Charlotte Sue Brown (born October 20, 1943) is an American television producer, writer, director, and showrunner who in 1977 was acclaimed to have become the first woman showrunner of a primetime network television series for her work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show spin-off Rhoda.
[3]: 149 She grew up in the Fairfax and Pico-Robertson neighborhoods in Los Angeles, California, where her father was a musician and her mother worked in a clerical position at The May Company.
[2] She wanted to get into the TV industry and managed to meet James L. Brooks via her dentist, eventually visiting the set of early episode tapings of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was unusual to find a woman inside the writers' room of a primetime network television show other than secretaries and personal assistants.
[1][2] When Brooks created Rhoda, a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Brown was hired as a staff writer.