B Is For… Breaking Boundaries

Like most industry members, Linda Mendoza experienced months of insecurity in 2020 when the pandemic hit.

But then the year took a turn. She was nominated for her first Emmy Award, as the director of Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready on Netflix. She won a Daytime Emmy as one of the directors of HBO's Sesame Street. And she received a DGA nom, her fourth, for the special Wanda Sykes: Not Normal, also on Netflix.

"It was surreal," says Mendoza, whose more than 130 credits, mainly in sitcoms and musical-variety, also include Brooklyn Nine-Nine, black-ish, The Good Place, Ugly Betty and In Performance at the White House. "I'm so grateful."

Not bad for someone who, she says, "fell into television. I went to school to be a sociologist."

After breaking up with a boyfriend, Mendoza left college in her native Detroit and found an office job in a record store on Hollywood Boulevard. When the store closed, she became a page at Metromedia, then the home of L.A.'s Channel 11. She moved into production, eventually becoming production supervisor for In Living Color and Saturday Night Live.

She learned about single- and multicamera directing during a 13-year stint as an assistant director and production supervisor for music-video and TV producer-director Bruce Gowers. In the late 1980s, music and comedy specials producer Bob Kaminsky gave Mendoza her first directing job, on Comedy from the Dark Zone, which she shot at a Montreal comedy festival.

Whether directing comedy or variety, she says, "My approach is always: what is the most important thing about the program? What are we trying to heighten? If there are songs, how can I make each piece stand out but still feel like it's part of the whole? In episodic, what is the story about? If there are two or three stories, how do you integrate them? How do you make sure that the tone is consistent?"

Mendoza does research if necessary to achieve those goals; early in her career, she took acting lessons and did stand-up. She's kept busy this year, directing episodic in L.A., spending four months in New York as producing director on Tracy Oliver's comedy series Harlem and prepping for two months in Nova Scotia for the Jenny Han series The Summer I Turned Pretty, both for Amazon.

She's also working on a musical with her husband, actor-writer Tim Kahle. "It's been an amazingly diverse career," Mendoza says. "Being a Latina, everybody's always trying to put you in a box. I've never been defined by a box."

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 7, 2021