Hit HBO comedy Girls is to end after its sixth season, much to the distress of fans, but the era-defining show – created and written by and starring Lena Dunham – is part of a surge of female-driven TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic.
Television has long been criticised for its lack of female comedy writers, but that is changing. “There does seem to be this whole new wave of very talented women who are writing smart and funny and very complicated male and female characters. It really feels like a moment,” says Rachel Springett, comedy commissioning editor at Channel 4.
Aiming to plug the Catastrophe-sized hole in the channel’s schedule, Springett has commissioned Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Crashing, about a disparate group of characters living in a disused hospital in east London. She describes it as “one of the most sophisticated debut scripts, like nothing I had ever read”.
Also in the Channel 4 schedule will be Julia Davis’s Morning Has Broken, set on a breakfast television show, and Roisin Conaty’s Game Face, which follows a 30-year-old’s struggle to navigate life. There are also new series of Caitlin and Caroline Moran’s Raised by Wolves and Michaela Coel’s recent hit Chewing Gum.
Sky Atlantic also has another new Julia Davis show, Robin’s Test, which follows three couples on a disastrous camping holiday. Several long-running female-driven comedies will return across all Sky channels, including Ruth Jones’s Stella and the Manchester-set Mount Pleasant. Dunham’s Girls is also on the bill.
In the US, the year’s most hotly anticipated comedy is Issa Rae’s Insecure, which was recently picked up by HBO. Other new shows include Comedy Central’s Idiotsitter, created by and starring Jillian Bell; Sharon Horgan’s HBO comedy Divorce, starring Sarah Jessica Parker; and Comedy Central’s hugely entertaining Another Period, created by and starring Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome.
Jon Mountague, head of comedy at Sky, agrees that female writers are finally getting their chance to shine, and audiences are responding. “TV has become a little bit more democratic recently,” he says. “For far too long, female voices have been underused and underheard. That’s definitely changing, although it should be said that it could still happen a bit more quickly. We get a huge amount of shows written from the perspective of middle-aged white men in crisis … What’s important is that we reflect a range of voices, not only to serve a diverse audience but also because it allows us to tell new and different stories.”
Waller-Bridge, an award-winning playwright and actor who appeared in Broadchurch and The Iron Lady, said she was moved to write her own show after realising how few interesting parts there were for women in TV comedies.
“I became aware of the lack of women writing sitcoms because there was just this lack of interesting, contradictory, gross-out female parts that I was so desperate to play,” she says. “I would bemoan the lack of them, then scratched the surface to find out why and realised it’s because there are so few women actually writing them … There are so many kick-ass amazing female playwrights around at the moment, and it still feels like TV is playing catch up.”
Chewing Gum stood out last year because of the freshness and confidence of Coel’s writing. “The stars really aligned with that show – it was a seamless watching experience,” Mountague says.
“Something like Stella is now in its fifth season and its longevity is entirely down to the way audiences relate to Ruth, her writing and vision and a sense of authenticity that really strikes a chord,” he adds. “Similarly, fans are really passionate about Mount Pleasant, which is written by Sarah Hooper. We all need to work harder at finding different stories to excite and interest audiences. The more voices that are commissioned, the more likely that is to be.”
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Crashing starts on Channel 4 on 11 January. Stella returns to Sky1 on 12 January
