As far as Dana Calvo is concerned, there’s really no better time she could have asked for Amazon to premiere her new show, “Good Girls Revolt.”
The drama — based on a Lynn Povich book of the same name — follows a group of women at the fictional News of the Week magazine as they fight for their right to pursue careers as reporters in 1969.
At the time, women were only allowed to hold the title “researcher” — though, they did the same (if not better) work as the male reporters to which they were assigned.
Anna Camp, Genevieve Angelson and Erin Darke star as women who work at the publication.
The book chronicles the real-life effort spearheaded by a group of women from Newsweek.
Calvo, a former reporter, shopped the story to HBO, Amazon and “maybe Netflix,” she told CNN in an interview this summer, when she and the cast were in Los Angeles presenting the show to television critics.
But the show ultimately ended up at the home of Emmy-winning “Transparent.” Largely, she said, because their response to it was immediate and urgent.
“They recognized that it would be a show that would work well for a time around the election when Hilary [Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee] was going to be running,” Calvo said. “And it would be sort of in the middle of girl power year and we knew that too.”
Actress Joy Bryant, who plays the women’s lawyer, real-life activist Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, echoes the sentiment.
“We’re on the cusp of the first female president,” she told CNN this week. “The timing couldn’t have been any better.”
“Good Girls Revolt” is not a show Calvo ever imagined being made at a network. In part, because it’s a period show, she said. Also, “It’s about women’s issues; it’s not going to be a network show.”
Amazon, she said, “wanted to market it for the right reasons at the right time.”
She also wasn’t intimidated by Amazon’s pilot process.
With few exceptions (see: Woody Allen’s disappointing “Crisis in Six Scenes”), Amazon’s pilots are shown to the public and voted on. The viewer feedback is then factored into Amazon’s decision about whether a show deserves a full season.
“I thought the women would like this at the very least,” Calvo said. “It turned out men liked it, too.”
“Good Girls Revolt” is streaming now on Amazon.