I feel like the majority of the stories that I post here begin with "I was talking to my friend Kim." But I was talking to my friend Kim recently about Community and some qualms we have been having with the writing. I told her that what the show truly needs is to return to a balanced writing staff a la season one with an equal number of both males and females. That led me down an interesting rabbit hole in attempting to discover exactly HOW many episodes per season of Community were written or co-written by female writers. After I made a rather startling discovery, I decided to apply this investigative work to more of my favorite network television comedies and made some more pretty starling discoveries, as well as developed a hypothesis based on my raw data. (Look at me sounding all science-y and stuff! You'd hardly know this was a writing blog.)
So, before I break down each show and its seasons, let me explain what you'll be reading and how I recovered the data/what it means:
The shows: I studied Community, New Girl, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and (to a lesser extent) The Mindy Project.
How I came up with the data: I researched the episodes in each season that have aired. (*Now updated since the seasons are over, to reflect the final percentages!) If a single episode was written solely by a woman or by a pair of women, I counted it as 1 point. My reasoning, of course, is that I am mostly focusing on the number of episodes penned by women. It doesn't matter if one or two or a hundred women write an episode: it counts as one episode. If a single episode was written by a writing team consisting of a male and female, I counted it as 1/2 of a point. I gave women like Annie Mebane and Amy Poehler credit if they wrote with a partner because, duh, they still wrote something!
What it all means: This data is obviously a baseline, not an end-all-be-all set of numbers. A variety of factors played into the percentages -- the number of episodes per season is, of course, a major factor. The larger number of episodes in a season, the less likely that there is a large percentage of episodes written by females (as sad as that is to type). Additionally, the size of the writing staff and the diversity among the staff plays a factor in the number of episodes written by women. Shows with a high turnover rate among the writing staff will also factor into this number. Again: it's not a conclusive set of data, but it's definitely interesting to watch the trend among certain shows rise and fall.
And now, without further adieu, let's take a look at some of the shows on my list!
