Television. For the better part of six decades, it was the square box that commanded our evening’s attention. Then it became the thin rectangle. Now television doesn’t have dimensions anymore, as our phones, tablets, and monitors are the conduits to our entertainment. As technology has whisked a generation of viewing habits away in a mere decade, so too has the content we watch outgrown the mundane labels of plain old sitcom and drama.
Scripted television content in the late 1940s came out of the gate with a flood of quality, ushering in the first “Golden Age” of teleplays, dramas, and episodic stories. In that era, viewers got lost in the novelty of the personalized melodrama, the actors, the dramatic tension, or comedic feats. But by program’s end, the box was powered down without viewers lingering much on the names who crafted the stories that captivated their imaginations.
As television evolved, great heights of storytelling were achieved from Roots to Star Trek, but we can all admit, a whole lot of mediocre material cropped up too. A vast percentage of programming leaned towards the comfort-food spectrum of entertainment, or providing vehicles for entertainers to become household names. Concentrated blocks of mesmerizing, scripted quality had its peak in the past.
Fast-forward to the age of the Internet and the subsequent sea-change in viewer awareness. As the 1990s came to a close, another box was vying for entertainment attention as millions were discovering that the computer was a conduit to carry on the television discussion after the fade to black. Digital communities formed around television shows. With immediate mass connectivity, it wasn’t enough to discuss what was seen the next morning around the proverbial watercooler. The conversation couldn’t, and didn’t have to, wait anymore.
Dissecting plot twists, performances, characters’ romantic entanglements, and infuriating turning points became a pastime for scripted-television connoisseurs, whether it was on boards like Television Without Pity or private news lists that evolved into community hubs for beloved shows. And with this new pastime came the unexpected “outing” of the names in the credits who were responsible for drafting the stories that engendered such audience obsession.
Granted, there have always been those who hailed the brilliant minds behind the scripts, especially critics, but Internet attention smashed open the gates of adulation so it wasn’t just the lead actors who gained the praise for a show’s success. Now, the brains behind the series concepts—the David Chases, Joss Whedons, and J.J. Abramses—were being referenced with the same kind of star-struck reverence as any sparkling leading man or woman.
Who would have ever bought that the pale, weary, self-deprecating talents plunking tirelessly on their abused keyboards would become the pin-up faces for the modern era’s latest Golden Age of television? No writer would ever delude themselves that that bizarro pitch would get picked up, but picked up it has by audiences who have run with it to make television creators as beloved and name-checked as their cast.
The awareness of the job has even birthed a new term to define it into the pop culture lexicon: the showrunner.
A few years ago, that word would have garnered confused looks by those outside of the industry. Instead it’s gaining more and more traction, with every Internet article that TV aficionados read detailing the development plans of popular show creators, or season finale post-mortem features that grill a showrunner on the micro-choices made drafting a season. Showrunners is even the title of the documentary for which this book serves as the official companion guide, and it certainly doesn’t get bigger than this (as we’d like to think).
Pedantically, the Oxford Dictionary defines a “showrunner” as “The person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television program.” Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) members (the labor union for film and television writers) have known that job to be the executive producer position since the guild started arbitrating writing credits titles back in 1941.
In practice, the showrunner is the big brain of an episodic television series, and the executor of the ordered number of scripts for a given season. But what does that mean day-to-day to a person sitting at the helm?
As it turns out, the specifics of the job are consistent, yet very individual to a person’s particular focus. How they each define the job is telling about their priorities within the position and how they execute the post.
I think the term “showrunner” is a fairly recent term of art. There have been TV shows for a long time. TV shows are, at the end of the day, fairly militaristic in that somebody’s at the head making choices and, unlike features, in television it’s typically a writer-producer who is looking out not only for the scripts, not only for the storytelling, but ultimately for the cuts that go out on the air, overseeing production as well.
It’s a lot to manage. It used to be that television shows were simpler. Television shows now are very cinematic. The production value is much higher. It’s not a stage-bound show. There are days on stage, but then there are also days on location. The management of a television show has gotten much, much harder and yet every seven days one goes on the air.
Being the showrunner means that you’re responsible for all the creative and financial aspects of the show. You’re responsible for taking an idea of the show, an idea for each episode, all the way through execution, all the way to a physical deliverable that you’re giving to the network that they’re going to be broadcasting over air. It’s like being a CEO of an organization, where a typical budget is $2.8m to $3.5m an episode. At the end of the year, you’ve been the CEO of an endeavor that is a $70m to $75m endeavor. So it is being responsible for that organization, from top to bottom, and making sure that it runs smoothly and making sure that it delivers a really great product for the folks that you’re working for, folks that are investing in you.
We showrunners used to be fairly anonymous, which seems to me to be better. Then there were people—long before I got into TV—like David E. Kelley or Steven Bochco, David Milch, that you knew of. Tom Fontana was the first showrunner where I realized, “Oh man, every time this guy does a show, I think it’s wonderful.” Now, there’s tons of us that at least our audiences seem to know, or a portion of our audiences seem to know. It’s a strange development. I think there’s in-front-of-the-camera people, and I think there’s behind-the-camera people. I guess there are a few people who are good on either side. You kind of choose to be behind the camera so that you can have that kind of life.
I think the Internet had to exist in order to create the story of the showrunner, the rise of the showrunner as you call it. I think that because Lost was what it was and because the writing itself became this thing that a lot of people were curious about—who is making up this story, we are really interested in the story itself—you have to be a serialized storyteller in order to do so. Can you imagine if David Lynch had an interest in and access to the Internet when Twin Peaks came along? I think that with what happened with Carlton (Cuse) and I, David Lynch absolutely would have been on talk shows, communicating directly with his fans. People would have known much more, there would have been a greater sense of authorship there.
I loved being a showrunner. It was the first time in my career that anybody paid attention to me. That was nice. But, also, I was surrounded by extraordinarily talented people and we were all on the same mission. To do that, whether you’re fighting with a network or they’re loving every minute of it, you have this enormous bond. It’s a feeling you don’t get from the movies because there everybody meets, does their thing, and goes their separate ways. On a TV show, for better or for worse, you’re stuck together, unless I fire you. It creates something that becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Everyone who does this job defines for themselves what it means. Doing a job like this, running a show, when you are breaking a story, say, for episode 11, doing an edit on episode one, doing a mix perhaps on episode two, writing yourself episode seven, and trying to cast episode six while episode five is shooting, I mean, it’s crazy. You would look at that and think, “Nobody can do all this,” and you would be right. You need to know where you ought to be and then you have to be there. That’s just part of your figuring out what your job is, I think. You can be pulled in a thousand different directions.
A showrunner has to have a bit of dictator in them and has to be able to say, “Yeah, I know you don’t think you quite have enough work with it. I know you’re not happy. Deal with it.” You have to be willing to piss people off, willing to make the unpopular decision. I think it’s a job that requires a lot of toughness. I think it requires a willingness to offend because you’ve got to see the people that are standing between you and your vision.
