Erica Shelton Kodish is heading back to CBS. The “Good Wife” alumna has signed a multi-year overall deal with CBS TV Studios after serving as showrunner on the fourth season of BET’s “Being Mary Jane.” The writer-producer’s new post will see her “developing new television projects for broadcast, cable, and streaming services,” according to Hollywood’s Black Renaissance.
After kicking off her career as a story editor for “Cold Case,” Kodish moved her way up to writing and co-producing the crime series. Her other writing and producing credits include “Covert Affairs” and “Hawthorne.”
“Getting my writing career off the ground seemed insurmountable,” Kodish has said. “After graduate school a professor told me to expect it to take five to eight years to launch your career. It took every bit of that. I wanted desperately to be in a television writing room and I couldn’t even seem to land a writing assistant position. It was very difficult because others seemed to be having a much easier time of it. But I’ve learned in this business, it does you no good to compare yourself to others. None. In the end, it didn’t really matter that it took me a little longer to get there. What matters is that I persevered. Yes, there were some who got there faster. There were others who took a lot longer, too. In hindsight, I noticed that the only people who didn’t eventually break through were the ones that gave up.”
When asked what advice she’d give to women of color pursuing a writing career, she emphasized, “It takes a village. For me, it was a patchwork of African-American writers, a tight group of women writers, women of color, and a couple key mentors who made it possible for me to have a writing career. For a WOC the challenges are steep. That’s the reason it’s important to have a network of people with whom to discuss these challenges. This group made it possible for me to persist when I was full of self-doubt or just dealing with the everyday challenges of the business.”
Kodish succeeded series creator Mara Brock Akil as showrunner of “Being Mary Jane.”
