FX, the TV network that dominated this year’s Emmy nominations thanks to The People v OJ Simpson and Fargo, is taking action to improve diversity behind the camera.
The recent development comes in the wake of statistics compiled by the Directors Guild of America, which found that only 12% of the directors hired to helm episodes during the channel’s 2014-15 season were women or people of color. As Variety revealed in 2015, FX had the worst track record of all networks.
FX has since proactively turned that trend around: 51% of the channel’s roster of directors are currently men and women of color or white women, the network revealed at the FX’s Television Critics Association panel in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
“We just happened to all be working in a system that was racially biased, and weren’t taking responsibility for stepping up and acknowledging that and saying, ‘OK, we will be the change,’” FX CEO John Landgraf said, reported by Variety.
As he put it bluntly during the presentation: “White males are only, depending on how you count them, somewhere between 31% and 36% of the US population. There’s nothing in my mind that says they ought to have 50% of the directing jobs. It’s not a panacea. It’s a beginning.”
Landgraf revealed that he instituted the change by sending a letter to his network’s showrunners in January, urging them to diversify their pool of directors, and encouraging them reach out to FX executives for assistance in finding new and diverse talent.
Jonathan Frank, FX’s executive vice-president of current series, added that candidates with no prior TV-directing experience were considered. Instead, they had to demonstrate that they had “an aptitude for finding character moments and emotional moments and could execute them and translate them so that they shine through”.
Landgraf said FX is also intent on diversifying its pool of creators as well.
“Ultimately that changes the composition of the way a story is told and presented and it does ultimately change the composition of the employee base,” he said.
He said that Donald Glover’s Atlanta and Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, both of which premiere in September, are two of the shows resulting from this new approach.