The job of a showrunner? You come in wanting to be creative, but you end up directing traffic. Sounds glossy, but really it’s a billion decisions a day. You’re the guy that has to decide what we’re going to do. You’re the guy that has to decide how the problem is going to be solved. They only bring you questions, and hopefully you have the right answers.
If people respond to it in millions of numbers positively, then your answers are good. If they don’t, then your answers are bad. Even as a showrunner, it’s not your creative vision that is the one that endures, it’s the administrative one. If the decisions you’re making make the products successful, then they’re happy with you. They don’t care how creative you are. They’ll fire the showrunner and they’ll hire another showrunner because what they want is for the thing that they bankrolled to be successful.
Even if you came up with the idea for what you think the perfect sandwich is, if you slap some condiments on that don’t make any sense to them, they go, “No, no, no, no, no! We like the bread and the meat but let’s try something else on top, and that guy wants to put mustard on everything. So, let’s get rid of him and get a guy who’ll put on there what we say to put on there, and maybe that’ll work.” You problem-solve, you direct traffic, you delegate, and every now and again you try and come up with something that you think is a good idea.
As difficult and as time-consuming and as stressful as it can be, I mean creatively, to be able to tell these stories and have the control over it that I do is such a rare thing. The great thing about TV is you can have the idea on Monday, write it on Tuesday, film it on Wednesday, and watch it on Friday, and there’s very few mediums out there that allow you to do that. I’m a writer who loves to write, and I know that sounds obvious, but there are a lot of people who are great writers who really don’t necessarily enjoy the process, and I really do. I love the first draft as much as I love the rewrites. The idea of really having those characters come alive in my head and hearing the words is just… it’s a rush for me, and I also love the post-process. Post for me is the final draft, and you can really go in and shape and finish telling the story in post.
I don’t know if I love being a showrunner on its own. I love getting to tell a story in a big novelistic way, that’s what I love. The thrill of showrunning, of having a lot of people staring at you and wondering what to do, is not …that’s not the thing that does it for me, but having a bunch of talented writers and being able to help tell a story is extremely satisfying.
I think between casting the next episode, being on set for the episode you’re shooting, being in the writers’ room, dealing with budgets and everything, I would say that showrunning is as much a feat of choreography as it is of anything else. It’s really, “How am I going to parse my day into 300 tiny parts and be present for any of them?” Showrunning has this slightly, almost glamorous patina to it. For me, a lot of it is the grind of selling the show, pitching the show, getting it sold, getting your deal made, getting an outline approved. These are the most mundane, banal tasks you can imagine, especially the bigger network version of that. And then there’s all the grinding out of the actual script, which is what it is. The nice thing about all of that writing and pitching and writing some more and pitching some more and then going through the process and then going into production and post, is that it’s the reason they let me do any of the stuff that I do, and that I can write okay. And you get to go from periods of total introversion to total extroversion. I could not handle just extroversion. There’s no way. Getting to go from one to another and then back into your cave and write some more, it’s a nice ebb and flow. That, to me, is the best thing about it.
What I enjoy the most about showrunning is having a vision that you’re able to follow. The writing is fantastic. I love running a room, being with a bunch of people who are incredibly talented and who are helping you think out your vision and then adding to your vision so it becomes everybody’s vision, really. It’s amazing. Where you think, “I’ve got a handle on this,” and then people come up with these ideas that are so much better than yours and you go down their roads, normally you would think, “Oh, group think.” As a former stand-up comic, I always had a nightmare vision of what it would be like to sit in a room with other people and write. Instead, if you’re with the right people and you’ve got the good goal, it’s the greatest thing in the world. It becomes this huge tree of creativity. I love seeing it all manifest itself. When you’re on stage and you see something you wrote three months ago and they’re doing it, it’s an amazing feeling.
To paraphrase a popular film meme, one does not simply just become a showrunner. It’s often a years-long process of first breaking into the television-writing industry as a writer’s assistant and then working your way up the ladder of episodic television staff-writing positions. It’s in those production trenches, such as writing, producing, post-production, and management, where a writer may evolve into an eventual showrunner.
EPISODIC TELEVISION WRITING LADDER
WRITERS ASSISTANT
STAFF WRITER
STORY EDITOR
EXECUTIVE STORY EDITOR
CO-PRODUCER
SUPERVISING PRODUCER
CO-EXEC PRODUCER
EXEC PRODUCER
SHOWRUNNER
Not every writer who ascends to the executive producer level wants to be a showrunner. The sacrifice and multi-tasking required from the individual, or showrunning partnership, is daunting enough to keep many writers satisfied with never committing to these all-encompassing responsibilities.
For those who do grab for the showrunner’s brass ring, there are many rewards—financial, creative, and collaborative—that can come of it. But it’s also a job where inexperience, ego, and poor management skills can be the downfall of many a great writer. Experiencing life under a bad showrunner, or watching a great writer wilt under the pressures exerted by the job, is unfortunately a common experience for scribes in writers’ rooms, but it’s where cautionary lessons are absorbed for future reference. For those who have executed the job, there are clear delineations for those who do the job well and those who do not.
When I was a kid, I watched The Muppet Show religiously. I loved it. I loved its tone. To see a character like Kermit running this three-ring circus, dealing with all the big egos, in a weird way gave me a sense of what the job was like. When you go to film school, you spend a lot of time working on storytelling and production, but not necessarily managing an organization of 300–350 people and making the trains run on time, overseeing a factory where you’re delivering a show every eight days. It becomes a real challenge, so the people I ended up modeling myself on were James T. Kirk and Kermit the Frog—big influences (Laughs).
I think the one attribute you must have to be a good showrunner is a creative vision. You can’t invite a lot of people to help you put together a show if you haven’t envisioned it properly, and then you have to be able to listen to people who are helping you put together your vision, and you have to understand that vision has to expand to include all the people playing on your team. You must have the vision first. You must have a really good creative vision, a really good creative idea, before starting out.
I feel like there’s a lot of balls to keep in the air, and that I’m constantly trying to keep balls in the air. I don’t feel like it pulls at me and drags me under. I kind of enjoy it, to be honest. I enjoy being the person with the answers. I enjoy people asking me questions, exchanges like: “What do you think this should be?” “Well, that’s what I think it should be.” “Should we go left or right?” “We’re going left.” I like being that person. I like being in control, that’s probably the bottom line to it. I enjoy the physical production of it, I like the set, I like the crews, and dealing with the actors. I like the creative dialog about it. Even dealing with the budget and the production hassles don’t get to me. I maintain a fairly calm show because I think part of my job is to have a calm show. I think that part of the job of a showrunner is to set the tone for what you’re doing. If I’m upset, everyone’s upset. If I’m panicked, everyone’s going to be panicked. If I have a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of anxiety everywhere you turn. If I’m not, if I’m calmer, people calm down more. If you act confident, it goes out to the rest of the production. Many times I’ve been standing on a set where we had some crisis where we had to do this, and this, and this. I’ll say, “We’re not curing cancer here, guys, it’s just a TV show, so don’t go crazy. Don’t kill yourselves to do this. It’s just a TV show. Let’s make it the best show we possibly can, let’s do our very best effort, and really do something we’re proud of. But, keep it in perspective.”
