Season two of Marvel’s Netflix series Jessica Jones may still be in the works—and as of now, isn’t slated to premiere until 2018 on the streaming service—but one more piece of info has just been revealed about who will be working behind the camera on the second season.
At the annual Transforming Hollywood symposium, Jessica Jones executive producer Melissa Rosenberg revealed that the show will have all female directors for the season’s planned 13 episodes. The news was reported by several critics in attendance at the event, including Variety’s Maureen Ryan and author Nancy Wang Yuen:
We will have female directors for all 13 episodes this season: Showrunner @tallgirlmel on @JessicaJones pic.twitter.com/n1hJwGXMsa
— Nancy Wang Yuen (@nancywyuen) October 22, 2016
Jessica Jones isn’t the first series to bring in a group of all-female directors; earlier this year, Ava DuVernay made headlines when she announced that her TV show Queen Sugar would be entirely directed by women. In spite of the fact that female directors still make up a vastly smaller percentage of all primetime TV directors (about 17%, in recent years), Queen Sugar is proof that it’s completely possible to hire more women in an industry that has long been viewed as a boys’ club—as long as you’re willing to be intentional about it. Meanwhile, the hiring field isn’t equal to start with: over 50 shows hired women or people of color to direct less than 15% of their episode total for the 2015-16 TV season—and of those 57 shows, 30 didn’t hire a single woman or person of color to direct.
So what do we have to look forward to in the upcoming second season of Jessica Jones, besides this encouraging news? Well, according to previous interviews with Rosenberg, the show won’t shy away from addressing the trauma of her past experiences with Kilgrave—even, perhaps, as Jessica adjusts to being part of a team, since her show’s season 2 is rumored to begin filming after the first season of The Defenders. While no list of directors’ names on Jessica Jones has been confirmed, it looks like interviews are already in the works.
As for Marvel Studios in general, the company has also been actively seeking a female director for its upcoming Captain Marvel feature, with several names on the shortlist already even though the film isn’t scheduled to debut until 2019.
(image via Netflix)
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