Women Behind the Scenes Spotlight: Maril Davis

Photo Credit: Gold Derby

Today’s Women Behind the Scenes spotlight is shone on Jill-of-All-Trades and Executive Producer Maril Davis.

Maril was born in Los Angeles, but moved to Oregon when she was 10 years old. She eventually attended Scripps College in Claremont, California; and while she has always been a sports enthusiast who briefly hoped for a career in women’s professional soccer, she always knew she wanted to work in television.

Her first job in the industry was as a production assistant in 1996 on the series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Soon after joining that production she began her association with Ronald D. Moore. That association would lead to her working on a lot of productions with the well-known producer.

She spent three seasons on Deep Space Nine working as a production associate and assistant to the producers. It was also during that time that she served as assistant to producers and production associate on Star Trek: Voyager.

In 2003, she worked alongside Ronald Moore on his TV series Carnivale and, of course, worked alongside him in the Battlestar Galactica mini-series in 2003, which spawned the long-running series as well as the BSG movies and mini-series that followed.

She, again, worked with Ronald Moore on his 2009 made-for-TV movie Virtuality in the role of co-producer and she followed him to the Battlestar Galactica prequel-esque series Caprica in 2009 and 2010.

Her association with Ronald Moore didn’t end there, as they worked together on the sci-fi horror series Helix as a co-executive producer before following him to the Starz hit series Outlander, where she has served as co-executive producer and eventually executive producer since its 2014 debut.

While Maril may not be a part of the writing team for Outlander, she does have quite the list of duties behind the scenes, including overseeing the writer’s office, being the liaison between the studio and network, casting, marketing and publicity.

In fact, it was thanks to her friendship with Outlander writer-producer Matthew B. Roberts and Outlander costume designer Terry Dresbach (who is also Ron Moore’s wife) that she got hooked on the acclaimed novels by Diana Gabaldon and eventually got Moore interested in the books as well.

She is also working on a new production with Moore: Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, which is currently filming.

Season 3 of Outlander can be seen on Sunday nights on Starz at 8/7c.

You can follow Maril Davis on Twitter at her work account @TallShipProds or at her personal account @NightMaril.