CONNIE BRITTON doesn’t often hear the word “no.”
The Emmy-nominated actress and producer has a string of iconic credits, inclu`ding starring roles in The White Lotus, Friday Night Lights, and Nashville. She’s a venture investor, a Dartmouth board member, and a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.
But the show that her company, Deep Blue Productions, was developing in 2022 wasn’t winning over the top brass at a Hollywood studio she pitched.
An intergenerational drama called Hysterical Women, it would center on four women, each experiencing a different hormonal shift. “We’ve got a daughter who is getting her period, a mother who is perimenopausal, her sister who is trying to go through fertility treatments, and then we’ve got the grandmother who is through menopause and having the best sex of her life,” Britton told an audience of female corporate leaders at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October. “It’s a fantastic show! Who wouldn’t watch that show?” The audience laughed and murmured assent.
And yet, Britton told them, Hysterical Women was not greenlit. The reason for this? The studio already had a show “on the air with four women,” and executives felt there wasn’t the space—or audience appetite—for a second.
The anecdote elicited rueful laughter. Granted, a show about “hysterical,” hormonal women might not be for everyone. But Britton’s point was clear: Men still run much of Hollywood.
The demoralizing reality, Britton told Fortune in a follow-up interview, is that even now, “there is not as much space for women-run and women-led programming.”
That’s true even six years after the #MeToo movement went viral and Time’s Up, a dominating the cultural zeitgeist and adding billions to the economy—but the top layer of entertainment industry power is still, largely, a boys’ club. There remains a glaring disconnect between the economic impact of women as consumers (they make up 44% of TV viewers across platforms), and the way that art and entertainment made by and for them is valued by industry decision-makers.
