When The Lincoln Lawyer co-showrunner Dailyn Rodriguez walked around set of the third season of the legal drama, one thing about the production caught her eye. “I saw a lot of women,” Rodriguez tells Tudum, “and I was very excited about that.”
Beyond the cast — from returning actors Becki Newton, Jazz Raycole, and Neve Campbell to newcomer Merrin Dungey — women were visible in key roles behind the cameras too, from the editing bays to the writers’ room where Dailyn Rodriguez, Andi Bushell, Gladys Rodriguez, Katy Erin, and Lisa Quintela scripted episodes. This was by design. From the beginning, Dailyn Rodriguez and The Lincoln Lawyer team strove to recruit and hire diverse talent, despite the television and film industry’s ongoing reputation for underrepresenting women in key production roles.
Premiering in 2022, the series follows hotshot lawyer Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) as he crusades for justice from the back seat of his Lincoln. But Haller doesn’t crack those cases alone, not by any means. “The show is really about a man surrounded by bunch of strong women,” co-creator and showrunner Ted Humphrey tells Tudum. “So it’s important to bring those viewpoints to light in telling the story.”
According to Humphrey, representation has been a priority since Season 1, especially in the writers’ room where the narratives are shaped. “Women are 50 percent of the population, and they’re more than 50 percent of the television viewers,” he says. “So it’s important in any television show to understand that.”
Co-showrunner Rodriguez echoes this, adding that it was vital that all elements of production be inclusive. “It starts from the top down,” she says. “We hired a female line producer this year, and she was very conscious of gender parity hiring.” Line producers, like Leanne Moore, often handle the hiring of crews and other personnel matters.
Their ongoing efforts paid off. The series’ second season received a ReFrame Stamp in August, which commemorates projects that demonstrate a commitment to gender-balanced hiring across a production. The ReFrame organization, founded and run by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film, sets the criteria for the Stamp. The annual mark of distinction focuses on narrative feature films and television programs that hire women, non-binary and/or gender non-conforming individuals as well as trans people of all genders in above-the-line (directors, writers, producers) and below-the-line (production designers, editors, costumers) jobs.
“It was so exciting that we got acknowledged for this because we work really hard [in inclusive hiring], and not just gender,” says Dailyn Rodriguez. The Lincoln Lawyer scored high for Season 2 because it employed women — and often women of color — in crucial roles. “We really want to give people a shot that don’t normally get a shot,” she adds. Among the women working behind the scenes of Season 3 were editors Amy Colla and Chi-Yoon Chung, directors Paula Garcés and Kate Woods, and a director of photography Moira Del Pilar Morel. “We had a great director this season, Paula Garcés. She’s an actress, but she’s really transitioning to directing, [and she] really knocked it out of the park for us."
The commitment to gender-balanced hiring extends to inclusive casting too.
“We are very cognizant that our show takes place in Los Angeles,” says Rodriguez. “So it’s not just about behind the scenes and hiring the people that are obviously the Angelenos that live here that are very diverse, but it’s also in front of the camera. It’s very important for us to portray Los Angeles as Los Angeles looks to us every day when we’re driving down the street.”
To recruit and maintain talent, the team also ensures that people who work on the show and have children receive the accommodations they need. The inclusive family-forward approach wasn’t a recent addition. “In Season 2, Becki Newton [who plays Lorna] had just had a baby, so we got her own room on set so she could nurse,” says Rodriguez.
The space allowed Newton to balance caretaking and child-bonding in between takes and rehearsals. “She was able to come to work with her child and have a nanny,” Rodriguez says. “[It was] a separate space that was private, that was not her trailer, something that was closer to where we were shooting.”
The Lincoln Lawyer joined this year’s roster of more than a dozen Netflix productions that also earned the ReFrame Stamp including Baby Reindeer, Blue Eye Samurai, The Witcher, and Virgin River.
And yet, as ReFrame’s 2023–2024 annual report shows, gender parity is still not the norm in the industry. For the 2023–2024 season (to be eligible for a Stamp, a show must have aired a full season of episodes between June 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024), fewer series received a ReFrame Stamp. Out of the television and streaming series featured on IMDbPro’s Top 200 list, only 38.5 percent earned a ReFrame Stamp, down 8.5 percent from past seasons. The report also showed that gender balance overall among writers dropped from 57 percent to 49 percent from the previous year.
Despite those industry-wide numbers, Rodriguez says the The Lincoln Lawyer writers’ room is its superpower. “We have a very diverse writers’ room with a lot of great points of view,” she says. That multiplicity of perspectives informed the direction and details of the series. “We’re telling the story of the murder of a sex worker,” Rodriguez says, referring to the show’s core plot in Season 3. “We were very careful not to judge that character, not to put stereotypes on her.”
And just as essentially, it’s women who are calling the shots when it comes to the show’s core action elements. “We have a female stunt coordinator since Season 1,” Humphrey says about Shauna Duggins, who has also worked on shows like The Perfect Couple and Griselda. “We love Shauna, and she’s been around a long time. There are not that many female stunt coordinators, and she’s great.”
The Lincoln Lawyer team’s determined efforts for gender-balanced production points to the need for long-overdue change in an industry where homogeneity is still pervasive. Dailyn Rodriguez says her workdays revealed more big wins for representation. “I remember one moment I was on the [Season 3] set, it was an episode I co-wrote with the writer's assistant who is Latina (Isabella Rodriguez), and there was a Latina director (Garcés), a Latina DP (Morel), a female first [assistant director] (Katie Carroll) and a female second AD (Sarah Hodges Olivieri), says Rodriguez. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening right now.’ ”
But it’s the women working as entry-level production assistants who give her the most hope for an equitable future. Rodriguez says, “[The PAs] are the next generation. It’s exciting to see what the next generation brings.”
Season 3 of The Lincoln Lawyer premieres Oct. 17. Catch the latest here.
