Every director for the second season of Netflix’s superhero jawn Jessica Jones will be a woman, reportsVariety. Melissa Rosenberg, the series showrunner, confirmed the hirings at a talk Friday at UC-Annenberg, but didn’t say any of the directors by name.
Seems like the series took a page from Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar, which debuted in September and also announced that its first season would be directed by women exclusively. An apparently increasing trend in television to right the gross imbalance of male-to-female directors given opportunities in all aspects of Hollywood, a number of newer women-centric or woman-developed shows feature majority-women directors, Insecure and the most recent season of Transparent among them.
The next season of Jessica Jones likely won’t air until 2018—which seems absurd, considering how hungry women are for three-dimensional characters like Jones—so it’s probably smart for the show to get ahead of the curve, considering by that time more than incremental shifts in the inclusion of women and/or people of color in Hollywood will have been made. At her Annenberg talk, Rosenberg emphasized the importance of having a wide and diverse range of voices in the creation of a program, according to Variety. “When I interview a writer, I’m less interested in what you’ve been doing professionally than I am in where you’re from, what your parents do, what’s your life experience, what are you bringing to the table personally?” she said. “I don’t want a bunch of people who look and sound [like me] and have the experiences I have.”
