It’s been a long few months of scandal ever since the Harvey Weinstein floodgates opened, so you might not remember some of the other big names outed last fall. Among the named and shamed was Roy Price, former president of Amazon Studios, who allegedly sexually harassed a female producer. The company, now in search of new creative leadership, should be looking for ways to repair their image as they head into a new year of original programming. Instead, they’re axing their best female-led original series.
Last week, the streaming service canceled Tig Notaro and Diablo Cody’s “One Mississippi” and Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins’ “I Love Dick.” Each show was critically beloved, including here at The Playlist, where we awarded both “I Love Dick” and “One Mississippi” A grades. “I Love Dick,” the second Amazon-backed series from “Transparent”creator Jill Soloway, reverently adapts the eponymous feminist text by Chris Kraus. The show follows Chris (an electric Kathryn Hahn) as she navigates desire in the face of marital and academic misogyny. “One Mississippi,” which dramatizes Notaro’s own life after her double mastectomy and mother’s death, explored grief, trauma, and lesbian identity in the deep South.
Season 2 of “One Mississippi,” released just months before the #MeToo dam broke, included a prescient subplot about an executive who masturbates in front of his female coworker. The scenes mirror real-world accusations against Louis C.K., who Tig Notaro has continuously denounced despite his executive producer credit on her show. In The New York Times’ coverage of the C.K. allegations, Notaro said that she felt “trapped” by their association, and that “[h]e knew it was going to make him look like a good guy, supporting a woman.” The Hollywood Reporter alleges that canceling “One Mississippi” marks a PR-savvy move away from C.K. If such a separation did motivate Amazon Studios’ decision to cut the show, it would represent an interesting double standard from the distributor that’s backed Woody Allen’s last two features, the limited series “Crisis In Six Scenes,” as well as his upcoming “A Rainy Day In New York.”
Like any social trend today, #MeToo and #TimesUp walk the line between activism and hollow symbolism. With the decision to cancel “One Mississippi” and “I Love Dick” (and industry rumors buzzing that “Transparent” may be next, after accusations against lead Jeffrey Tambor), it seems Amazon Studios has chosen the latter strategy. The company faced scrutiny last year after axing Dana Calvo’s “Good Girls Revolt,” a show about the first women in the media to sue for gender discrimination. Calvo linked the decision to Roy Price, saying he “just doesn’t care for the show,” and reportedly wouldn’t even learn its character’s names. But even in this post-Price era, as COO Albert Cheng takes over for the disgraced executive and Sharon Tal Yguado begins overseeing scripted originals, it seems Amazon cares little for female-centered programming.
In a memo about Price’s suspension released last October, senior VP of Business Development Jeff Blackburn asserted that “the news coming out of Hollywood over the past week has been shocking and disturbing.” He goes on:
I remain incredibly optimistic about the future of Amazon Studios and what we have planned in FY-18 and beyond. We need to ensure that our focus remains on our customers, and that we are executing on their behalf. Thank you for your dedication and commitment to our creators and talent, who are making some of the very best content available on TV and in theaters all over the world.
It’s befuddling, then, to see the company continue killing off its “very best content.” Both “One Mississippi” and “I Love Dick” were critically acclaimed: “I Love Dick” scored a Golden Globe nomination for male lead Kevin Bacon this year, while “One Mississippi” was nominated for a 2017 WGA Award and won the Critics Choice Television Award for Most Exciting New Series.
Both shows have strong cult followings, thanks in part to their LGBT cultural significance. It’s worth noting that Tig Notaro, a lesbian, and Jill Soloway, a nonbinary queer person, are both gay as well as female. Both shows feature butch lesbian characters and front-and-center romantic relationships between women. These shows’ cancellations mark a serious loss for lesbian representation and LGBT audiences in general.
Amazon is supposedly cutting indie-esque content to focus on franchise tentpoles like their upcoming “Lord of the Rings” series. Among TV/film giants, profit trumps quality content. Water is wet. But it feels especially harsh to see these titles go in the midst of #MeToo. Aside from directly addressing some of the most high-profile Hollywood allegations in-show, “One Mississippi” provided creative space for its female showrunners to uniquely and sardonically elucidate the fallout of sexual assault, homophobia, and societal misogyny. In one of the show’s most haunting scenes, a chorus of female characters gigglingly discuss their sexual assault histories, sleepover-style. “I Love Dick” adapts an overtly feminist work, tackling misogyny in academia and the politics of desire. In one of the best TV episodes this decade, “A Short History of Weird Girls,” the women of “I Love Dick” unpack their sexual histories in to-camera monologues.
If #MeToo has taught us anything, it should be that women’s stories – particularly women’s stories of assault and sexuality and desire – matter. #MeToo is a cultural response to societal silence. The solution to this epidemic is to let more women speak. By cutting these stories out of their lineup, Amazon have proved that they don’t really care about women’s voices – thus, the #MeToo problem itself. It’s sadly unsurprising to see a studio value money over quality, but in this new dawn of industry criticism, it’s significant to see a studio value money over women.
Female voices deserve a place on our screens. LGBT creators deserve to share their work. If Amazon doesn’t want to make space for those projects anymore, they’re going to fall into the same bland pattern most major Hollywood studios have adopted, cranking out franchises and big-budget productions that eventually grow stale. Here’s hoping that both “One Mississippi” and “I Love Dick” find a smarter network, and that Amazon eventually realizes their mistake.