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Regarding Female-Centric Shows and Behind-the-Scenes Dramas


Khan

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Which seems so utterly ridic to me.  Yes, Jackee, as Sondra, was the Emmy winner and breakout star.  But "227," as a series, NEVER revolved around her.  Mary, not Sondra, was the axis.  Anyone else could see that, but not Marla, or her ego.  And because she let her ego rule her emotions, a show that COULD have run 7 or 8 seasons ended up running only 5 after the breakout star was demoted and the new cast additions proved to be disastrous.

 

Isn't it true that Jeri Ryan and Brannon Braga's relationship rubbed many Trek-verse actors the wrong way?

 

I've read somewhere that the basic difference between Bea Arthur and Betty White boiled down to this: Betty was (and is) an optimistic person who could play to the audience in between takes, while Bea was more cynical, and more introverted.  Rue McClanahan, therefore, served as a kind of mediator, someone who could keep peace between the two.

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I honestly don't know - probably. They have acknowledged it was a bad idea. What I do know is most of the cast has also acknowledged that Kate put Ryan through hell and it was difficult to deal with, and that Ryan didn't deserve it. And IIRC, when Ryan joined the show she was married to a major Democratic politician in CA who became embroiled in a sex scandal which humiliated her - he had tried to force her to go to fetish clubs with him, etc. Ryan's relationship with Braga later on was a rebound from that. But Mulgrew was on her from Day 1.

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Must we bring Kelli Maroney into this?

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AFAIK, the rest of the cast actually loved both Ryan and Mulgrew - it was the two women that had the frosty relationship due to Mulgrew resenting the situation. But if you look 'em up on google images you'll see them having the time of their lives together recently, so that's nice. They were both so good on that mediocre show. Too good for it.

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As Vera Louise Gourman would say....Shame Shame Shame!

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Didn't Kane just last one season or was he there in season 2?

This is true. I wonder if this is why Kate left afterwards? Her replacement and departure is what ruined this show for me and completely made it less enjoyable.

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What is interesting to me is the focus on the catfighting between women in these behind-the-scenes TV shows. It is a trope we all recognise from our soaps and dramas, and it behooves the media to report it in such a manner because that brings the attention. I'm guilty of it as much as the next girl as the SATC drama has me all aflutter.

 

However, there has also been some EPIC behind-the-scenes drama on TV shows featuring males vs females. The one that come to mind is Grey's Anatomy when it was Katherine Heigl vs. Isaiah Washington vs. Patrick Dempsey/TR Knight. The Grey's Anatomy bitchfest in fact shows that it's 'not just' the women who don't get along, but men with each other and men with women, too.

 

The fact is, actors tend to be needy and self-involved and, in work situations, sometimes people don't get along with their co-workers. Moreover, on a top-rated TV show with the network and production company butting their noses in, and certain people (Heigl) leaking to the press and outing one of her co-stars, it's going to be a mess.

 

As we are now keenly aware, Hollywood is extremely toxic; Ellen Pompeo talked in a recent interview about how she tried to negotiate an increase in her salary, first with Dempsey onside (negotiating Friends-style), but then Dempsey got a big raise and so he backed off and she had to go it alone. Basically, she was informed by the production company that Dempsey was getting more than her because he was considered the draw. Production essentially pitted the females against the males in that fight. With the earlier Heigl/Washington debacle, we can add race and allegations of homophobia to that mix.

 

My personal take on that fight is that Heigl has always been troublesome on every TV set she goes, and not so much regarding money but regarding her character getting more airtime and attention. It started on the CW show Roswell where KH sidelined the main female character to the point where the show tanked quickly (one for the Series You Abandoned thread). On GA, while the show was an ensemble, it was clear that Pompeo and Dempse played the lynchpin main characters -- or rather Pompeo alone did (it's called Grey's for a reason). Heigl, TR Knight, Sandra Oh and others were in high supporting, at least in the early seasons. Shonda Rimes initially wanted McDreamy to be black, and she wanted Isaiah Washington to play him, but the network intervened and so she created the character of Burke for Washington. As it turned out, Washington and Oh had chemistry equal to Pompeo and Dempsey, and I think it always rankled Washington that he'd been sidelined for the chinless preener Dempsey. They hated each other. Heigl saw an opportunity to manoeuvre amid these simmering tensions and to up her presence on the show, hence the press debacle she instigated. This forced the network's and Shonda's hand in firing Washington. At least that is what was told to me by a friend who worked at HBO in LA at the time and who said all the crew at the time were talking about it. Most of the crew were sorry to see Washington go.

 

Anyhoo, sorry for the somewhat OT long post. As you can see, I hate Heigl and Dempsey lol, and feel IW was somewhat of a fall guy to their machinations.

