Earlier this week, Drew, a CBS pilot about a grown-up Nancy Drew was rejected by the network—despite testing well with audiences—because it reportedly skewed “too female.” With actress Sarah Shahi playing the lead, the show would have been the first to feature a person of color as Nancy Drew, and was widely hyped before its release. Its dismissal was greeted with disappointment from many, and the outrage ballooned into major backlash online. Soon enough, the hashtag #toofemale was trending.
Actress Carrie Preston of True Blood and The Good Wife was one of the first to call out CBS for the decision on Twitter, and the criticism piled on, even prompting Shahi herself to weigh in on the lack of representation for women on television. As some noted, an aversion to strong female characters doesn’t bode well for the network’s upcoming programming, including a planned reboot of Star Trek. Many brought up female detectives who have done well in the past, including Scully from the X-Files and more. Others tweeted simply, “You suck, CBS.”
Glenn Geller, president of CBS Entertainment, denied gender had anything to do with the show’s rejection on Wednesday, but by then the decision had already generated hundreds of tweets. Many viewers are now challenging CBS—which only has two women on its 13-member board of directors—on its representation of women. What's worse, Dana Piccoli, an entertainment writer and pop culture critic who was one of the first to tweet the hashtag, said based on this week’s upfronts, it looks like the network that once hosted the Good Wife is slipping backwards.
“Almost all of the new shows are led by men,” Piccoli said. “I think there is a resistance to change the course from what's proven to be successful, so why not just keep doing it. Thing is, the TV world is rapidly changing and those who don't adapt will be left behind by viewers.”
Other networks are not doing much better—ABC picked up Conviction, which despite featuring a female lead looks like a sexist trainwreck. Most other shows picked up this season were written by men. (To be fair, CBS did pick up Doubt, a legal drama starring Laverne Cox and Katherine Heigl written by the same people behind Drew: Joan Rater and Tony Phelan of Grey’s Anatomy.)
According to Piccoli, it is continually becoming less acceptable for networks to ignore 50 percent of their audience. “There's this really insidious misconception that men won't tune in to watch women led shows, so networks have to be careful about putting too many women on the bill,” she said. “Tell that to Orange is the New Black, or Pretty Little Liars, or Jessica Jones. Women are all too often dismissed as a core audience and not only is that insulting, it's just not good business.”
Yearafter year, the Hollywood Diversity report from UCLA proves Piccoli is right: Shows with more diverse casts “excel” in ratings compared to non-diverse shows.
“There was an apparent disconnect between the industry's professed focus on the bottom line and actual staffing practices in film, broadcast television, and cable,” the study said—median ratings peaked for shows with casts around 41 to 50 percent minority.
Many shows are ahead of the curve and already seeing the benefits in viewership: If the continued success of programs like Jessica Jones, which saw 4.8 million viewers in a 35-day cycle; Transparent whose director owes its success to its feminist roots; and Orange is the New Black, which had Netflix subscriber growth double shortly after its launch, are any indication, making strong female roles a priority isn’t only doable, it’s lucrative.
While Upfronts continue, the #toofemale conversation is continuing to rage on. It has already outlasted the elimination of Drew, with more people using the hashtag on Thursday to criticize the decision not to allow any of the women from the casts of CW shows Arrow or The Flash speak at the CW Upfronts. Of course, a hashtag won't soon change the fact that television network and studio heads are 96 percent white and 71 percent male. Maybe the executives won’t care about the hashtag, continuing to eschew diversity to maintain the bottom line while willfully ignoring stats that suggest their old practices are counterproductive. But it’s possible this conversation will get them to think about what viewers want. When women start tweeting “maybe I’m #toofemale for CBS,” it might be time for the network to start paying attention before it loses viewership. And maybe somewhere down the road, we could get a network series landscape as diverse as the streaming world is starting to look. With the #toofemale movement outlasting the usual 24-hour Twitter outrage cycle, maybe lasting change will be next.