I think there’s two kinds of showrunners: there are hoarders and there are sharers. I’ve worked with both. Sharers want to include everybody in the process. Obviously, they want people to get better; it means less work for them, and it means that the show will be better. Hoarders need to do it all themselves. They need to put their name on every script. They need to, if possible, rewrite every script. I never rewrite anybody if they get it right. That’s a contract that I have with the writers. If you come along and we work this out and you figure out the formula and you put it on the page, it’s going to air. I don’t think it helps building the growth of the show if you don’t incorporate other people because it’s the tonnage of the thing. Maybe if it was the BBC and I was doing six episodes a year, I could be that guy. It also seems like a lonely way to work. The writers of my shows and staffs, they’re my families. You want them to grow. A lot of them are enormously talented, but you want them to be partners and not just scribes.
As with all things in life, just because a person is good at one thing doesn’t mean their skill sets transfer to every task they perform. With showrunning, the ability to write doesn’t mean that the ability to manage will be inherent as well. In fact, writers are known to be a rather singular species, spending long hours alone with scary amounts of caffeinated drinks, getting a computer-monitor tan.
“I think a lot of showrunners would rather be in their own room dealing with the story and dealing with the writers,” former House writer Pam Davis explains. “But you have to answer all the questions or else everything grinds to a halt, so it’s a really great balancing act of being a producer and a manager and being a great writer, so not a lot of people have everything it takes.”
Which begs the question of what could possibly go wrong, assuming that every writer will be a gifted people person and decision maker?
A lot.
The skill set to be a good writer and to be a good manager are, one could argue, almost diametrically opposite. I think writers tend to be skeptics and critics. They are fueled by anger, by curiosity, by outrage, and you’ve always got your nose up against the glass of whatever particular world you’re trying to peer into. It’s important to be wary and to be skeptical and to trust essentially nobody but yourself. A writer’s stock in trade is your own sensibility and your own vision.
Whereas when you’re managing writers, the idea is to be diplomatic, generous, to be a good manager of your own time, and to consider where other people are coming from. You have to be a psychologist in terms of you have so many aspects of production to be concerned about. The writers are your most immediate, but then you have to deal with actors, you have deal with the directors, and you have to deal with everybody else. You’ve got to manage upward to the studio as well as managing downward to all the people who report to you. Those skills are not innate, and when you spend a lot of time just trying to steer your own boat as a writer and develop confidence in your own vision and try to protect that, the idea now that you have to be doing all these other tasks can be overwhelming.
If there’s a mistake I’ve made over the past few years, it’s thinking that everyone can do this. Not everyone has those particular skill sets to run a show. What I take as sort of obvious—and it’s not really rocket science to run a TV series—other people are quite challenged by it. I don’t say that with ego. I think that certain people are adaptive to certain things, or have certain skill sets.
Qualities that a showrunner needs to do the job well: it’s kind of a mixture of great writer and storyteller and great manager, which is really not a common combination. You need to be able to kind of see a big-picture story, and be able to give notes effectively so you can build the story and work with a writer well without just taking over, because the more work your writer does for you story-wise the less work you can do. You can take something great and make it even better or you can overstep and kind of end up working constantly.
The management part is really a tough thing for writers because we’re generally sitting alone in a room somewhere, and then all of a sudden you get a show and you have to be in charge of 800 different departments and you have to prioritize what goes where, and you’d rather, probably, be sitting alone in your room dealing with a story. But you have to deal with a hundred people asking you a hundred questions, so it’s a combination.
It’s a sticky question because if you’re a creator of a show, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have the muscles to run a show. Running a show is a technical operation, too, not just creative. Are you going to get the scripts in on time? Are you going to be able to supervise the directors correctly? Are you going to cast a show? Showrunners cast too; they’re responsible for every element. The difficulty sometimes in doing that is that it’s not attached to the personality and the confidence of the showrunner. We were very confident creators in that we knew exactly what the show was going to be. We knew where we wanted to head. We had very strong opinions about it.
It is an interesting transition to go from the guy who is the feature writer living in your own head to somebody who is now trying to articulate a vision to everybody else and also being a leader in the room, and that’s not something that is necessarily taught. It’s something that you have to feel your way through and learn. There are some people who are natural leaders and some people who are big personalities, but everybody has to find their own style. There are certainly tales of folks who don’t do it well and have extraordinarily dysfunctional rooms, and yet the show has turned out pretty well, but I aspire to try and make the organization run as smoothly as possible. It was a new skill set to conquer. When you are used to having the solution in your head, when you are used to, from the feature universe, going off and thinking about it and then coming back with a solution, transitioning into making that process public and putting it up on the board, having everybody jump in, that was kind of new for me and that was a skill set that I had to acquire along the way.
Nobody’s born knowing how to run a show, particularly writers. There’s two things: [a writer] could have the disposition to be a good leader, but no experience or no exposure to those tools that can help them, or they just might not have the personality for it at all. It’s not surprising that the good writers often don’t make the best showrunners because you are always a parent. You are a parent to the cast, and you are a parent to your writing staff. That’s really the way the thing functions. If you’ve created the show, you’re literally a parent. You’ve brought these characters into life. You’re the one who’s making the decisions. If you choose not to see yourself as a parent, that doesn’t mean that you’re not a parent. It means you’re a dysfunctional parent and everything that happens on your show can be related to what happens in the dysfunctional family. People start trying to go around you. Nature abhors a vacuum, so people start trying to make decisions. If you’re a bad parent, they’ll say, “Mom said this and Dad said that,” and they’ll try to get you to make decisions based on their own particular perspective.
When you’re a showrunner, you’re still in the middle. You have bosses: the studio and the network apply pressure from above. The actors and actresses from both sides. The crew and the staff from below. You absolutely have far more freedom to make crucial creative decisions, and you are not attempting to mimic someone else’s voice. You are the voice. But instead of being responsible for bits and pieces of one or two episodes, you are responsible for everything from prep to production to post. That’s in addition to breaking and writing scripts and managing the studio and network notes. It’s like having more homework than you can possibly do—with a final exam looming every time a script is due. Your job is actually multiple jobs that funnel into a single position. I was lucky. I’d had experience managing crews as a reporter. I’d also had a lot of production and post-production experience in that first news career. Most writers don’t get those experiences. But that still isn’t everything you need to know.
Once you create a show, you’re suddenly tasked with running a complicated, collaborative business. A studio effectively hands you millions of dollars and says, “Go hire hundreds of strangers and make a bunch of movies with them.” Showrunning requires all kinds of skills that go well beyond writing. But if you want your vision realized, and you want a unified tone and look, you have to learn all these new skills—and learn them fast.”
