Woman On A Mission

Can Jill Soloway change the way we make TV?

- Emily Bobrow

JILL SOLOWAY LAUGHS at the bravado she displayed during her early-career pitch meetings with Hollywood television executives. “I used to walk in and tell them, ‘I want to do something no one has ever done before, and I want to change the world,’” she says. She soon learned that the writers who actually get their shows produced do so by promising to earn studios lots of money, so she toned down her revolutionary spiel. But now, after the runaway, Emmy winning success of Transparent—an on-demand Amazon series that launched in 2014 and is loosely based on Soloway’s own parent coming out as a transgender woman—she is back to rabble-rousing. With Topple, the production company she founded in 2016, this writer-director-producer aspires to achieve nothing less than to “topple the patriarchy.”

While walking around the Silver Lake reservoir, Soloway concedes that her goal to disrupt white male hegemony may be a bit hubristic. Most showrunners would be happy enough with the acclaim she received for Transparent and Six Feet Under—and some Porsche money. But don’t underestimate her ambition to inject feminism into the male-dominated world of entertainment. With Transparent, Soloway made a point of hiring as many queer and transgender people as possible, which demonstrated the critical and commercial value of including marginalized voices in a creative process and helped launch quite a few careers. Now, with I Love Dick, her latest series for Amazon, she eschews conventional expectations for how women should appear on screen (read: likable, sexy) to tell a story in which a woman is, in her words, “the subject, not the object.”