CATEGORY The Makers

The multihyphenate has mined her own background for much of her art, from Master of None's "Thanksgiving" coming-out episode (which made her the first black woman to win a comedy writing Emmy) to Showtime's The Chi, an ode to the South Side of her native Chicago. When not developing semiautobiographical TBS pilot Twenties and BET's Boomerang sequel series, Waithe, 34, empowers others, from co-founding a network of black female TV writers to partnering on a pilot lab for writers of color.

My three morning musts "Check my phone like every other red-blooded human being; feed my dog, which is a lovely thing for the spirit, to take care of a living thing; then while she's eating, I have a moment to myself. I put my phone down and have a couple minutes of solitude and quiet."

I'd love to work with … "Janelle Monae. I love her spirit and energy and the way she walks in the world."

My secret to working with difficult people "If I work with a difficult person, I make sure they aren't there the following year. That's my secret: to be as relevant as possible, because the more relevant you are and the more important you are, the more leverage you have. You only have to work with difficult people when you don't have power."

What might surprise people about me "That I watch things over and over again. I watch really random documentaries, like old-ass documentaries. There's this documentary called The War Room about George Stephanopoulos doing the campaign for Bill Clinton. I'm not even that much of a political head, but George Stephanopoulos looks 12, and he's literally spearheading this campaign about a young Bill Clinton, and it's this amazing documentary and such an amazing moment in time. You learn so much about who he was, and as a culture how we haven't changed. I'll also sit and watch old Whitney Houston interviews on YouTube. I also watch Oscar speeches a lot on YouTube. I find them very inspirational. Another weird thing I do — this thing I watch constantly is Tom Hanks presenting Denzel Washington with the Cecil B. DeMille Award. If you haven't watched it recently, you should go back and watch it. Denzel doesn't need a eulogy now, because he has Tom Hanks' thing. They should play that at Denzel Washington's funeral."

My entertainment guilty pleasure "It's one of the best television shows on the planet, but I'm going to say guilty pleasure because it's animated: Big Mouth. I'm friends with Nick [Kroll], and I've said to him, 'Dog, it's the smartest, most gut-wrenching, funny, vulnerable, poignant thing I've ever seen.' You can tell it's a lot of his shit and his stuff he's dealing with when he was an adolescent, but it's also funny and he's not afraid to lean into the sexual hormones of it all, and the guilt of it all. And yes, it's about adolescence, but the truth is we still struggle with this shit as adults."

Is it better to be an extrovert or introvert in Hollywood? "Both. You've got to be an introvert because you have to refill your cup, but obviously you've got to be an extrovert out here because you're a politician."

What's changed with men in Hollywood this year … "Not much."

… and what hasn't changed at all "Diversity in the upper-level positions of the industry."

My dream 2020 presidential ticket "I'll say Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Can he get on the ticket again? Fuck it, I'll be really black. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. That's the Willie Brown ticket."