How showrunners and writers set the tone for an inclusive room.

(12/4/2020)

“What can a Showrunner say on Day One of the room to help create a healthy and safe atmosphere, and help everyone feel comfortable raising their concerns?”

This question was posed during a panel discussion in October that addressed how best to have an open dialogue about social justice issues in writers’ rooms, and the pervasive underrepresentation of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers on staffs that can make such discussions fraught with tension.

Presented by the WGAW’s Writers Education Committee, Committee of Black Writers, and Committee of Women Writers, the virtual panel of showrunners and writers had a two-fold aim: to share “tools, resources, and approaches” to increase inclusivity and upward mobility for underrepresented BIPOC writers, and to discuss how “non-BIPOC writers can discuss sensitive matters of race and sexuality in the room.”

It was in the context of the latter issue that the Day One conversation came up. To dig into the subject more deeply, Connect caught up with several of the panelists.

Joy Kecken (Motherland: Fort Salem, The Wire) organized the panel coming out of a turbulent summer in which the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement gave rise to a new consideration of the malign influence of a TV staple—the cop show. At the time, Kecken, as showrunner, was hiring writers for just such a series, and consulted with the Color of Change #ChangeHollywood initiative. “It was eye-opening,” Kecken said, referring to the input on how to prevent a series from skewing toward racial bias in its depictions of law enforcement interactions with the public.

Kecken wanted to share what she’d been exposed to from Color of Change and the Think Tank for Inclusion & Equity (TTIE). (The latter group recently launched a series of factsheets designed to educate writers on “a number of mis- and underrepresented communities and issues.”) At the same time, a big part of the panel, she said, “was talking about sensitive topics in a writers’ room, and the sensitivity that comes out of most showrunners dealing with a staff that may not look like them, even in terms of sexuality or age or disability. How do you talk about these sensitive topics in a way that acknowledges the room, and where the showrunner is actually listening? At least from the panel that we had, many of the writers who had been on staffs felt like, if they were Black or Latino, whatever they had to say was dismissed.”

Panelist Janine Sherman Barrois, showrunner of Claws, pointed out that honest conversations in the room are best achieved through the multiplicity of views that come from having a diverse staff. “A lot of the conversation that night was generated from, how do we make the workplace more inclusive and not so segregated” in terms of race and gender, she said. “If you have an environment where you have ten writers in a room, and there are nine white people and you have one person of color, how are you having honest conversations? Because the person of color is not in a position of power often, nor is it their job to shoot down everyone in the room with their beliefs. Nor should the white people feel that their beliefs are word because they’re going unchecked. You then have conversations that happen that put people in positions where they don’t feel heard, they don’t feel safe.”

As for the Day One conversation, Barrois said: “I think you do need to have some sort of speech, especially in letting people know that their points of view are safe and sacred in this room. You want everyone to be heard, you want thoughts to be challenged, you don’t want writers to feel like their voices cannot be heard and that there’s a power dynamic where they are not allowed to be their authentic self.”

As a writer of color who is half-Black and half-Asian, panelist and WGAW Board member Deric A. Hughes is familiar with the Day One routine of walking into a room and doing the mental check, as in: “OK, how many [BIPOC writers] are there?” Ultimately, several panelists noted, the real Day One opportunity for inclusivity must happen much earlier: When a show has been greenlit or picked up, and it’s time to hire a staff.

Glen Mazzara: The Showrunner’s Opening Day Speech

In recent years, co-chair of the WGAW Inclusion and Equity Group Glen Mazzara has given an hourlong talk—what he calls the Showrunner’s Opening Day Speech—versions of which he’s used on The Walking Dead, The Dark Tower, and Damien.

Mazzara’s Day One “rules of the room” are up-front and specific. No interrupting when someone is speaking. No porn in the office. (“I do find that sometimes people start calling up videos, and pretty soon you could end up that people are joking around with porn that makes people uncomfortable,” he said.) The n-word is off-limits. “People end up using the n-word when they are pitching out material and they are channeling a character. So I just say, ‘Don’t do it.’”

While there is room for heated debates on issues like race and domestic violence, they should be on story points, Mazzara emphasizes. Equally important, Mazzara makes explicit the formal and informal resources available to writers, from the Guild and the studio, so that issues don’t fester. He does not exclude himself from this. “If I’m the problem, or my number two is the problem, feel free to report,” Mazzara said.

“Very often you get repeated instances of conflict or abuse or bullying, and the traditional method has been studios, or producers, or showrunners, just saying, ‘Well let’s just get through this season.’ And the can gets kicked down the road and nothing’s ever resolved,” Mazzara said. “To take the stage on Day One and say, ‘I’m the showrunner and we’re all part of the same team, and here’s been my experience with running shows, and here’s how I want this show to run, and here are your resources,’ it just makes people comfortable and it puts all the issues out on the table in a way that includes everyone in the process.”

The talk, Mazzara said, is reflective of a generational shift when it comes to the unilateral authority historically celebrated by the industry. That has changed, Mazzara said, alongside the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, and since the results of a late-2017 survey demonstrated abusive norms in room culture. “In a way, the Guild became like a union that represents miners. We cannot send our people into unsafe conditions. There’s an activism within the mid-level and younger writers that there is an expectation. It’s a power shift. If they’re going to sign on to a show, and they’re going to have their career for the next six months or a year or three years in the hands of a showrunner, those mid-level members are putting pressure on the Guild leadership to make sure that the showrunners know what they’re doing.”