Roundtable on women’s authorship and adaptation in contemporary television

ABSTRACT

This roundtable took place in summer 2023 and sought to capture current thinking on women’s authorship and adaptation in contemporary television. The roundtable brought together emerging and more established scholars from the US and the UK, including Elizabeth Alsop, Jacqueline Johnson, Stefania Marghitu, Isabel C. Pinedo, and Theresa Trimmel, and was moderated by Sarah Louise Smyth. While all scholars note a significant “surgence” in women’s television authorship, as many women showrunners, writers, producers, and directors are becoming highly visible in the streaming era, there are still a number of barriers at work: whiteness continues to be extremely pervasive; notions of taste and quality continue to undervalue women’s work; and the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes (ongoing during this roundtable’s discussion) disproportionately impact cisgender women and BIPOC, trans and non-binary people. This roundtable hopes to generate more discussions in these areas and open up further avenues for research.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s authorship
• television
• adaptation
• feminism
• streaming era

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Louise Smyth

Sarah Louise Smyth is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Essex, UK. Her work focuses on women’s authorship and the screen industries, and she has published essays on British women filmmakers. She is currently beginning a new project on Nora Ephron and has recently published the chapter “Nora, Julie, Julia: Legacies of Older Women in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2009)” in Women, Ageing and the Screen Industries, edited by Susan Liddy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).