Tyler Perry Studios Alum Michelle Sneed Launches Her Own Studio, A Few Good Women Productions (Exclusive)

Mikey O'Connell
·3 min read

With over a decade at one of the most successful independent studios under her belt, Michelle Sneed is striking out on her own.

The Tyler Perry Studios alum, who most recently served as president of the sprawling and prolific Atlanta operation since 2018, just launched a new studio. A Few Good Women Productions is targeting a first-of-its-kind model, with exclusively female leadership offering green lights and maintaining project autonomy through every phase — acquisition, development, financing, production, licensing and distribution.

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“One thing that I’ve always said is, ‘Why do big studios get to have lot of fun?’ — and by ‘fun’ I mean majority ownership of these assets,” says Sneed, who wants to see that money trickle down not to just partners and creators but budgets. “I have dedicated my career mostly to Black and brown content. And I’d say that about 99 percent of the time, it’s been on extremely small budgets. We make a lot of success out of very little. I want to see our content in a premium lens, with the appropriate budgets. That means you have the premium resources, premium staff and everything else in between. That’s how we are different.”

Sneed quietly left TPS at the end of the 2021 and has since been raising capital and deepening creator relationships. The newly minted founder and CEO takes with her longtime colleague Tsedy Gebeyehu, who’ll serve as president of the Los Angeles-based company. Specifics around the forthcoming projects in development will follow in the coming weeks and months, but Sneed is primarily interested in the scripted space at the moment — with a focus on limited series and features. She’s also quick to clarify that the name of her company is a nod to the plan to keep an all-female senior leadership team and not the kind of content she plans to make.

“We’re definitely not making content that’s just for women, but it’s important to me that people know this is a women-led studio,” says Sneed. “We believe that to truly execute what we want, prioritizing diverse content in a premium way, there has to be that diversity at the top. But we’re working with all kinds of people and all kinds of content across the board.”

Originally working alongside Perry shortly after his studio’s inception, from 2009 to 2016, Sneed briefly left for a run as director of physical production for BET Networks. There, she oversaw and executed a sprawling slate including the flagship BET Awards and the critically acclaimed (if woefully short-lived) late night talk show The Rundown With Robin Thede. Sneed returned to TPS in 2018, where her run as president saw the studio deliver more than 450 episodes of television (Sistas, The Oval, Ruthless, All the Queen’s Men) and three feature films (A Fall From Grace, A Madea Homecoming and A Jazzman’s Blues).

“That is a volume studio, as you know, and we were delivering about 250 hours of content per year,” she says. “The growth there was insane, but my team helped write the Georgia tax credit. And that was a real 30 percent, no catches to it.”

Her time at TPS also proved something to Sneed that few people beyond her old boss have figured out: One doesn’t have to work within the traditional system of legacy studios. “It’s 2023, and there are a million different ways to get things done — and none are necessarily right or wrong,” she says. “Do what makes sense to you, even if it’s not the way the big boys have been doing it.”

Sneed is member of the Producers Guild of America and serves on the Board of Governors for the Paley Center, as well as the Dream Chasers Foundation.

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