A 'MacGyver' Competition Asks: What If Our TV Stars Were Scientists and Engineers?
In the 1985 TV show MacGyver, the secret agent title character used a Swiss army knife and a roll of duct tape to solve urgent, life-or-death crises. Thirty years later, series creator Lee David Zlotoff gathered a room full of scientists, engineers, and screenwriters to solve what he sees as one of the world's most pressing problems: how to get more women involved in science. The answer, it seems, is television.
"Whether we want this to be true or not, people learn an enormous amount from what they see on TV," said Ann Merchant, a spokesperson for the National Academy of Sciences. Entertainment, she said, is "accidental curriculum."
It was Tuesday afternoon and the crowd at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, Calif. was waiting anxiously for the judges to announce the winner of The Next MacGyver, a nationwide competition in which nearly 2,000 contestants submitted proposals for a potential TV series. There's no guarantee that the winning shows will ever air, but there's $5,000 at stake and a far more valuable prize: a mentorship with established TV producers. There's just two key guidelines: the show has to involve science or engineering and its MacGyver character must to be a woman. Easier said than done.
"Writers are taught to write what they know. They don't know any engineers," said Merchant. She added that the National Academy of Sciences' entertainment exchange program, which matches scientists as research consultants on Hollywood productions, has been pushing to make women engineers more visible to content creators. The logic behind it is best encapsulated by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media slogan: "If she can see it, she can be it, "meaning young girls emulate the female characters they see in TV and movies.
But of the top-grossing films released in the most-profitable countries around the globe in recent years, just 3.5 percent were depicted as working in an identifiable science, engineering, technology, or mathematics career. Nearly 90 percent of those characters were men, according to research conducted by Davis' organization. If those numbers sound exaggerated, they're only slightly more outrageous than the real gender gap in those industries, which are dominated 74 percent by men, despite that women make up roughly half of the labor force, according to census data.
During The Next MacGyver's two-hour pitch session that host Julie Ann Crommett compared to a nicer version of Shark Tank, there were pointed questions from judges including actor-producer America Ferrera, CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker, Geena Davis Institute's Madeline Di Nonno, and Aerospace Corporation President and CEO Wanda Austin.
One pitch about a designer who creates wearable technology had judges concerned about the show's balance between fashion and engineering. An idea for a show about young Imagineers had judges reasonably curious about whether it had to take place at Disneyland. During a pitch based on the life of 19th-century engineer Ada Lovelace, the protagonist's steamy romance drew skepticism—until creator Shanee Edwards admitted she was "personally developing a crush" on the fictional love interest. She pictured him being portrayed by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
While judges deliberated on the winner of The Next MacGyver, a TV industry panel imagined an alternative narrative: Why couldn't Amy Schumer in Trainwreck have been a coder rather than a magazine journalist? (Not that there's anything wrong with journalists.)
"I think people find science and technology really intimidating, which is why I think Amy Schumer doesn't make her characters a scientist," said Danielle Feinberg, an 18-year lighting & photography veteran at Pixar. Ironically, there is one Inside Amy Schumer sketch in which she plays a scientist: the joke is that she can't stop saying 'I'm sorry,' even for the simple act of breathing or speaking.
The characters invented by the 12 finalists of The Next MacGyver are far less apologetic. But the winners of The Next MacGyver have to prepare themselves for a bumpy road. "We don't know what's going to happen. Hollywood is a place where virtually anything can happen, and it probably will," Zlotoff said. His advice to the losers: "Failure is to see better success. It is not the end of the line."
Miranda Sajdak's Riveting, a World War II drama about a prom queen turned wartime engineer, was a winner; so was Beth Keser's procedural about a science prodigy who ditches corporate life to become an expert witness. Craig Motlong's spy drama Q Branch; Jayde Lovell's high school comedy Science and Engineering Clubs; and Edwards' steampunk historical drama Ada and the Machine all earned mentorships with teams of TV writers and producers. Edwards was paired with Ferrera's production company, Take Fountain Productions. No word yet on whether Rhys Meyers has signed on to the project.
In homage to the 1980s cult TV show that made engineering cool, Zlotoff awarded the winners with what he referred to as ersatz trophies: large silver rolls of duct tape. "The importance is not that we get one of these shows on the air," he assured the audience.
What does matter, he said, is that "the bell got rung and the song got sung and the speeches got made and once again we said to the world, 'Women need to be a part of the solution to fixing the problems on this planet.'"
If we don't encourage women's participation in science and engineering, Zlotoff cautioned, then we're all in peril. At least, then we'll really need a MacGyver to help solve the problem.
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Original article from TakePart
