Vicki Shabo had spent more than a decade advocating for a federal paid parental leave in the only rich country that doesn’t have it. Then in 2021, just when it seemed like it might happen, lawmakers ejected paid leave from a spending bill and sent it tumbling back down the list of priorities. 

Shabo wracked her brain: Why was this issue that just about most people agreed on continuously discarded as a nice-to-have and not a need? Advocates had tried so many strategies to help lawmakers understand, but there was one, she realized, that hadn’t yet been tapped. 

Politicians kept treating paid leave and other care policies as expendable because our culture treated them like that. And what are some of the best tools to change cultural attitudes? TV and film.

“As a person who grew up in Los Angeles and has always sort of felt the parasocial engagement with favorite television characters and television shows, I was fascinated by the ways in which other issues and causes had used on-screen storytelling to move forward changes in culture and in policy,” Shabo said. 

The concept of a “designated driver,” for example, was popularized through American TV shows and films in the late 1980s in an effort to reduce alcohol-induced accidents. Like with paid leave, the policy effort had stalled, so advocates worked to get messages into more than 160 prime-time episodes that featured characters abstaining from drinking if they were driving. From 1988 to 1992, the number of deaths tied to alcohol-related car accidents dropped 25 percent thanks to stricter laws and enforcement, but also a marked increase in the use of designated drivers that was furthered by on-screen representation. 

There was also a meteoric rise in representation of LGBTQ+ characters on screens in the years leading to 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality. A 2008 study found that 34 percent of adults who had recently shifted their views on LGBTQ+ people said they viewed them more favorably because of characters they watched on TV. Shows like “Modern Family,” “Will & Grace” and “Glee” all played a meaningful role in reshaping those opinions, research found. By 2015, Bob Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, said the TV industry “played an important part in advancing the conversation” on LGBTQ+ rights.

That idea gripped Shabo, who realized depictions of caregiving, gender and family dynamics on screens were often still playing on old tropes like the clueless father. Data from the Geena Davis Institute, which analyzes gender representation in media, shows that men are still depicted as the breadwinner on screen 90 percent of the time when in real life it’s more evenly split. Women are often shown either at home or at work but rarely integrating both parts of their lives. Child care is rarely mentioned. 

Helping viewers see that issues related to work, family and care are not theirs alone to bear, but that other families are dealing with them, too, and systemic support can also help could lay the groundwork for policy shifts, Shabo said. Changing how the public thinks about solutions could be what pushes policymakers to place issues like parental leave higher on the priority list. 

“I just thought about the ways in which television and film are representing people’s lives as it relates to work and family obligations, but rarely doing so in a way that reveals the structural components of the individual struggles that people are facing, and often tends to invisibilize and kind of keep private — in the way that people do — challenges with work and family,” she said. 

So in 2022, she started to build out Re-Scripting Gender, Work, Family, and Care, her entertainment initiative with the Washington, D.C.-based progressive think tank New America, to provide research, resources and tip sheets to writers, producers and other creatives about how and why they should shift the caregiving and gender narratives they bring to the screen. The initiative’s newsletter reaches more than 400 creatives, executives, media researchers and others, and Shabo regularly presents her research to Hollywood creatives at public speaking events.

Research by the initiative shows that 92 percent of viewers say realistic work, family and caregiving themes are important to see on screen, and 65 percent would be more likely to subscribe or keep subscribing to a streaming service that carries programming that shows authentic care and family stories. 

“There’s a business case, a creative case and a social impact case to make these stories more visible,” Shabo said. 

But moving an entire industry on an issue that lawmakers are still grappling with is a challenge, and an even bigger one at a time of political division. The right has more vocally expressed views on caregiving in recent years, from Vice President JD Vance advocating for grandparents to care for grandchildren to tradwives taking over Instagram feeds. Finding child care, taking parental leave or figuring out elder care for an aging family member are viewed by many conservatives as private family problems.

Writers and experts told The 19th that in this political climate studios are nervous about making content the Trump administration may disagree with. And even though Hollywood is largely liberal, executives are risk adverse and less likely to support projects that center authentic gender portrayals. A show like “Jack Ryan,” about a CIA analyst, has a better chance of getting made than a show about women’s health care. 

“There is this perception that audiences just want pure entertainment and there are tried and true formulas,” Shabo said. 

Kirsten Schaffer, the CEO of Women in Film, an advocacy organization fighting for gender parity in film and television, said there is “definitely” a contraction taking place both in terms of the kinds of stories told and gender representation in the industry because of the administration’s stance on issues related to gender and diversity, equity and inclusion. 

