Last July, inside an impeccably decorated Mid-Century modern home built on a Sunset Gower Studios, stood Mara Brok Akil. The acclaimed writer behind Girlfriends, The Game and Being Mary Jane was talking to a director on Forever, her latest show for Netflix, while a couple of yards away, a group of writers sitting at video village was watching the interaction on the monitors.
But the writers weren’t working on Forever.
The group was from a cohort of Akil’s Writer’s Colony, a residency program that was established in 2021. They were chosen to participate in Akil’s inaugural Shadow Program, which brings graduates from the writer’s residency to set to follow Akil from budget meetings to conversations with the art department and everywhere in between. The ultimate goal is to have the writers witness everything it takes to run a television set.
As filming in Los Angeles has lessened and budgets have tightened, screenwriters have had fewer opportunities to go to the sets of their shows. It is a new reality that was brought up during the 2023 union strike, with writers noting that the next generation of showrunners won’t have sufficient experience to run sets without hands-on experience and mentorship.
The Shadow Program was launched on the set of Forever, Akil’s adaptation of the Judy Blume novel. It is meant to give writers on-set exposure and, for Akil, the program is the logical next step for her now four-year-old Writer’s Colony.
“With success, you get invited to panels and public opportunities to share your experience. And inevitably, I would be rushed by people who asked me how I did it,” says Akil. “I really had to stop and think, How did I do it?” Her answer became the foundation for The Writer’s Colony.
Founded in 2021, The Writer’s Colony is a three-month screenwriting residency for Black writers that is located next door to Akil’s West Adams offices. Designed by Tiffany Howell of Night Palm, the 2,300-square-foot building that houses the Writer’s Colony is meant to inspire a sense of calm so that participants can focus on finishing their screenplays.
As she continued to run the residency, Akil thought back to her early on set experiences with her mentor, Ralph Farquhar (South Central, Moesha). Akil recalls, “The writers literally sat behind the showrunner on show night, between takes, [Farquhar] would turn around and say, ‘I need a joke.’ And while he went in there, the director talked to the camera, and the showrunner talked to the actor. He’s waiting on us to run in a joke.”
Akil calls this “apprenticeship education” and compares the television set for up-and-coming writers to a teaching hospital. “The craftsmanship and the apprenticeship model are broken in a lot of ways,” says Akil. “The industry is not even allowing showrunners to bring writers to set for the scripts that they wrote. Why don’t you want this? It’s an asset!”
“It’s just getting rarer and rarer to be on sets, let alone with a Black female creator,” says Aissa Rose Gueye, a Wesleyan grad who has worked as a writer’s assistant on shows like Issa Rae’s Rap Sh!t. The strikes happened when she was readying to make the jump from support staff to writer. She applied and was accepted into the Writer’s Colony and later the Shadow Program, saying the programs allowed her to “still believe that there is a career to be had.”
“Anytime you get a chance to see how all the moving parts work on a set, you know that’s where you want to be,” adds Aquillia “Q” Mikel, who also participated in the Shadow Program.
On the Forever set, Gueye and Mikel were sitting in video village when a young Forever staff writer joined them to watch the episode being filmed. Gueye remembers, “Having the opportunity to be there and watch her work, I thought, ‘That’s incredible to have somebody champion you.’ I was watching [her] career unfold in real time.”
Akil’s work with The Writer’s Colony continues amid Hollywood’s dismantling of its previously touted diversity efforts. Disney, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery and other major media and entertainment companies have been rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion language and programs amid the Trump administration’s war on DEI policies. All of this puts the studio and network pipeline programs, which were run by DEI departments to provide training and opportunities to those creatives traditionally underrepresented in entertainment, in a precarious position.
“I know my history, and this is not new for me or the Black community, period,” says Akil. “There’s always these ebbs and flows, because America ebbs and flows over the battle and the myths of racism.”
She continues, “Let me very much underscore this, though it is disheartening to roll back progress, what I know to be true is that in order to move forward it’s always in community.”
