Women Behind the Scenes Spotlight: Jennie Snyder Urman

Today’s Women Behind the Scenes spotlight is shone on Executive Producer and Writer Jennie Snyder Urman.

Jennie got her start in the entertainment industry just a little less than a decade ago, writing spec TV episodes with an old college roommate. That has parlayed into quite an impression resume of female lead TV series, starting with the comedy Hope & Faith that starred Kelly Ripa and Faith Ford. Jennie started out in 2003 as a story editor for the sitcom, which ran for three seasons, and then was promoted to script editor and eventually ended up as executive story editor.

Jennie then joined the writing staff of the popular dramedy Gilmore Girls in 2006 where she also served as a co-producer for one season. One year later she shifted gears over to the Anne Heche led ABC drama Men in Trees, working as a writer and producer for one season.

In 2008, she was a writer and supervising producer on the short-lived Lipstick Jungle from the mind of Candace Bushnell, the novelist behind the book for which the series was named (as well as that other female ’empowerment’ series Sex and the City, which was also based on a novel by Bushnell).

Over the next two seasons, Jennie worked as a writer and supervising producer on the CW remake 90210, eventually becoming co-executive producer. 2011 was a big year for Jennie as she was the writer and executive producer on the pilot Danni Lowinski as well as becoming a first-time screenwriter for the box office film Something Borrowed, which starred Kate Hudson and Ginnifer Goodwin (from Once Upon a Time fame).

As Jennie shares about coming off work on a big screen film, she found that she missed television’s creative opportunities and the camaraderie of the writers’ room. “In features you write a thing and you step back. But in TV, you have a chance to keep digging into the characters. You’re not telling a closed-ended story but one that keeps evolving. You slow down the storytelling and let things breathe. I like the pace of it. You get to write something, see it and move on”.

With that thought in mind, this TV season, Jennie was offered the opportunity by The CW to be series creator of the new CW medical dramedy Emily Owens, M.D., which stars Mamie Gummer in the lead role. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jennie shared this about what drove her to create this show, which is a bit of departure from her past work, “I (wanted) to do a procedural so that’s definitely a departure for me. But tone-wise, (Emily Owens, M.D.) fits in with the kind of writing that I do, which is the merging of the quirky character comedy and drama worlds. Doing the medical procedural is a departure for me and I really like it so far”.

Emily Owens, M.D. airs Tuesday nights at 9/8c on The CW.