It’s so funny because on television everybody who is a showrunner pretty much is a writer, and that’s almost always the way it’s been except in the early days so it’s difficult for me to separate the two. But I suppose that if you are unable to maybe standup for yourself and rewrite people, you kind of have to be able to do that and live with yourself. I suppose if you couldn’t do that then it wouldn’t be a good fit. I also think that for television it’s so collaborative and, particularly in broadcast, you will be doing this huge number of episodes. You have to be able to work well with others.
You know, you have an army at your disposal when you’re showrunning, and that army can be very effective if they have orders. Where I’ve gone awry is where I’ve let one area of what I’m doing fall behind and I have to turn all my attention there, and now, all of a sudden, you have this whole army over here that doesn’t have orders and so they’re sitting around and not doing the job they need to do. And therefore, when you finally finish and you come back you’re like, “Whoa, why aren’t we further along here?” Well, it’s because I didn’t give them direction along the way, so really it’s a time-management issue. It’s knowing that while I’m over here, the people over there have their orders and they’re working.
Shawn Ryan is a buddy of mine and I see him quite often, and [we] have these discussions sometimes. The interesting thing on The Shield is that Shawn was a baby writer when he was handed that show. He wasn’t an established showrunner, and I think because of that he was very open in terms of process. Not that now, as a seasoned showrunner, he’s not, but at the time it was all very new to him. I think it was the experience of having him as a mentor but also as a guy who was sort of in the process of discovering how to do it, as I was. I had never been staffed on a show before or written TV, other than specs. He was a guy with a couple of years of experience in TV who had never run a show before. I feel like we both went to school a little bit on the show. I think I learned my foundation for how I approach the world from Shawn in terms of how I run the room, and how I deal with my actors. Shawn is just a guy who was very aware of allowing writers to participate and have their own voice. He always had an open-door policy with the actors in terms of the script, not necessarily to allow actors to change the script, but at least you have the door open and say, “Come in and talk to me if you don’t understand something.”
I wouldn’t be a showrunner if I hadn’t written a script that somebody loved. You know, when people ask me what I do, I never say I’m a showrunner. I say I’m a writer—it’s a very important distinction. I spend far more time showrunning than I do writing, and yet in my head and heart I’m a writer. Everything I’m doing is to support and defend and protect the writing and the stories that we’re trying to tell. But if you can’t sit down and crank out that script that makes the actors go, “Ooh, can’t wait to play this,” that makes a studio go, “Ooh, this is great,” that makes the network go, “Ooh, this is going to be a great episode to have on the air,” then you can be the greatest manager of people in the world, but what are you doing and what are you telling, you know?
With the demands of the executive producer position requiring so much time and attention, many have chosen to embark upon the position with a creative partner. Many writing teams such as Robert and Michelle King (The Good Wife), Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis (Once Upon a Time), or Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas (Agent Carter), have used their long-term writing partnerships to their advantage, splitting showrunner tasks to make the position more manageable. If a co-showrunner dynamic is a choice from the start, it often creates some of the most stable behind-the-scenes environments, because there are two ears to bend in a day, and they work in tandem.
However, with the increased demand for scripted programming, there is a newer trend of original spec pilot ideas being bought from less experienced writers, or feature-film writers. Despite the idea’s worthiness for greenlighting, that doesn’t mean studios and networks are keen to hand over multimillion-dollar television budgets to creators unfamiliar with the intense demands of scripted production. And thus, there’s been an uptick of concept creators being paired with veteran executive producers who know the rigors of achieving script and post-production deadlines.
In theory, it forges a creative partnership that allows the creator to feed and guide the ideas for a season’s worth of scripts, while the day-to-day management of the show is also being fostered by a seasoned professional. In practice, it can be a forced partnership that’s more about financial needs than creative synergy. In the best case scenarios, the creative team finds a middle ground and the pairing moves forward finding their own balance of duties. Or in some instances, the placed executive producer mentors the new creator enough to walk away by the end of a freshman season with the network and studio content that a stable foundation has been created and can be maintained.
Perspective is everything, and the following spectrum of writers and co-showrunners from married teams (the Kings) to separated partnerships (Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman) are very frank about what works and what doesn’t work about the dynamic.
The easiest way to have creative people work together is when they choose to do it, and this variation on the co-showrunning model is obviously the smoothest because (at least initially) they want to steer the series ship as a partnership.
Frankly, I have absolutely no idea how single showrunners do it.
I don’t know either. The bottom line is that there’s literally so much to do every step of the way. If we didn’t have each other to do it, I think we would go crazy. I think there are showrunners who go crazy or go down into addiction. I think we keep each other from doing that, although sometimes I wonder about you. (Laughs)
I think it’s easier [being married as well]. The fact that our day together doesn’t end makes it easier. The fact that we don’t have resentful spouses at home makes it easier.
I think we kind of rely on each other a lot. It’s not wrong to say we’re happily married. That’s a good place to start. Then there aren’t all these little things that crop up that make you divisive, because you’re dealing with them together.
What are our duties on Leverage as showrunners? Drinking. Drinking is a big one. (Laughs) It’s odd, because we aren’t actually writing partners. We’re actually friends who came up with the idea for the show at the same time Dean [Devlin] was developing it and we folded together. Chris [Downey] had been doing half-hours and I’d been doing features. We came in at this without any real example of showrunning, except comedy showrunning. We really came at it like a comedy room. We’re all in a room together, we break the stories together. As far as the administrative stuff, I tend to follow a little more on that because I got a bit of a sense of it. When I’m doing that, he’s driving the stories in the room. It’s very flexible. It’s whoever is in the room at the time. The writers are always on set when they’re shooting. Sometimes I’ll be on set. Sometimes he’ll be on set. I was directing, so I was up for that. He took over the whole duties of the room during those weeks. It’s pretty much who has got the free hand at that moment.
This dynamic can get prickly when networks or studios decide to introduce creatives to one another and/or demand they co-showrun. Sometimes it’s because the executive producer is under a development deal where a part of their contract is to jump into problem shows to help tinker, or get a show off the ground. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of potential for egos to be bruised or feathers to be ruffled. “I have been in this chair before and it can be very fraught,” showrunner Dee Johnson says candidly about her repeated stint coming onto shows such as The Good Wife and Nashville as a network mandated executive producer. “The arranged marriage of it can be really fraught. It becomes a bit of a dance and it has to find its footing. It’s not an ideal scenario though most of the time. Rarely does it work out where everybody is loving each other.”
But sometimes, the executive producers are open to the arranged marriage, like when J.H. Wyman was brought in to assist Jeff Pinkner co-showrunning Fringe in its second season, or feature writer Jonathan Nolan was paired with Greg Plageman after Person of Interest’s pick-up at CBS.
What [Jeff Pinkner and I] do on Fringe is 50-50 everything because it’s a difficult job. It’s a big show. There’s so much on the writing side. There’s so much on the producing side. There’s so much on the editing side. It’s just great that we have each other to count on. If I’m doing writing, he’s doing editing. It becomes easier to actually succeed because it’s very tough in television; if you fall behind you’re done. This allows us not to fall behind. We trust each other very much, so it’s okay. I know that if he’s looking after something that we’re okay and, hopefully, he feels the same.
