H’wood Mounts Its Gender Bias Defense

…And puts women showrunners in the front lines so everybody knows the ladies are being exploited at the same time they’re being dissed getting a fair shake after all.

14 Women are in The Hollywood Reporter’s Top 50 Showrunners of 2012 – by Kerensa Cadenas (Hollywood Reporter)

The Hollywood Reporter recently named their Top 50 Showrunners of 2012 for both comedy and drama. 14 of the 50 showrunners named were women. And women made up 4 of the 11 on the Showrunners to Watch list. Despite the recent and continuing frustrating news regarding women in television, I’m hoping that the recentinflux of women-created television news continues to up these numbers. read article

Who Says Web Series Aren’t the Future of TV?

Fairfax, one of Australia’s largest media companies, says it is.

And inasmuch as they’re Big Dogs in the country that gave us WILFRED, we’re all ears:

Show Doing Well on BitTorrent? We’ll Buy It, Says Media Giant – by Ernesto

Fairfax’s head of video Ricky Sutton has admitted that his company’s acquisition strategy is in large part based on what content is popular on BitTorrent. Not only is Fairfax using BitTorrent as a market research tool, the company also admits to advertising their content offerings directly on BitTorrent sites, in an attempt to convert pirates into paying customers. read article

NBC-Universal Exec V.P. Muses About the Future of Television

Definitely worth reading:

Our favorite inkblot, best described as: “OMG! An agent!”

The TV Industry’s New Rorschach Test – by Tony Cardinale (HuffingtonPost.Com)

A YouTube cooking show has just been picked up for network syndication. Ratings for the Summer Olympics surged, driven by an unprecedented amount of streaming content online. Last month, for the first time ever, not one single Best Drama Emmy nominee came from a broadcast network. The first week of the broadcast season was its lowest-rated in history[1], while on cable Here Comes Honey Boo Boo drew nearly three million viewers[2]. Oh, how the TV landscape is changing!

Today’s picture of consumers and their new entertainment behaviors is a Rorschach test of sorts. And as someone who likes to look at the glass as half full, we see opportunity in that illustration — the future is bright; but there are others who see disaster ahead. read article

A Serious Look at How to Come Up w/Awesome Sci-Fi Ideas

The most helpful post of the month so far:

10 Tips for Generating Killer Science Fiction Story Ideas – by Charlie Jane Anders

Science fiction is the literature of big ideas — so coming up with an amazing story idea often feels like the biggest stumbling block in the way of your dreams of authorship. Unfortunately, most of us can’t just have Robert A. Heinlein mail us $100 and a couple dozen brilliant ideas. So what do you do? read article

Love & Money Dept – TV Writing Deals for 10/16/12

The Beverly Hills are alive with the sound of, “Cha-ching!”
  •  Jeff Lowell (COMMON LAW, JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE) & Emma Koenig are writing a sitcom pilot for NBC based on Koenig’s blog, “F*ck! I’m in My Twenties” (proving that TV executives love titles they can’t put on TV).
  • Kenya Barris (SOUL FOOD, GIRLFRIENDS, THE GAME) is “co-creating” FIVEHEAD, a sitcom for ABC, with Tyra Banks, on whose life the show is based (the fact that Barris is listed as “co-creator” and not “writer” proving that even though this is supposed to be a “scripted” series, Ms. Banks has no idea whatsoever what that means).
  • Joseph McGinty Nichol & Daniel Cerone (creators of SUPERNATURAL, CHUCK, CHARMED, DEXTER)) have sold #RESISTANCE, a series about a kickass woman cop turned vigilantes to CBS (the hashtag proving CBS is much younger/hipper/nerdier than the world previously believed.)
  • NBC is planning a new series, WUNDERLAND, written by Anthony Zuiker (CSI), about a time in the future when Alice has become an evil queen fighting to stop a young rebel from – you guessed it – the other side of the looking glass – from overthrowing her (proving that nobody at NBC knows what Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was all about. Nor, it would seem, do they care).