie features like “Caught” on her resume, networks were unwilling to give her her first TV job. “We can’t be your first,” they would say, according to Kiley. “Come back after you have one under your belt.”
But Kiley and another panelist, Rachel Goldberg, saw a swift change when multi-hyphenate Ryan Murphy introduced his Half initiative, which strives to reserve 50 percent of the directing jobs on Murphy’s shows for women and people of color. “[Murphy] said, ‘50-year-old white men make change. I promise you I’m going to give you an episode,’” Goldberg explained.
And he did: Goldberg is one of the directors on the upcoming season of “American Horror Story.” “Now I can blow shit up,” she joked.
Murphy’s Half program is much-needed in an arena that’s notoriously hard to break into. Thanks to Peak TV, there are more television shows and jobs than ever, but studios and producers tend to keep using the same small pool of directors over and over. When new people are hired, they are usually white men. According to a study from the Directors Guild of America, only 19 percent of all first-time directors from the 2009–10 season to 2015–16 were women. Just 14 percent were people of color.
The panelists also touched upon another impossible situation they often face. Film producers told Alexis Ostrander (“Ballon”), “Go do an episode of TV and we’ll give you a feature.” Add that requirement to the “We can’t be your first” obstacle and you have a lot of ambitious women directors with nowhere to turn.
Ostrander noted that Half and mentorship from veteran TV director and producer Thomas Schlamme (“The Americans”) helped her find a way forward. “She landed an episode of ‘American Horror Story’ and is now off and running,” the source reports.
The panelists observed that opportunities have a tendency to open up once women directors are able to overcome the “We can’t be your first” hurdle. After finally breaking into the TV landscape a couple years ago, Steph Green has been booked solid with jobs on “The Americans,” “You’re the Worst,” “Billions,” and “Scandal.”
This is a welcome change for Green. “It’s been so exciting to have my problem be that I can’t say yes [to new jobs] because I’m booked on something else,” she said.
