My first time up to bat as a showrunner, what I did was hire an all-Latinx writers room. And it's a diverse Latinx writers room - we have an Afro-Dominican and Texicans and Chileans. It's diverse within its Latinidad.
White, older showrunners told me, 'Why do you want to hire an all-Latinx writers room? Hire who's best for the show - don't get caught up in that.' And I was like, 'No.' For such an intimate show about the details of a culture? You can't fake that. The room needs to reflect the makeup of the show.
At Shondaland, six out of nine writers were of color - not Latinx, but I was like, 'Wait, I can do that but for the whole room?' 'Atlanta' had done that, then I can do that.
I had never heard this term before - gente-fication - which is also happening in Portland, Houston; it's happening in a lot of cities. It's upwardly mobile Latinx who want to come back to their neighborhoods where they grew up - or it's Latinx moving to L.A. and looking for a Latinx neighborhood to live or open a business.
Book critics certainly are judges who wield a tremendous amount of power in terms of whether or not a book will reach a wider audience. That's one of the reasons why I try to give coverage to books written by Latinx writers; too many worthwhile works of literature do not get the kind of coverage they deserve, and I've certainly seen that with respect to books written by writers of color. But there are some wonderful, diverse writers out there who mentor and otherwise support those voices that often have been ignored by much of the mainstream press.
When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.
I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.
I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.
A lot of what you're seeing these characters go through is something that either is a story one of the actors told in the writers' room or one of the writers themselves told in the writers' room.
The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.
I just wanted to put together the best Latinx writers. I didn't care about the level.They have a passion for 'Vida' in a different way, in a higher way.
One of my favorites is 'Parks and Recreation.' Great show; awesome writing; beautiful, diverse cast. They also have a very diverse writer's room, which I love.
I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.
In television writing, even if you're running the writers room, it's a writers room.
Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.
You want a diverse writers' room, not because it's the fair thing to do or the right thing to do, but because it's the best thing to do for your show. I've seen that to be true.
When you're doing a pilot, you're doing it in this bubble that almost works against the creative impulse. You don't have time to get to know the actors first, and you have three writers, as opposed to a room full of writers.