Other names Charlotte Sue Brown Other name Charlotte Sue Brown | Years active 1972–1998 | |
Born October 20, 1943 (age 73) ( 1943-10-20 ) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. Occupation Television producer, writer and director Nominations Writers Guild of America Award for Television: Episodic Comedy | ||
Charlotte Brown (born October 20, 1943) is a television writer who in 1977 became the first woman showrunner of a primetime network television series.
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Biography
Brown was born in Cleveland, Ohio. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was unusual to find a woman inside the writers' room of a primetime network television show that wasn't either a secretary or personal assistant. A notable exception was Madelyn Pugh, who wrote for the I Love Lucy series. After the success of Treva Silverman, some showrunners began to actively recruit women writers. One of them was James L. Brooks who hired Brown to write an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Assignments soon followed on The Sandy Duncan Show, The Partridge Family, and The Bob Newhart Show. For many of the series in which she worked, Brown was often the first woman writer that had ever been hired by that particular producer.
When Brooks created Rhoda, a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Brown was hired as a staff writer. In 1975, she received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for writing an episode for the series. She quickly rose up the ranks, becoming the program's executive producer in 1977. As a result, Brown became one of the first female showrunners in primetime television history.