The past year for Annmarie Morais and Marsha Greene has been filled with new lessons and opportunities, thanks to their experience as showrunners for CBC and BET+’s The Porter.

“It’s allowed people to see me in a different way in terms of not just the person that you can hire to come in and fix broken characters, but also someone you need to hire when the questions are bigger than whether these characters are working or not,” says Morais, who also serves as an executive producer and writer alongside Greene on the series. “To be trusted and shepherd something from inception to the vision and then to the producers is a really new area for me.”

She adds “I’m grateful for what it’s brought, but I think we’re both women who’ve worked really hard to have this.”

The Porter follows two Black train porters who fight for equity in their workplace after enduring long hours and abusive treatment in the 1920s. Produced by Winnipeg-based Inferno Pictures and Toronto’s Sphere Media (formerly Sienna Films), the 8 x 60-minute series held a lot of firsts for both showrunners.

For Morais, it was her first official showrunner experience. She previously worked as a writer for series like CTV Sci-Fi’s Killjoys, BET’s American Soul, and Global’s Ransom.

As for Greene, who’s the VP of the Writers’ Guild of Canada (WGC) and chair of the WGC Diversity Committee, she says she hadn’t previously worked on a series with so much VFX work nor “been through the process as a showrunner from the ground-up.” When she served as showrunner for Global’s Mary Kills People, she was hired on in the third season. Greene has also written for Global’s Private Eyes and Departure, and ABC’s Ten Days in the Valley.

It was also the first time both worked in an all-Black writers’ room, comprising Andrew Burrows-Trotman, Priscilla White, and Andrea Scott. R.T. Thorne also participated in the writers’ room.

Morais says the writers’ room brought diverse stories and experiences that were “crucial to building the fabric of The Porter.” Such representation seems to be increasing, she adds. “I don’t think The Porter will be a one-off in terms of having that experience again. It’s not common, but it’s becoming more acceptable.”

Jennifer Kawaja, executive producer of the series and president of scripted English content at Sphere Media, says “there’s a much greater appetite at the broadcasters’ [level] to recognize that up until a very short time ago, our industry was not inclusive and did not include people in positions of power like showrunners and creators who are racialized or BIPOC or who are LGBTQ+. There have been changes and I think an increased willingness and active work in that area.”

Since the success of The Porter, which got an Emmy nomination for best choreography for Christian Vincent, Greene has been working on a pilot and bible for a half-hour dramedy series about female friendship, using a grant received from the Canada Media Fund Early-Stage Development Program.

Morais says she has “several irons in the fire.” Among them is development on a TV adaptation of the Bluford YA novel series from Townsend Press, set in an inner-city high school, with a producing team including Mary J. Blige and David Dinerstein.

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Winter 2022 issue

Photo of U.S. actor Loren Lott as Lucy in The Porter by Shauna Townley