“In times of abundance there is more getting made and more openmindedness. In times of scaling back everybody is more risk adverse,” Schaffer said. “Now women in the industry will say to me, ‘That executive who was so committed to having 50 percent women on every director, writer list that they sent out are now relieved that they don’t have to do that anymore.’”

Sasha Stewart, a writer on “Dying for Sex,” a limited series about a woman with Stage IV breast cancer who leaves her husband to explore her sexuality, said she and writer Keisha Zollar initially tried to sell a show about women’s health care that would focus on issues including reproductive care and menopause in a more documentary style. It ultimately was not greenlit.

“It was mostly that all the female execs loved it and then they had to go pitch it to their male bosses,” Stewart said.

“Dying for Sex,” she said, “was packaged in this super marketable sex adventure” and was the show that execs backed. But Stewart said the team worked hard to pull from personal caregiving experiences to build out the story, including talking to oncologists and patient advocates. One advocate they consulted even played a nurse on the show. Stewart, a cancer survivor, leaned on her own experience and that of her husband, who was her primary caregiver. 

The story follows protagonist Molly on her journey, but flips some traditional scripts to also focus on her best friend Nikki, who steps in to be her primary caretaker. In the third episode, Nikki is fired from an acting job due to the demands of navigating health insurance, appointments and providing care for Molly.

The writers room for “Dying for Sex” was made up of six women, one nonbinary person and one man, plus two women showrunners. Because so much of the cast and crew were also mothers, the team worked hours that allowed everyone to get home to their families, Stewart said. All of those elements mattered in what ultimately made it on the screen. 

“I would love it if somebody in Congress watched the show, or any state or local government,” Steward said. “Maybe more people would try to pass paid family medical leave and other important issues.”

But “Dying for Sex” was the exception. For most writers, Stewart said, the goal is to get on whatever job they can, and then if it’s possible they may try to put caregiving storylines in. 

The industry has long been unsustainable for women, women of color and caregivers, an issue that took center stage during the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike when creatives walked out of their jobs in response to growing disparities in the industry. Streaming has reshaped TV, especially, leading to smaller writers’ rooms, more limited opportunities and dwindling pay and benefits that have made it more difficult for writers to stay in the business. 

As more diverse writers are shut out, it becomes harder for authentic stories about care, gender and family to make it on to screens. Writers of color and women are often in the lowest positions of power on TV and film sets. Only about 28 percent of showrunners were women in 2024 and just 8 percent were women of color, the lowest share of women in five years according to Women in Film’s research. And according to the Writers Guild of America’s 2025 equity and inclusion report, the share of women screenwriters dropped from 45 percent to 33 percent in just one year, from 2023 to 2024. 

On screens, some caregiving storylines have cut through, both on streaming and network television. HBO’s medical drama “The Pitt” delves into the often invisible challenges family caregivers face around end-of-life care. On ABC’s “High Potential,” the protagonist is a single mother of three who, in the show’s pilot, negotiates a job contract to ensure it includes child care for her kids. 

“Do you have any idea how expensive child care is these days?” she says. 

In film, too, one of the year’s big superhero epics, “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” was at its core a story about motherhood that centered not Mr. Fantastic, but Sue Storm, who early in the movie donned a maternity spacesuit without anyone fussing over her or asking her to rest.   

Care is on screens more than we realize, it just isn’t often directly addressed, said Zollar, who was also a writer on “Dying for Sex.” 

There are still “a lot of people who just aren’t thinking about it, who it’s more out of sight out of mind and it’s not centered in how they build stories,” she said. But more directly referencing issues of family and gender on TV and film can shape attitudes, including those of legislators — the majority of whom are older men — who may not be thinking about topics like paid leave and child care. 

“Beacuse we don’t label it or we don’t remind [viewers] that it is an essential part of the story, we can forget its existing in stories. We are not seeing how essential it is to the story itself,” Zollar said. 

In Shabo’s work talking to writers about the ways in which they can more directly incorporate care and family storylines, she said she’s found that many of them frame their work as thinking about their characters rather than thinking about issues. Luckily, “our set of things we want to see on screen are well positioned because they are so human and personal, and it’s not a stretch to get a story line of somebody trying to navigate work and family,” she said. 

It’s medical shows that acknowledge that patients can be workers, too — are they missing work and need leave? It’s workplace shows that don’t shy away from the realities of biases that affect wages and conditions. It’s pregnant characters or parents who wrestle with securing child care to work, men also taking leave and parents who name the caregiving solutions they need.

In Shabo’s view, care and gender issues aren’t “the broccoli to hide” in shows and films. Instead, her research is helping to make the case that “this is actually the meal that audiences want to see.”