The directors for Season 7 of Game of Thrones have been announced, and there are more men behind the camera than naked boobs in front of it.
It hasn’t been confirmed yet that GoT will be dropping the episode order for next season to seven, but as Entertainment Weekly points out, there are fewer directors slated to helm the season. What they don’t point out is that the directors announced are, yet again, all men: Alan Taylor, Jeremy Podeswa, Mark Mylod, and Matt Shakman will be joining returning men Miguel Sapochnik and David Nutter.
Season 6 ended with the women of Westeros taking charge, pointing to a resolution of the story that sees their vindication after seasons of degradation and violence at the hands of men.
But as blogger Casey Cipriani points out, though Game of Thrones may be willing to court female fandom, it’s not necessarily interested in giving women jobs. She writes on Women and Hollywood that their stats are less than impressive when it comes to giving women power on the actual set:
Michelle MacLaren remains the show’s only female director. She directed four episodes over the course of Seasons 3 and 4. But Seasons 1,2,5, and 6 saw no other women helm an episode.
The series has had two female writers out of seven. But they, Vanessa Taylor and Jane Espenson, have only written three episodes between them.
As the DGA recently reported, women directed only 17.1 percent of television episodes during the 2015–16 season. A previous study from the DGA revealed that “women and minority directors face significant hiring disadvantage at entry level.”
The world of Game of Thrones might be as different as you can imagine from Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, but the story arc of a changing universe and shifting power structures have always seemed like a parallel to me. GoT’s showrunners might take a page out of Weiner’s book and consider who they’re hiring to write and direct women’s stories. In 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that on Mad Men “seven of the nine members of the writing team are women. Women directed five of the 13 episodes in the third season.” That was a good season.
Image via HBO.