I had worked with Warner Brothers on a couple of shows. I had met Jonathan [Nolan] through them when I was developing another project. We hit it off. We have some similarities in our background and, admittedly, it’s not a genre that I had done before, but I took to pretty quickly. I think we get along pretty well.
I honestly think some of these shows, the scale of them on broadcast television, they’re not really ideally suited to one person running them because there’s so much work from the writing, to the room, to the casting, to editing. It’s just constantly backing up. There’ll be 22, 23, episodes a year, which is an older model, but it’s a treadmill where if you fall, you hit your head, and you never get up.
It’s fucking bananas! We do panels with other showrunners, the cable guys, and they’re always very nice to us, but they treat Greg and I like refugees from a leper colony. It’s a little bit like, “How the fuck are you guys making this many episodes of TV, and trying to make them well? It’s a crazy business model.” It’s one of the reasons why I wanted a partner on the show, and I was incredibly excited that Greg was willing to come on board, because I knew enough through my wife’s [Lisa Joy, writer for Pushing Daisies] experience, to know that this is a crazy, crazy fucking job. It’s a really cool one, but it is a crazy one. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like a controlled plane crash every week to get through that many scripts, and try to make them great.
So yes, there are occasions when we divide and conquer for the most part. We try and weigh in together on things, and often one of us will go in on post on a given episode, and we largely rotate on that, and someone else will try and keep the home fires burning. And then [for] production, we shoot everything in New York. We post and write out of this building [in Los Angeles], and we try and get one of us out to set at least once a month, just to make sure, but the show does run itself pretty well. You flatter yourself into thinking that you have to be there, or it’ll fall apart. It’s not going to fall apart. They run a great shop out in New York for us, but we do like to get out there as often as we can, just to make sure that it’s one conversation, it’s one show, and everyone is still working together.
It’s fair to say that I was firmly ensconced in the feature universe and I hadn’t come up through television. I’d written a couple of freelance episodes of some shows when I was first getting started but didn’t really know about the machinery. I had friends in TV. We talked about the writers’ room, but I was coming in from an outsider’s point of view, so the first season they teamed me up with a guy (Barry Schindel) who was relatively seasoned. He was a great guy but ultimately I had pretty good clarity of vision of what I wanted, and by the third episode I was de facto running things, but absolutely with his help and with his support. One of the things I love in life is the steep learning curve. I found it exhilarating to get in and learn what everybody did and try to master enough of it to be able to know what everybody was talking about and be able to make decisions.
But what about when it isn’t rainbows and puppies behind closed doors? Even when a collaboration is going right, there will be bad days of conflict. In a situation where there’s an imbalance of power (especially when an executive producer has been appointed), can a partnership move forward, or does it create irreparable damage? A few showrunners explain the repercussions of disharmony.
I had a tremendous disagreement with [the creator] about how the first season [of Army Wives] should end. It was a respectful disagreement. It was felt that for the end of the first season, she needed something really big, to really do a huge cliffhanger. What she had in mind was a soldier walking into a bar and blowing himself up and not letting the audience know who lived and who died. Personally, I thought that was against the spirit of what the show had done up to that point, and that it kind of jumped the shark. That was my thought.
Also, I was tired. I had been dropped into the middle of the situation [as a co-showrunner]. I didn’t even have a chance to read the underlying book for weeks and weeks. I was on the show, breaking stories, and hadn’t even had a chance to read the source material, that’s how behind we were.
So I had very good talks with the studio and the network. I said, “Look, she’s got this competing vision for this show. She created it. Let her do it.” They said, “Well, we can’t let her run the show because she doesn’t have enough experience as a showrunner.” I said, “That’s fine, but I think we’ve come along far enough that it wouldn’t be comfortable for us to continue to work together, just because I don’t quite share what she wants to do with it.” But we parted as friends, and remain friends, which is unusual. Part of what it was that it made easy for me to walk off was I was tired, and I felt I had done what I was asked to do, which was to put that show on its feet. I was very proud of it. I wished it well. [Melvoin returned to solely run the show from seasons 3-7.]
Honestly, it was difficult [co-showrunning with Chris Rock]. It was very, very difficult. It changed Chris and me. It changed our relationship because you come into the show as creative partners, but there’s a structure. The structure here is he’s Chris Rock and I’m Chris Rock’s guy. Then Chris Rock goes off and does something else and then I’m actually the guy left there to make decisions, so I have to make decisions. Creatively, what our relationship has been is that I’m almost functioning as a muse. I help him get his ideas out, but then if he leaves for two or three weeks, the show must go on, so now I got to make decisions.
But Chris is a very hands-on, creative person, so that was tricky because if I’m making certain decisions that he’s not 100 percent on board with, or he’s not 100 percent sure about, he’s got to wait to see how it plays out. Suddenly he’s in an incredibly uncomfortable position. He actually has to trust in a way that he’s not accustomed to trusting. Even if he trusted me before, he was still in the next room. Now he’s four states over and three weeks away and he hopes that whatever he sees—that he’s going to be credited with or blamed for—meets his approval.
On the one hand it’s tough because you have a creative relationship that you had established over a number of years. You have a friendship which you’ve established over a number of years, but the dynamic is changed. Really, in the truest sense of the word, I used to work for him. When we were doing HBO’s The Chris Rock Show, I was there because Chris wanted me there, and we worked very closely in getting his ideas out, but he was the showrunner. He was actually making the decisions. Then when we go to a studio and a network, I’m actually the showrunner. I’m the guy that’s there every day and I’m talking to the network. I’m talking to the studio executives. He’s familiar with them but I’m actually developing a relationship, and when they have a problem, they call me. Hopefully I can get him and get an answer. And if I can’t get him and get an answer, based on whatever the practical aspects of what we’re dealing with are, I’ve got to make a decision. I’ve got to hope that whatever decision I make, he’s happy with it. In the plus percentile, he is, and every now and again he’s not. Then we got to try to figure out how to hash that out, because he can’t be sure. He’s got to wait until it goes on. Now he just has to sit and wait until that decision appears on the air and he has to see whether he thinks it hurt him or whether he thinks it’s helping him. Nobody can tell him how that feels. He has to make that decision himself.
It’s any creative process. When you’re really vested in it, all these little things make a difference. He actually was put, I think, in a very uncomfortable position. It was a position that he’s absolutely 100 percent unaccustomed to being in. He was allowing his comedy vision to be managed by someone else. That someone was me. It’s Chris Rock; he’s one of the greatest comedians ever. It would literally be the same thing as him going, “Why don’t you take my act and go say it. See what that looks like.”
In the case of Fringe, Jeff Pinkner bowed out of his executive-producer role just prior to the show’s final season for many reasons including feature writing opportunities. It left J.H. Wyman as the sole showrunner for the last 13 hours of the series, a position he was completely comfortable assuming, yet admits was still a creative loss.
