Mara Brock Akil remembers the moment she gained the confidence to become a showrunner with the precision of someone who has turned it over in her mind a few thousand times.
She was not long out of Northwestern University, working as a writer’s trainee on the buzzy Fox dramedy “South Central” in 1994. The series, from writer-producers Ralph Farquhar and Michael J. Weithorn, attracted a hotshot writing staff — and on this afternoon all but one of them were preoccupied with other projects.
Brock Akil sat in a nearly empty writers’ room with Weithorn and one other scribe. Weithorn noticed Brock Akil had a lot of notes in the margins of the script she was holding.
“‘Mara, if there’s ever a time you have a thought, now would be it,’” Brock Akil recalls Weithorn saying. “He saw the script — and he goes, ‘You could read any of that on there.’”
Brock Akil was in fact the picture-perfect writer to contribute to “South Central,” having grown up in Compton. A love of writing drove her to earn a degree in journalism from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. After graduating, she returned to Los Angeles to pursue a career in entertainment — specifically television writing, at a time when the field wasn’t very welcoming to Black women. But that was changing.
Weithorn “gave me that one permission that was critical, just to hear my voice in that room. He provided space and made it safe for me to give my voice when the world said, ‘Don’t do that.’”
Brock Akil made the most of the wings she grew that day on “South Central.” On Feb. 28, the showrunner and creator — known for such series as “Girlfriends,” CW and BET’s “The Game,” BET’s “Being Mary Jane” and most recently, Netflix’s Judy Blume adaptation “Forever” — will be recognized with the Norman Lear Achievement Award from the Producers Guild of America. She’ll receive the kudo at the 37th annual Producers Guild Awards in Century City. In addition, Amy Pascal will be honored with the David O. Selznick Achievement Award; Jason Blum, producer and CEO of the prosperous Blumhouse film and TV banner, will receive the Milestone Award for his contributions to the industry.
After “South Central,” Brock Akil wound up working for Farquhar on the UPN sitcom “Moesha.” She had no shortage of story ideas for the domestic comedy that she steadily pitched in the writers’ room. Farquhar had a habit of telling her, gently, “Save it for your pilot.” Finally, one of the ideas that she couldn’t stop pitching became the basis of Brock Akil’s first hit series, UPN/CW’s “Girlfriends” (2000-2008).
In the 1990s and early aughts, “the culture around making TV was so beautiful. It was so team-oriented and team-spirited,” Brock Akil says. “And having the audience right there can be the arbiter of a note. You can use the audience to help you on different things because sometimes with a script you just don’t know until you know.”
Brock Akil is juggling multiple project including Season 2 of “Forever.” She’s also focused on working with the next generation of writers and creators, many of whom haven’t had the kind of early-career writing and producing experiences that shaped her into an A-list showrunner.
“I had a safe place to watch and to understand and to apply all of that knowledge,” she says.
Now, it’s important to Brock Akil that everyone working on her shows appreciates the privilege of telling stories that travel around the world.
“It never misses me how many people get to put their fingerprints on it. So I’m very proud, whether it’s 100 people helping us do a show or whether it’s around 400 with ‘Forever,’” Brock Akil says. “Four hundred families are affected by this one story that you sit down and you make. I can’t think of a better way to organize and work — economically, for the community. I think TV is a collaborative art form that really celebrates human ingenuity, integrity, intention, imagination, creativity, just hard fucking work — and coffee and matcha.”
