A small number of people still don’t seem to believe that there is a correlation between badly written female characters and male-dominated writers’ rooms.
Well then… Let’s take a look, shall we?
Above, you see the distribution of writing credits for Rizzoli & Isles based on the data available on IMDb for all six seasons (as of 2015-08-19). This isn’t an official research project, but I think it illustrates the problem quite well.
It’s simple: red = female writer, blue = male writer.
The data includes major writing credits, such as “written by,” “story by,” “story editor” and “teleplay.” These are the credits at the top of the IMDb page for the respective episode. If two people share the same type of credit (e.g. “written by Writer A & Writer B”), I awarded half a point each. Also note that sometimes one writer received several types of credits (e.g., in 5x15, Ron McGee is credited both for “written by” and “story editor”). In these cases, each type of credit counts individually because it would’ve been possible to award one of these credits to another writer (maybe even a woman).
Not included are the “Based on the novels by” credit for Tess Gerritsen and the “Developed by” credit for Janet Tamaro, because these are just credits on paper without any effect on the actual episode.
As you can see, S1 and S2 look the way you would expect them to look. Notice the spike of male writers in the second half of S3 when the focus shifted to Lydia / TJ and “Casey as the brave hero.” Then, S4 looks almost normal again (aside from Casey’s magical boner, the overall tone was indeed more mature compared to S3). And then we have the total character deconstruction of Jane, Maura, and Angela (plus Susie’s pointless death) in S5 and S6… Look at the graphs. Do I really need to explain what’s going on there?
