TELEVISION

On screen and off, female power drives ABC’s ‘Nashville’

7 of the show’s 10 current writers are women

ABC’s ‘Nashville’ stars Hayden Panettiere as Juliette Barnes and Connie Britton as Rayna Jaymes.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Callie Khouri’s office is laden with secrets.

An emerald-green silk chaise, a Craftsman-style lamp and scattered family heirlooms lend Southern-belle intrigue to the Nashville creator’s Santa Monica work space.

On a shelf rests a silver urn with the cryptic label “Relax Pills.” Beside it is a 1920s Underwood typewriter that once belonged to Khouri’s grandfather, though what he tapped out on it is a mystery, even to her.

Also under wraps is the plot of the Wednesday season finale of ABC’s country-music drama, something Khouri guards vehemently — almost as closely as the ingredients in the frothy bourbon smoothies we’re sampling this afternoon.

“They’re good, aren’t they?” Khouri says, sipping hers through a straw. “I really have no idea what’s in them.” The cagey spark in her eye suggests she may know more than she’s letting on.

One thing she’ll happily talk about is the unusual amount of female power behind Nashville. Women aren’t just in the writers room at Nashville, they have the majority say. Seven of the show’s 10 current writers are women, including Khouri and show runner Dee Johnson, as are many of its directors.

It’s the same story up and down the chain of command, from the show’s top executives — Lionsgate’s Chris Selak, ABC Studio’s Stephanie Leifer and ABC’s Channing Dungey — to each of its current editors and all but one of its interns.

At the moment, a dozen or so Nashville staffers, including the show’s lone male intern (he made the bourbon smoothies from his grandmother’s recipe), are gathered on folding chairs around an overstuffed leather ottoman strewn with snacks — carrot sticks, almonds, a wedge of Brie — in Khouri’s office.

“The interesting thing is, we never thought, ‘Let’s hire women.’ It was just: ‘Who’s the best person for the job?’” Khouri says. “It absolutely came about organically.”

“It’s so rare, honestly, at least in my experience,” adds Johnson, who was formerly a show runner on The Good Wife and other shows.

“It’s much better than it used to be,” Khouri says, “but when you look at the overall numbers for women in the Writers Guild, it’s inexplicable, inexcusable.”

A WGA report released this spring on diversity found a “far from level” playing field for TV writers in the 2011-2012 season (which didn’t include Nashville), with an average of 2.73 women writers per show.

With just a 5 percent increase in the share of TV writing jobs for women over the last decade, the report declared, “it would be another 42 years before women reach proportionate representation.”

A Directors Guild study of episodic TV directors for the same season found Caucasian males directed 73 percent of the work across broadcast and cable; Caucasian females, 11 percent; and minority females, 4 percent.

The landscape of Nashville “is obviously way above average,” says Kimberly Myers, director of diversity for WGA West. “It has the potential to change things. The more you get women gaining experience and joining the pool of people regularly considered for jobs changes paradigms — work begets work. It absolutely opens doors.”

Nashville isn’t a total anomaly — at ABC alone, longtime show creator Shonda Rhimes staffs plenty of women at Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and she did the same on Private Practice. AMC’s The Walking Dead and HBO’s Girls feature a particularly high number of women directors. But these are not the norm.

“I’ve been in some ugly (writers) rooms. It can get combative,” says Johnson, who is Filipino American. “This is a pretty loud room, but pretty egalitarian. It’s very sort of gracious.”

“I’ve been in many rooms where I’m the only black person, and many rooms where I’m the only woman,” adds writer Wendy Calhoun. “Sometimes writers get pigeonholed into only being able to pitch toward certain characters — they give you the black person to write. In this room, everyone’s pitching on everybody. It’s so refreshing.”

There’s an in-the-trenches camaraderie between Khouri and Johnson, both of whom simultaneously exude femininity and tough-as-nails confidence.

Neither graduated college — and neither is ashamed of that fact. They’ve both depended on raw talent and hard work to rise to positions of prominence. And both clearly command the attention, respect, and affection of this crew, who often finish one another’s sentences and are prone to bouts of spontaneous laughter.

The gender neutrality extends to men. “I’m one of the few men on this staff,” says David Gould. “But I don’t feel an imbalance. I was a musician and this reminds me of being in a band. Everyone’s in it together.”

Dungey, ABC’s senior vice president of drama development, says Khouri’s “richly layered” female characters struck her from the very first pitch meeting: “I recognized these women she was describing. I saw myself and my friends and family in them, and I wanted to be a part of helping bring their stories to life.”

Khouri says she’s hopeful for a Season 2 pickup, “but you never know.”

The bigger mystery for fans of the show is whether the online rumors are true that two characters get killed off in the finale she’s shooting. All Khouri will say is, “You’ll have to tune in to find out.”