"In terms of pitches that you're seeing ... are you seeing anything that somehow reflective of this movement?" moderator Nicole Page, a New York-based attorney, asked the panel of executives and TV producers. "Are people talking about it in terms of content at all?"
There was a pause.
"I think it's hard. We've had our development team voice that we would like to do more female programming in different ways than we've seen before, but obviously we're all kind of catering to what the audience wants," said Laura Palumbo Johnson, co-owner of Magilla Entertainment.
"But as we have these conversations and the collective mind-set shifts a bit, I think ... those opportunities will open up and content will change more."
In other words, even though #MeToo has become enough of a movement that "silence-breakers" were Time's Person of the Year, if there's a sense many viewers have little desire for programming about it, creators will stay away.
Jenny Daly, a former vice-president of development at E! and founder of production company T Group, said she was curious to see how McGowan's show fared; she had seen few networks express interest in exploring similar subjects. After all, she said, many channels marketed to non-coastal viewers (or as she put it, people in "a Trump kind of environment") who might not be as interested.
"I know when I've brought up other programming like that to speak to networks, (the reaction) has been 'It won't appeal to our middle America audience'," Daly said.
Daly theorised part of the problem might be that #MeToo, in which people shared stories of sexual harassment, wasn't an "equal opportunity movement" — while it had hit hard in the media and entertainment industries, it had not had such an impact in other places.
She said: "It almost sounds like the networks who are programming to 'not the coasts' are really going to shy away from this, because it's not really — it hasn't touched it there as much, maybe."