Running the show solo has its challenges on a whole bunch of levels. Number one, it’s just so much fun to be a part of something with another person. You get a different perspective on things. But our group has been so involved in each other’s lives and thinking. We’ve all influenced each other so well: J.J. [Abrams] and Jeff or Akiva [Goldsmith] and the writers that we use all the time. Now it becomes a lot more about my own personal view of things, how I like to tell stories, because one has to adjust. I don’t want to say, “compromise,” because compromise, for me, has a negative connotation, but I mean adjust. You’ll say, “Well, I wouldn’t handle an element that way, but I can see why that’s important to you. I’ll go with that and let’s do that.” That probably comes a lot from being a musician and being able to do my part and then everybody does their part. Then together, that’s the sound. I quite enjoyed having Jeff and having that. It’s really fun. That said, with the show coming into that last season, it was very clear where I personally wanted to go.
When looking at the chain of command in television, the showrunner is responsible for overseeing the cast, producers, directors, and everyone in the crew (or those below the line). While it may seem like the pinnacle position, the showrunner is actually beholden to the network, which licenses and broadcasts their show, and the studio, who helps finance the production of the series. Those two entities represent the purse strings, and the bosses of a showrunner. The showrunner’s function is not only creative, but also serves to ensure that the financial backer’s investment has the potential to recoup their money and eventually become profitable when the series is eligible for syndication or foreign-market sales. Because of that, most showrunners understand that adopting a maverick attitude against their financial overlords isn’t the smartest way of handling creative conflicts.
Instead, most showrunners have figured out their individual ways of making their bosses happy without selling out creatively to every whim of often jittery studio and network executives. It’s a high-wire act that often needs a lot of adjustments as the seasons proceed, which these showrunners explain.
We go to a bunch of people and ask them to give us a couple million bucks a week to tell our little pretend stories. The idea that they should do that with no strings attached is madness. It’s other people’s money. There are stockholders out there somewhere. I don’t know who would invest in television now—that’s a horrible idea—but in theory, that’s other people’s money we’re playing with. We should involve them in the process and be open to the idea that you get some feedback. Don’t try to drive us, but tell us what road you want us on, and we’ll do the best we can.
Ultimately, it’s a business where there is a number. There’s a number at which you survive and there’s a number at which you don’t survive. You get feedback; it’s called ratings. Beyond what critics say about the show or what feedback you get on the websites, you look at the ratings and you see whether or not you’re succeeding or failing. We respect that aspect of the business. We understand that the network has to maintain a certain number of eyeballs on their show or else you’re gone.
The license fee is the amount of money that the network pays the studio for the show, and they get to broadcast it for that license fee. Then the studio turns around, and sells the show around the world and sells it into syndication to another network or cable. The studio has a whole bunch of ways of making money in secondary markets. [With Bones] Fox, the network, is the primary client. It behooves Fox, the network, to have the studio pay tons of money for the show, because it looks fantastic. It behooves 20th Century Fox TV to keep their budget down so that they’re making as much profit as they can simply from the license fee so that all the other sales are gravy. Those are different agendas, and I have to contend with that. Every showrunner has to contend with the studio and the network. They very often fight through the show, not here. There is some cross-pollination with executives. The studio executive and the network executive can meet and have a coffee and hash things out, but it happens less than you would think.
As a showrunner, I always view things like a bank. You can deposit into a bank and you can withdraw from a bank. And at the beginning of my shows, I would always spend time depositing. Meaning, I would prove to the network that a) I knew what I was doing, then b), ask them to give me notes, but I’m going to react to them in smart ways, and if I disagree, I’m going to tell you why and you’re going to be proud of the final product. Once you establish that relationship, you get an incredible amount of leeway.
You know, while I was doing The Shield, I also did The Unit for CBS with David Mamet. There wasn’t a single story we wanted to do that we weren’t allowed to do on that show, but it comes from building trust. You can withdraw things that you want so long as you made deposits along the way with these people. And so it really comes down to the fact that they have a lot of things to worry about at the studios and networks. Therefore, my plan is always to, as quickly as possible, become the least problematic show for them, because they only have so many hours in the day. And they’re going to focus where they think their biggest problems are. So if my show is the least of their problems, then they’re off giving notes and trying to save some other show, and that’s when I’m allowed to do what I want.
In Hollywood, a lot of people get paid money to have opinions, and they feel that if they don’t express that opinion they’re not earning their money. So very often you have a lot of input that’s not necessarily constructive. At TNT, the dialog is much more like two entities trying to do something together as opposed to “we’re your boss and we want you to do this because our market research says so.” They really approach it in a very old-fashioned way that I don’t see even at the studios right now. Back in the day it used to be that a studio would gamble on a filmmaker and if the movie did well, they all felt great and got raises. If the movie tanked, they all got fired. Nowadays it’s much more manipulated. It’s more calculated. The experience of working with TNT has been like a throwback. They give us an enormous amount of freedom and when they have notes it’s because they care deeply about something. And even then, you can have an adult conversation. It’s such an unusual experience that I’m drawn back to it over and over again.
We don’t ever tell people the scripts will be great. We assure them that they will like our work and we will work hard. It’s interesting. [Chris and I] both worked for guys, and with guys, like this where they consider the sales job to continue past the pilot and all the way through the first season or even the second season, selling to the network again and again and again about how great the show is. I think we’re both of the opinion that, “Here is the script, here’s the work, here’s the show. You like it, great. If you don’t, then we should go work for people who like our stuff and you should just go find people whose stuff you like.”
You know what? I’d like to sit here and go, “Dammit, every time we try and do something different, [Fox] stands in our way and we run roughshod over them.” They’ve actually been very good. Whenever we’ve done a departure episode, with a couple of exceptions, they’ve been extraordinarily supportive. They’ve welcomed it. Even in season one when we did the first departure episode, which was “Three Stories,” they were excited about it right out of the gate, and we spent a little extra money on it.
I’m not positive that the writers of shows should be the showrunners. I’m not 100 percent there. I’m glad it’s worked out that way because it’s been to my advantage, as I’m a writer. We can be very self-indulgent. I think writers can get a little bit precious about our work, and when we’re the bosses, the only people who are going to draw that to our attention are probably the studio and the network executives. I’m not someone who would say I wish they didn’t exist. It is born for friction, but I think we need them, and out of that friction comes better work.
JOSS WHEDON: THE UNEXPECTED REBEL
As the former executive producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and now Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Joss Whedon has had more than his share of documented struggles with networks who didn’t understand, or have the patience, to foster his particular brand of cult shows. More surprising to Whedon is the lore that’s circulated about how he’s pushed back on those executives. He sets the record straight on his “rebellious rep” and his actual view about his responsibility to the networks.
