'The Power' showrunner calls out 'horrendous' lack of women offered directing jobs

For the writers and producers of the Prime Video series The Power, starring Toni Collette and based on the book by Naomi Alderman, having a number of women involved in the development and directing of this show was critical.

In The Power, which premiered on March 31 and episodes continue to be released weekly, girls around the world discover they have an organ that generates electricity. That power, which can be transferred to older women as well, causes sparks to come out of their hands to electrocute people at will. This new "power" women and girls have attained around the world threatens the status quo of society, where largely men have held the most authority.

“There are incredible men who also work on the show so I don't want to not talk about them and their contributions, but as a woman who's been working in television for, let's say at least two decades, I have had to claw my way up from being the only woman in a room initially, in most of the writers rooms that I was in,” showrunner Raelle Tucker told Yahoo Canada.

“I think it was so important to give those opportunities to women who could speak to the experience of our female characters. But also, statistically, if you look at the number of female directors working right now, it's still absolutely horrendous. It's shocking that we haven't made more progress. So in a show that's wildly entertaining, but it's also political, I think our hiring decisions also had to reflect those politics.”

Executive producer Jane Featherstone stressed that oftentimes, when women are employed in directing roles, it's not for shows like The Power.

“They're given the traditionally more female stories, whether that's a more soapy story, or whatever it is," Featherstone said. "This has huge action set pieces, this has epic scale and it's cinematic, and you can use the toys to make this into a piece of real drama."

“It was really important as well that women directors got the chance to do that stuff, and the writers and the writing team got the chance to write that stuff, because we don't normally get the chance to do that.”

Naomi de Pear, an executive producer on the series as well, added that there is a "misconception" in the entertainment industry that it's "hard" to find women directors and other crew members.

“I've had other people in the industry say, how did you find all of those female directors,” de Pear said. “By the way, they're directors, … you don't need to say female before directors.”

“There's hundreds of talented female directors and you don't need to look far to find people who can work at the scale with this sort of ambition. Same with writers. I think there's this misconception that there's not enough women in the industry. There's loads of them, you've just got to give them the job.”

'Men have an inbred vanity'

This working environment, where women are leading the charge in telling this story, is something that has also been highlighted by The Power cast.

Eddie Marsan plays Bernie Monke, who's really the embodiment of toxic masculinity. He neglects his daughter Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz), oftentimes pretending she doesn't exist, while praising and mentoring his sons. Marsan stressed that a story like this could only be crafted by women, because it's written through the lens of women's experiences with men like Bernie.

“You can meet a guy on a date and think he's wonderful and within a few weeks, you find out that he's abusive," Marsan said. "That was something that men don't write, but women understand, and that's why it was fascinating to play Bernie."

“Men have an inbred vanity and also, we like to think that we're not misogynist, we don't have toxic masculinity, so when we write it, we can't write it two dimensional. We have a very comfortable detachment from it. What women were doing when writing Bernie, especially when they showed the scenes of love and connection with Roxy, and then it all turns on a dime and he's really horrible, that's women's experience of toxic masculinity.”