Sharon Horgan has claimed that studio executives usually give tougher notes on female characters, revealing that she often has to battle against the desire to “soften our edges.”
Reflecting on her interactions with studio chiefs at SXSW London, the BAFTA-winning Bad Sisters star said: “It’s very funny, actually, to get notes on something where you know there’s two lead characters in a show, one male, one female, and the notes that come back for the female character are usually kind of different than the ones you get for the male character.”
Horgan said she experienced this on Emmy-nominated Catastrophe, the Channel 4 series that streamed on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.
“We would have notes given to Rob [Delaney] and I about the unlikability of the female character, and … just like soften our edges a bit,” she explained. “We would do a bitch pass on Sharon, and then we would do like a bastard pass on Rob, to make Rob more of a bastard and make me less of a bitch.”
Horgan added that she has worked on U.S. pilots that have not been picked up because the female characters might not have been considered right for an audience.
This included an ABC pilot titled Bad Mom, in which a child made his mother a cocktail. “We realized pretty quickly that that was never going to get made,” she said. She added that the urge to self-censor some female characters in her writing “stays under your skin.”
Despite her success, Horgan said it remains “really hard” to get a series commissioned and films made. Youth, her follow-up to Bad Sisters, has landed at HBO and is currently in production. Produced by Merman, the comedy series follows a 50-year-old divorcee’s (Horgan) search for sex and love whilst juggling caring for her ailing parents and parenting her should-be grown-up son.
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