The Hollywood Reporter, sponsored by Lilly, hosted its TV's 50 Most Powerful Producers Dinner on Wednesday night at Marea Beverly Hills, timed to the release of THR's annual 50 Most Powerful TV Producers of 2026 list and arriving just days before the Emmys.
The guest list included Quinta Brunson, Damon Lindelof, Widow's Bay showrunner Katie Dippold, Widow's Bay's Kelly Galuska, the Hacks trio of Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, Courtney A. Kemp, Erin Foster, Jenni Konner, Nora Silver and The Morning Show showrunner Charlotte Stoudt. Also on hand were Sterling Point showrunner Josh Schwartz, Abbott Elementary showrunner Justin Halpern, The Pitt producer Cynthia Adarkwa, Hello Sunshine's Lauren Neustadter and her writer/producer husband Scott Neustadter, The Gilded Age showrunner Sonja Warfield and Cape Fear showrunner Nick Antosca.
The evening opened with cocktails before guests sat down to several courses of Italian dishes paired with programming built around the producers being honored. THR editor-in-chief Maer Roshan delivered welcome remarks, followed by a conversation between Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder Dr. Stacy Smith and Lilly senior vp and chief marketing officer, consumer, Lina Polimeni, focused on how disease is depicted in entertainment.
Smith outlined findings from a joint study by Annenberg and Lilly examining how health is portrayed on screen, saying, "the first major headline is it isn't." While noting "The Pitt is great," she said the study looked at 100 films, 100 TV shows and more than 8,000 speaking characters and found minimal portrayal of illnesses such as cancer, with 50 percent of affected characters dying.
Polimeni said no number of PSAs could match the impact of seeing oneself reflected in a story that "entertains you and that engages you." She added that the absence of representation wasn't surprising, but "the inaccuracies really worried me." Pointing to the cancer statistic, she noted that "it's not just 50 percent of the characters die, but typically they get diagnosed and they die in the same episode," which misrepresents the real pace of a cancer diagnosis. That distortion, she said, "creates a fear for you to go find out whether you do have cancer," discouraging the early screening she called critical to fighting the disease. "And so as a result of that [fear], less people are getting screened. And so it's not just about depiction, it's also about action that is tied to that."
After more courses and conversation, THR's Mikey O'Connell led the night's headline segment, an off-the-record discussion with 20th Television president Karey Burke and Netflix head of scripted series for the U.S. and Canada, Jinny Howe, which drew laughs from the room.
Photo: Jonny Marlow, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
