And yet, press continued to push on why it’s taking so long.
“Change is happening.
We have a midseason lead character who is gay.
Over the last number of years, diverse series regulars are up almost 60 percent.
We are making progress.”
“So many of our hits are long-running.
There is not as much shelf space to put new programming on,” he said.
They are fantastic at what they do."
“I’m not sure how to address that,” he said.
We said in the past we are going to do better and we are doing better.
Every single drama on our air has at least one diverse character.
We are moving in the right direction."
“CBS did develop female lead shows,” Sherman said.
“We had six pilots with six female leads.
That is the cycle of the business.”
“We loved both those actors and did not want to lose them,” Kahl said.
We wanted them to stick around.
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of having a long successful show is sometimes you lose cast members.
We didn’t want it to happen.
It’s the nature of the business.
We made very lucrative offers to those actors."
“I would take a little issue that I think we are getting the job done.
We want shows that will run a long time.
That’s a little bit of an issue on our connection.
We have a lot of successful shows.
