NBC has a novel solution to the dearth of female directors: Let them direct
Director Olivia Newman had it all planned out. In order to keep making personal features - like her 2018 Netflix film "First Match" - she'd make a living as a TV director. But her agent, she says, warned her that his other client, Dee Rees ("Mudbound"), had struggled getting her first episodic credit even after making a movie, "Bessie," for HBO.
Newman wasn't discouraged. And the timing was right. NBC was launching a new directing program: Female Forward. She applied and was accepted into its inaugural year. Now she's "suddenly a director in the Dick Wolf universe, which if someone had told me 10 years ago that's where I'd get my start in television, I'd be like, 'Ha, that's funny,'" Newman says.
It's the sort of success story that has long been the exception more than the rule for female directors in Hollywood.
Rising awareness about systemic gender discrimination and bias in recent years hasn't extinguished the power imbalance - just look at the all-male nominees for best director and best screenplay for next month's Golden Globes. Even the dense fog of television content, which has contributed to record gains for the number of
