Diversity Behind The Scenes Of Episodic Television Hasn’t Improved

From actresses like Viola Davis (ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder), Octavia Spencer (Fox’s Red Band Society), and Alfre Woodard (NBC’s State of Affairs) taking leading roles to comedies like ABC’s Black-ish (about a black patriarch who worries his Beverly Hills family has lost its cultural roots), ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat (about a Taiwanese couple and their first-generation children living in suburban Florida in the ’90s), and The CW’s Jane the Virgin (about three generations of Latina women dealing with relationships and an unexpected pregnancy), it seemed the Scandal effect, as BuzzFeed’s Kate Aurthur called it, had finally begun to kick in. After Shonda Rhimes’ series with its black female lead in Kerry Washington became a particularly massive hit in the 2012–2013 season, some network executives made a conscious attempt to replicate the show’s success. In discussing ABC’s new series for the 2013–2014 season, Paul Lee, the network’s entertainment group president, said, “We really wanted to reflect the changing face of America.” But, just a few months prior, Fox’s Chairman of Entertainment Kevin Reilly admitted that behind the scenes, the networks still have work to do.

And nothing speaks to that more than a new report released by the Directors Guild of America that analyzed the ethnicity and gender of directors hired to direct primetime episodic television across broadcast, basic cable, premium cable, and high-budget online original series. After looking at more than 3,500 episodes among 220 scripted series produced in the 2013–2014 network television season and the 2013 cable television season, the DGA found that white males directed 69% of all episodes, minority males directed 17%, white females directed 12%, and minority females directed 2%.

Though the statistics about female directors remained static from the 2012–2013 season, the percentage of episodes directed by minority males appeared to increase 3%. But upon further examination, the DGA found that gain is solely attributed to Tyler Perry, who directed all episodes of the three television series he also produced in the most recent TV season — For Better or Worse, The Haves and the Have Nots, and Love Thy Neighbor, which all air on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

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