“Actually, it’s so funny, because the job I wanted more than anything else was your job,” Nemesis showrunner Courtney A. Kemp tells MovieMaker at the top of a conversation about her career in television.
A decade before Kemp would create the flagship Starz franchise Power, she was an assistant at GQ, writing freelance on the side, and dreaming of becoming the first Black editor in chief of Vogue.
“That’s what I thought I was going to be,” the Emmy-nominated writer, producer and showrunner says. “I wanted to work at Entertainment Weekly, or a magazine like that, very badly. … So I started at Mademoiselle – remember that title of 400 years ago? And then after working at Mademoiselle, I went to GQ… where I got an opportunity to write an article about interracial dating.”
That 2001 article not only scored Kemp a book agent at ICM, but caught the attention of television producers Chris Alberghini and Michael Chessler, who wanted to turn the article into a series. The show never happened, but it did recalibrate the young writer’s ambition toward television and accelerated a ride to success in a notoriously difficult industry.
Through the experience of not getting the magazine jobs she wanted, but thriving in TV, she developed a philosophy she shares with young people seeking advice: “When it’s right for you, it’ll be a hot knife through butter. When it’s wrong for you, there’s not anything you can do.”
But if you’re meant to write, Kemp considers you among the luckiest in the world.
”We can write our way out of problems,” she says. “All you need is a laptop and a dream, and you could actually make your career out of that. So, I just went back to the drawing board and wrote what I liked to watch.”
Courtney A. Kemp on Nemesis
Nemesis begins streaming Thursday on Netflix, and the psychological crime drama follows two men — Detective Isaiah Stiles, played by Matthew Law, and heist mastermind Coltrane Wilder, played by Y’lan Noel. Kemp co-created the show with her fiancé, Tani Marole.
“I’m very lucky,” Kemp says, but adds: “It was a bumpy ride to get there. I left GQ. I went to start writing the J Crew catalog. It wasn’t like it happened overnight.”
She moved to Los Angeles in June 2004 and two months later earned a staff writing job on The Bernie Mac Show: “I wrote a spec episode, and they hired me off the spec episode, which was pretty amazing,” she says. “I was very fortunate.”
That fortune only lasted one season, though, because Kemp was fired by the end of it.
“I’m not funny,” she says self-effacingly. “Not like the way you have to be to keep up in that kind of environment. I just wasn’t funny, and I got fired.”
The boot from the FOX sitcom served as a wakeup call when her agent, Nancy Etz, asked if she wanted to keep writing comedy.
“I was like, ‘No.’ I didn’t even watch comedies. I was someone who loved murder mysteries and loved violence,” she explains. “So, I wrote a spec CSI, and I got hired on a show called In Justice, and from that point forward, I was in one-hour drama, and much happier.”
She also worked on shows including Eli Stone, My Own Worst Enemy and Happy Town. But her time on In Justice was especially helpful because its creators, Robert and Michelle King, went on to create the hit Emmy magnet The Good Wife. Kemp worked on the show as a supervising producer.
“They loved me,” she recalls. “They liked working with me when I was a baby writer on In Justice. So they came calling, and I did an interview, and they hired me.”
She credits the creators as mentors who taught her much of what she needed to know before running her own show.
“They were incredible storytellers,” she explains. “I learned a lot about how to really create structure, and how to use your actors appropriately so you don’t wear out your number one [character] in your storytelling — and all the pieces of production that you don’t think about when you think about storytelling.”
Power
Soon Kemp began stepping into her power, literally and figuratively. She met with producer Mark Canton, who wanted to do a music-driven television show with 50 Cent. It dovetailed nicely with an idea Kemp had been privately developing.
“I wanted to do a Black Sopranos. I was really interested in that,” she says. “Also, my father died that year, in 2011, and so I was looking for a way to write about him. And all those things came together in that period of time. And I ended up choosing to leave The Good Wife so that I could focus on developing Power.”
She wrote and produced on CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 and Beauty and the Beast while working on the pilot for Power. It launched a massive TV universe of which she remains an executive producer.
But it might not have ever happened if she hadn’t been brave enough to see it through. As her team was shopping around Power, she received a very attractive offer to go back to working for Greg Berlanti, the TV powerhouse for whom she had worked on Eli Stone.
Then her agent, Etz, asked her another crucial question, Kemp recalls:
“Do you want to work for Greg Berlanti, or do you want to be Greg Berlanti?’
“And she just got me. I was like, ‘I want to be Greg.’ She said, ‘Then don’t take the job. Wait and see if you get a green light on Power.’ And then I did. And all of this — everything, the house that I’m sitting in — all of that comes from that one moment of like, ‘Do you believe in yourself?’
“Greg is one of the most important mentors in my life,” Kemp adds. “I always tell young kids of color that your mentor doesn’t have to look like you. It’s really important that we not always only look to people who look like us for that help.
“Greg believed in me from the very beginning,” she adds, “and I really appreciate that.”
She adds: “When I worked for Greg, he had three shows on the air: Brothers and Sisters, Eli Stone and Dirty Sexy Money. So that was always my goal, to have three shows at the same time,” Kemp says.
Power led to spinoffs including Power Book II: Ghost, and Power Book III: Raising Kanan. In 2021, she set up her overall Netflix deal. She is also working on a show for HBO.
“And then I got there and I was like, ‘Holy s—, this is hard!’
“Once you have success,” she adds, “now you have to write and you have to tell everyone to leave you alone, because if you don’t get the script out… all these people, who need it to make the thing, don’t have it. And so, now you work for the crew.”
The stress of showrunning the Power universe hit a peak in 2021, when her team was working under particularly strenuous Covid conditions. Then tragedy struck when her brother passed away.
“He was my rock. He was my everything. And I think in that period of time, I did not know how much pressure I was under and how much I was taking on,” Kemp explains. “Thank God I didn’t know. I think naivete goes a long way in this business.
“I think for me, what I realized producing at that level is, I love producing, but I am a writer. I love writing, and the further away I got from the writing, the less happy I was,” she continues. “I didn’t want to just have an empire, I wanted to write. And so, that’s one of the great things about Nemesis, which I created with my partner, Tani Marole. I got to write again.
“Like any writer, I love having written, that’s my true joy,” she adds. “I still go through all the imposter syndrome. I still go, ‘Man. I used to be more talented.’ I still do all the s— all writers do; nothing has changed in that way. The thing that is different from me and other writers is that I have the ability to go, ‘Well, you can’t totally suck, because you got here, and people are still willing to pay for it,’ so that’s great.”
Nemesis arrives Thursday on Netflix.
Main image: Matthew Law plays Isiah Stiles in Nemesis. Photo by Saeed Adyani/Netflix © 2026