Joss Whedon
“I’ve probably spoken out against the behavior of the people at the top in the networks two or three times in my career. And now, I find recently that I have a reputation. The very first time I ever disagreed with one network head, he brought out the word difficult. ‘Well, if you’re gonna be difficult…’ I’m like, ‘Wow. I’ve pretty much given you everything you’ve asked for, for four years, actually five, and this is the first time we’ve ever disagreed,’ and boom, here comes the rep. I have had mostly extremely good relationships, not just with network heads, but with standards and practices people; the kind of people, and younger executives, who are supposed to be the enemy. When you’re doing a show, they can be the enemy, and sometimes they have been. They absolutely have. Obviously with Firefly, it was us against them and it was a sad state of affairs to be in. But that’s not how I operate. I am, and always have tried to be, a company man. I treat showrunning and this work of being in Hollywood like the Army. I take the orders that I’m given, even if I disagree with them, because one day I intend to be giving them and will expect the same.
That goes back to the first shows I worked on, the first movies. I don’t step out of line. Sometimes I look back and go, ‘Maybe I should have.’ Part of me is just pathologically afraid of conflict, and part of me also just doesn’t understand what kind of power I might have. In the instance of saying, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had fought for Angel,’ it might well have mattered if I had fought for Angel, it just never occurred to me that you could.
That was after a time with having a great relationship with the WB and then having them kick Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the curb because they got into a shouting match with Fox. I think everybody’s at fault there. Those business decisions can offend me, but they are not really part of my life. It’s really the day-to-day workings of the show where I will do everything in my power to make the thing palatable to people who are putting up millions and millions of dollars to make the thing happen, and who have an absolute understanding of their network that I don’t. They should have a say in what’s going on.
Yes, I like to be left alone to do my thing. Everybody does. But the moment you forget that the executive you can’t stand, who has never been helpful at all, might be the only person in the room who has the right idea about how to fix something, the moment you forget that, you’re going to lose.
I know a lot of stories of great showrunners who are like, ‘And I told the network, go fuck yourself, and I kicked them out and I shut the door.’ I’ve never done that. I’ve gotten a little bit shirty and I’ve gotten insistent and I’ve drawn the line. I’ve put myself in a position to draw the line and I think that’s an important part of it. I never needed to put a show on the air, so I never had to become so craven to the network that I hated them for it.
When I did Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I said, ‘This is exactly the show we want to do. If you want a show that’s sort of similar, then God-speed. I’m going to do something else with my life.’ And therefore, because I had that absolute clarity, it was easy for me to be giving in other areas. I don’t think you need to treat anybody like your enemy unless they are actively trying to destroy you, which occasionally does happen. There are those kinds of people out there, but there are not many. Everybody has a pretty good will and if you can tap into that and make allies out of everybody, things are going to just go much better. Yet now, I find that I’m this hot-headed maverick, which is amazing because I’m afraid of four-year olds.”
With increasingly fractured audience viewing patterns, technology moving faster than revenue models can keep up, and more and more competition over the digital-channel landscape, there’s so much more than just writing great stories for a showrunner to think about now: quality scripts, social-media presence, ratings with DVR adjustments, and so on. Showrunners feel the constant pressure of being pulled in even more directions, and in ways no one could have anticipated even five years ago.
Television has become really compelling because it’s in a fight for survival. Entertainment has become so diverse because you have the Internet, you have gaming. You have a hundred channels of niche entertainment for the folks who are interested in bass fishing or exploring the Amazon or finding crazy stuff at yard sales. It’s fractured the audience in a way that we haven’t really seen in our contemporary history. It’s always kind of been the big three networks that have controlled everything, and before that a handful of radio stations, so the culture was all having the same conversation.
What’s happening now is that we’re going to this more specialized, niche programming which has forced conventional broadcast television to become much more competitive. It’s forced it to become better just to survive. The level of storytelling is just much more sophisticated in your average show that takes place now versus your average show from 20, 30 years ago. There are a lot more moves because we’re all trying to break through the noise. We’re all trying to find an audience and make them think that our hour’s worthwhile. I think those evolutionary pressures make the job difficult but also really exciting because you can’t rest on your laurels these days. You always have to be pushing your storytelling into new territory. You can’t just say, “Okay. I have an audience. I’m going to cruise for a season or two.” You always have to be continuing to think how you are going to build that audience. How are you going to challenge the audience so they don’t get bored? How are you going to do new storytelling? On Castle, every season we take a look at what we’ve done and we look at growing the characters or going into some sort of new paradigm that allows our characters to view the world in different ways than we’ve seen in previous episodes or previous seasons. I think it’s really the responsibility of the showrunner to continue to figure out how to push stuff forward.
With so many balls in the air, you’d think it’s difficult sometimes to sort it all out, but I find that when you’re actually in the middle of it, it can be very exhilarating. If you get fatigued everything becomes excruciating, but when I’m feeling energized it’s a challenge and it’s one of those things, like a guy spinning so many plates, where you actually feel kind of cocky about the whole thing. It’s almost like playing 30-second chess and you’re playing with six different people; move that, do this, do that, and you’re walking into an editing bay and you’re making a decision and you’re coming back into the writers’ room making this decision. You’re looking at a problem that’s coming from the set and you’re making a decision. That’s when it’s at its best. When things aren’t going well, when you’re tired, when you’re getting too much network or studio interference or problems from the set, it can feel like you’ve got a thousand people tap dancing on your skull. That’s not fun.
When you create something, you have to have this little man in your head that says, “This is going to live for the ages.” You’re trying to speak universally. Some people aren’t. Some people are doing something else. I am constantly begging for everybody in the world to love me every second when I’m working, and sadly also in my life. You kind of go in expecting that people will respond to it and that they’ll stay with it. It doesn’t leave me. It’s incorporated in me. When people come up and it’s fresh to them as they’ve just seen it, or they still love it, or whatever it is, there’s an element of, “Well, yeah,” which sounds like hubris, but is really just this little piece of hubris that you absolutely need to continue for all the times that people are going, “That’s never going to work.”
I’ll tell you a really fun story. The assistant director’s office is just down the hall. It’s about 20 yards away, and we have a pre-production meeting in there every episode. One episode we wound it up, and we had several lingering details that we had to figure out. I was walking from that door to my office and that walk took me 30 minutes, because everyone said, “I just need five minutes,” “I just need five minutes,” “I just need a minute.”
At the very end of it, the guy who was doing props at the time, Frank Brighton, said, “Mr. Duff, I’m sorry to stop you, but I just need five minutes.” I said, “Frank, one day I’m going to walk from that office to this office and no one is going to care what I have to say about anything, so stop me, please, and ask my opinion. I have an opportunity to give my opinion and people are listening.”
I think that’s how you have to look at it; you have to look at is as an opportunity. If you embrace the opportunity, and you embrace the people who are helping, you realize that opportunity, and you have a much better shot of getting it done right. You have elected to live in a stress-filled environment when you come on to do this kind of job.
