Adult Swim’s excuse for not hiring women is a perfect example of TV’s problem (correction)

by Julia Alexander

''Earlier this week, Adult Swim’s executive vice president and creative director Mike Lazzo was accused of purposely not taking on any female creators or showrunners by anonymous employees at the network because "when you put women in the writers room, you get conflict, not comedy."

Adult Swim, according to a recent Buzzfeed report, has the lowest number of female writers on staff out of any network. Only 1 in 34 credits on any given series were by a woman, which pales in comparison to the other television networks’ 1 in every 5. According to Buzzfeed’s anonymous sources who worked at Adult Swim, Lazzo was one of the main reasons why more female writers weren’t being brought on board.

On Monday, Lazzo took to Reddit to clear up what he said. According to Lazzo, he believed "women don’t tend to like conflict, comedy often comes from conflict, so that’s probably why we (or others) have so few female projects." He added that despite what employees had told Buzzfeed, he was considered one of the most approachable executives at Adult Swim and that he tried to help everyone tighten their idea or pitch into something that the network would actually want to get behind. Lazzo then went on to say that if unnamed sources were mad at him, it was an issue on their end, not his...''