LOS ANGELES — Shows with diverse casts — such as “FBI,” “Bridgerton” and “Snowpiercer” — are popular with audiences, but white men are getting more opportunities to head up series with substantial budgets than women and people of color are, according to a UCLA study released Thursday.
The 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report, which covers data from the 2020-2021 season, finds that the TV industry is so far falling short on pledges made by executives in recent years to bring more diversity to writers rooms and the producing ranks, particularly when it comes to big-budget shows.
“The next few years may be a test of whether Hollywood is truly committed to the changes they promised during the nation’s reckoning on race following the murder of George Floyd,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA, which produces the report.
Although series with sizable budgets, such as HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and Prime Video’s “The Rings of Power,” are attracting large audiences and substantial media attention, a revelatory finding from the 2020-21 data shows that women and people of color — despite making gains in representation across all platforms — are not receiving the same financial backing as their white male counterparts.