Buffy The Vampire Slayer

As a producer and an executive, Gail Berman has built her TV career championing projects driven by powerful portrayals of strong women: She helped Joss Whedon transform "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from a flop genre film into a pop culture-grabbing WB Network series; she backed Linwood Boomer and his vision of an everymom, as embodied by Jane Kaczmarek in Fox’s "Malcolm in the Middle"; and as Fox entertainment president, she has escorted Wanda Sykes to center stage this year in the network’s promising midseason comedy "Wanda at Large."

"It’s really a joy to depict a full woman, warts and all, and with great humor," she says. "There’s great dignity in someone like (’Malcolm’s’) Lois, who is a working mother with four children and a childlike husband who really has to just grapple with what the world dishes out to her."

A Long Island, N.Y., native, Berman got her start by beating the odds on Broadway, where she and then-producing partner Susan Rose mounted the first U.S. production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." Berman and Rose were twentysomethings fresh out of the University of Maryland, but they convinced producer Robert Stigwood to sell them the "Joseph" rights — and the production garnered seven Tony nominations during its 1982-83 run.

By the end of the ’80s, Berman had shifted to television, with a job supervising original production for HBO’s Comedy Channel (a precursor of Comedy Central). By the early 1990s, Berman had moved to Southern California and was running Sandy Gallin’s Sandollar Television, where she worked with Whedon on "Buffy" and with Margaret Cho on the ABC sitcom "All-American Girl."

In 1998, Berman was tapped to launch another boutique production banner: Regency Television, a joint venture of Arnon Milchan and News Corp. Less than two years later, Regency had delivered a huge hit to Fox in "Malcolm"; six months after that, Berman was named the network’s entertainment president.

Her experience as a young producer on "Joseph" taught Berman that success lies in sticking with one’s gut instincts. That is more difficult to do as a network president than as a producer, she admits, but it’s vital. "You have to speak up, even when it’s easier to go, ’Um, OK,’" Berman says. "If you don’t have the passion, even in a corporate job, then there’s something wrong."