Showrunner Ed Bernero (excerpted):
It’s very female, development. Development staffs are almost all female. It’s not that easy to get a male skewed show through development…. Most of the network television audience now is primarily women, but I think that’s because the shows are developed to appeal to women. I don’t know that there are too many shows that appeal to guys anymore…. Part of the erosion of network television is that men watch sports – there’s not that much on for them. There are not shows that have male themes. […]
You don’t see loners anymore, you don’t see a Mannix or a Rockford Files or something where it’s a tough guy standing against the world. It doesn’t appeal to women. Guys like a guy who stands up for [what’s] right, and [on] the Hawaii Five-0 that we were going to write, the issue was sort of like living up to your father, being a cop in a world where your father was a great cop. That’s really a male theme. Women don’t really compete with their mothers; men compete with their fathers. […] […]
Something with real sort of male themes and male strength… the things that appeal to us, the things we compete for. Macho in a different sense – the kind of things that we think makes us a man. It doesn’t really exist right now.