TV writers’ rooms, so we have long been told (mostly by male writers), are hotbeds of creativity. Places where intense geniuses bat one-liners back and forth like tennis champions and everyone talks like Don Draper landing an account with Chevy. Normal workplace rules don’t apply in this weirdly mythologised space. Everything must be at the service of the story. So if that involves a male writer forcing a female writer’s head between her knees, then balancing a soda can on it while making a joke about her ability to perform oral sex (as writer Mark Schwahn was alleged to have done during his time on One Tree Hill, according to a Variety report last year), then so be it. An award-winning show might be the end result.
Post #MeToo, it turns out the hallowed writers’ room is in fact a hotbed of … sexual harassment. More than a decade after the “Friends” decision of 2006, when the California supreme court ruled that sexually explicit talk in a writers’ room did not amount to sexual harassment, a Writers Guild of America West survey has found that almost two-thirds of female writers have experienced harassment at some point in their careers, much of it in the production of American sitcoms. The funny place is often where the nasty stuff happens. Women tend to be told to lighten up if they don’t like it.
Most women have stories to tell. I have sat in newspaper conferences, surrounded by men “bantering” over which hot actress to put on a cover. I have wanted the ground to swallow me up listening to a debate over whether running interviews with two Asian women over consecutive weeks is “too much”. These may not be examples of sexual harassment, but they are standard ways of undermining women in the workplace. They show how hard it can be simply trying to occupy your space at the table. The culture is so ingrained, calling it out doesn’t feel like an option. Instead, we tend to feel humiliated, complicit, ashamed.
What is the message here? That an unsafe space is a prerequisite for visionary thinking? That women writers, who will almost always be outnumbered and paid less, function as a kind of creative collateral damage? That it’s OK to ask a female employee to lie on the floor while assuming a stance on top of her because “it’s not uncommon in writers’ rooms that we act out what we want production to film”? This is what the showrunner Andrew Kreisberg, since fired by Warner Bros following multiple claims of sexual harassment, reportedly said in response to the above allegation. An answer that demonstrates the casual contempt for women such workplace cultures breed, and proves that misogyny in the writers’ room will inevitably lead to misogyny on screen.
