How Oprah’s Network Finally Found Its Voice
Summary
“She came in and sat right in front of me, and from the start was wanting to open the story up and understand what it was about,” he tells me when I reach him by phone in Los Angeles. The ACLU analyzed more than 220 television shows made in 2013-14, representing about 3,500 total episodes, and found that women accounted for only 14 percent of directors. More recently, a 2016 report from the Writers Guild of America, West, revealed that among scripted TV creators on broadcast networks, minorities were underrepresented 11 to one. (The same year, top showrunner Ryan Murphy, who recently left FX for Netflix in a five-year, $300 million deal, launched the HALF Initiative, which similarly seeks to boost the number of directors who are women and people of color.) OWN had a major stake in this creative and commercial renaissance, as its two new scripted dramas received critical acclaim in traditional media and online among newly minted fans, helping to chart a revised course for the network’s future.