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I've never heard of any bad blood between the women on China Beach. I did wonder about Chloe Webb as the show pretty much never mentioned her or brought her back when everyone else who played a living character returned, but she was part of their reunion photos a few years back, so maybe not.

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I think Arnold Kane left after the first season of "Alice."

 

IIRC, Kate Jackson left after the third season of "Charlie's Angels," because she was miffed that the producers could not (or would not) allow her time off to co-star in "Kramer vs. Kramer."  She was supposed to play the part that won Meryl Streep her first Oscar; and Kate believed that NOT being allowed to do the movie ruined her chances of launching a big film career.

 

Of course, several years later, after the greener pastures she'd left CA for turned out not to be so green, she came back to TV, with "Scarecrow & Mrs. King;" and from the start, she clashed with the creator/EPs, Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner, who ended up leaving about halfway through the first season.

 

But...wasn't IW the one who called T.R. Knight a "fag" or "faggot"?

 

You make an excellent point, Cat, about BTS dramas with both men and women.  As you've said, it's not JUST the women on TV shows who can't along, even though that's how the media portrays the situation.

 

Nevertheless -- and I guess this is my point in creating this thread -- if women who work in TV are well aware of the issues that can crop up in series where it might predominantly male or "50/50," meaning a mix of male and female cast members, wouldn't it behoove actresses who work on shows w/ predominantly female casts to rise above the tomfoolery and establish more inviting workplaces, if only to show those on the outside that women, even women who are on our TV screens everyday or every week, can co-exist peacefully in a creative working environment?  Especially now, as women in industries all over are fighting back against decades of sexism and objectification from men?

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Kate Jackson was too harsh to be a big movie actress - TV was her best medium. It's a shame she never found another part that suited her after that show ended. 

 

Ross-Leming and Buckner are poor showrunners. Their scripts on Supernatural are always like something out of a C-list sleaze film from 1983.

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Isaiah Washington is very talented, and I still enjoy seeing him in things. But his behavior re: Knight was erratic and inappropriate at best and arrogant and bigoted at worst.

 

I also never forgave Shonda Rhimes for her seemingly grudging, passive aggressive response to the whole situation - slow to act, slow to discipline him, perhaps because he'd been her original choice for Dempsey's role. A gay man got humiliated and smeared in public and she seemed to sit on her hands while IW just kept rambling to the press, like he was her soft spot. We've come a long way since that kind of public inaction and ambivalence, at least.

 

 I'm glad I finally can pin the rapid descent of Lois & Clark on someone. My mom and I dug it as a kid but the minute it went from Moonlighting to comic camp I quit - I was a huge comics geek (including the Superman titles at the time), but even then I knew they couldn't do that on the cheap.

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@Khan @Vee Maybe I'm the one acting like Shonda and giving Washington a free pass. He did refer to TR Knight as a slur while in a fight with Dempsey. I always felt IW was somewhat unfairly treated by other members of the cast; at the same time, I recognize that it was his own mouth that got his ass fired, and that Heigl took the opportunity to bring it out into the open in order to force Shonda's hand, because Rimes did NOT want to fire him.

 

 

You're right, of course, and there must be some cases of more welcoming and inclusive sets, especially now, especially in hindsight.

 

However, I also think that actresses had previously been sleepwalking when it comes to the current toxic environment. It has been accepted for so long that this environment is a given, that women's worth on a TV or film set is usually a fraction of a man's worth, and actresses just put up with it. Also I think there wasn't as much a sense of community, and jobbing actresses kept their heads down. Indeed, that is what Kim Cattrall seemingly did until well after SATC ended. Maybe some actresses felt they didn't have much power to meaningfully change things on a TV set. 

 

With SATC, SJP was of course not just an actress collecting a wage; she helped pitch the project, made sure she headlined the show, and quickly became an EP. She should and could have made the set more inclusive. After all, she and Michael Patrick King were best buds, and she had lunch on-set with Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis. When they went to Mexico and Morocco to do the movies, she stayed at the same luxe hotels with them. It was KC who was purposely excluded from these luncheons, or who was housed in a different hotel from the other three. SJP had chances to make the set a civil place (even if KC and SJP probably would not want to eat lunch together every day). She had the power to make the changes she wanted to the show, to the working environment, and she chose not to. And now she's getting her friends like Molly Shannon and Andy Cohen to be her mouthpieces and breathe, aghast, "how dare you" in Kim Cattrall's direction.

 

P.S.: I really enjoyed Scarecrow & Mrs. King back in the day. I also loved an NBC show called Partners in Crime starring Lynda Carter and Loni Anderson which only lasted, like, 10 episodes. I wonder how that set was? For some reason, I imagine Lynda Carter must have been pretty easygoing.

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