I would also like to say that there are 250 other people who will be doing this job with me. That’s one of the things that I’m principally grateful for, and I know in my heart and in my bones that I do not have my own television show. A lot of people who are doing my job don’t understand that. They think they do. I don’t. I do not have my own show. No one has their own TV show. It takes 250 to 300 people giving it everything they’ve got every day of the week to have a good show. Mostly, though, I’m doing what the day brings me. I admit very much to being run by the show more than running the show myself. The show takes you and runs with it. You don’t get to decide where you’re going to go. The show decides where you’re going to go, and the show decides when you have time to consider something else, anything else.
Jeff Melvoin is spot on when he says, “No one is born knowing how to run a show,” but that doesn’t mean you can’t get officially trained to do the job well. Through the Writers’ Guild of America, Melvoin helped create the curriculum for the Showrunners Training Program (launched in 2005) that was “designed to help senior-level writer-producers hone the skills necessary to become successful showrunners in today’s television landscape.” 1
Jeff Melvoin explains that for those that want to create their own series concepts with the intention of executive producing the show into existence, the program empowers writers with real-life exposure to the day-to-day of showrunning.
The impulse for the Showrunners Training Program came from a couple of directions. First of all, a friend of mine, John Wirth (Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles), another showrunner, worked together with me on the show Remington Steele. He had an idea to put together a book about the various jobs of what goes into being a writer and writer/producer in episodic television. There were about ten of us who started to assemble that. We thought it would take a year. It took us five years. John and I ended up editing it. It’s a nice little volume and it’s put out [free] by the Writers’ Guild.
That kind of put the idea in my head about doing something on a different scale, on a different platform. One of the things that interested me was continuing education. The Guild does a great job of protecting writers in terms of contracts, pensions, and medical benefits, but I thought it had not done such a good job of capturing any collective wisdom or institutional memory about what it was to run a television show. In the old days, I don’t think it was as necessary because there were fewer networks, fewer competition. The audience, frankly, wasn’t as demanding.
The way the business ran was that you had to be in the business for six to eight years before they would let you pitch a show, because the assumption was that if you pitched the show you would run the show. After six or eight years, the networks and studios had leached just about enough creativity from you that you were going to suggest something different, but not too different; fresh, but not too fresh, which is what they wanted. “My detective has a limp. My detective has a father-and-daughter combination. My detective is blind.” Whatever it is, it was all variations on a theme and you could apply that to any of the genres.
I think that MTM Enterprises was largely responsible for the rise of the showrunner as an individual. The term wasn’t in use until the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. In fact, the job wasn’t there. Back in the ‘60s, when they did 39 shows in the season—as opposed to 22, which is a prime-time season today—there was essentially a non-writing producer, like a Sheldon Leonard (The Andy Griffith Show) or a Danny Thomas (The Dick Van Dyke Show), or a Quinn Martin (The Fugitive). There was a story editor and there was a freelance market. They did 39 shows that way and it worked.
What happened with the rise of MTM was that Grant Tinker recognized that if you put more responsibility in the hands of the writers, gave them more authority and gave them more back end, good things would happen. Plus you didn’t have to pay them as much up front. With the rise of the comedies at MTM, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and then with the dramas, beginning with things like The White Shadow, St. Elsewhere, and Hill Street Blues, when those things caught on the studios were quick to follow. Suddenly the writer/producer became a much more important figure.
Then over the last 20 years, with the proliferation of outlets, cable in particular, not only was there a need for more shows, but also there was a need for more creativity. The idea of simply getting someone to say, “My detective is a father and son,” that wasn’t enough. There had to be fresher stuff coming in, which I think is a good thing, and so they began to look for writers who were younger, writers who had newer ideas, but writers who didn’t necessarily have six to eight to ten years in television. This all coincided, so there’s more slots being opened and there’s younger and less experienced people. They don’t necessarily have to be younger; there are a number of people that had considerable experience in film that started to come over to TV, but they had zero TV experience.
Another ramification of what was happening with the business is that shows were getting the hook earlier. The idea that you could get a show and the show was okay but it could run for five or six years—those were becoming rare. There’s no better way to learn this business than to be on a show for two or three years. You can really see how things work, and learn. But if you’re changing jobs every year or so, it’s not conducive to really learning that much. That’s especially so because in the life history of a show, the first six to 13 episodes are always frenetic. Changes are being made. You’re being second-guessed left and right, and you can’t really get into that kind of rhythm that I consider reasonable, and balanced habits and protocol can’t be put into place where you can really produce the show professionally and get the best results out of everybody. You’ve got to throw your mother under the bus, if you need to, in those first six episodes just to keep it on the air.
You put all those things together and what happened, I think, as we came into the late ‘90s and the turn of the century, is that many more people were getting the job of creating a show or running a show with less and less experience and less opportunity to get that experience, because the apprenticeships were becoming fewer and farther between. That’s what led me to think people could really benefit from having some sort of program in which they could, at least, be exposed to different ways that people do it.
The first week, it’s going from writer to manager: what does it mean, what’s the job, what’s the history of it? Then, the second week is managing writers and the writing process. Then it’s managing directors and actors, managing executive relationships, managing production, managing post-production, and then managing your career. By the time we’re through, we’ve had directors come and talk to us about the job from their perspective. We’ve had actors talk about the job from their perspective. We’ve had unit production managers and location managers talking about their job. We’ve gone to a post house and had editors and cameramen talk to us about what the job is.
The idea is to give the class exposure to all the different tasks that go into being a showrunner, but also to understand what other people’s jobs are and what they look to you as a showrunner to do for them so that you can enable them to actually do their jobs.
I reduce showrunning to: if you have to remember only one thing from the entire six weeks, it’s four words: “quality scripts, on time.” If you don’t have quality scripts then what’s the point of doing any of this? If quality scripts don’t come on time you’re going to be off the air. You’re not going to have a quality hour because they couldn’t do a quality hour because your script was late.
No, most shows aren’t smash hits. Most shows are living on that bubble and, at the end of the day when the network and the studio look at the hot costs and look at what the show has done, they say, either we want to be in business with that person again or we don’t. How you acquit yourself is often as important, or more important, than how your first or second show actually performs, because if you stay in the race long enough, you’re going to win. It’s just a question of how you can stay in the race. Nothing will get you out of it quicker than arrogance, ignorance, and being over budget and behind schedule.
I don’t know if by going through the program, we can quantifiably say that it increases somebody’s marketability. Anecdotally, we are hearing that that’s increasingly true, that the program has a certain status, and that it is a relief, or a comfort or reassurance, for a studio and a network to know that someone has been through it.
JANET TAMARO, STP GRADUATE
“The Showrunners Training Program at the WGA was pretty great because so many showrunners shared their experiences. However, nothing prepares you for the near-incinerating temperatures of that actual showrunner’s hot seat. I saved my notes, and when it got tough during my first season at the helm, I’d re-read them to remind myself that this is the gig: solving the problems.
“The Writers’ Guild asked me to come and speak to a new group of potential showrunners. It was an out-of-body experience to be a panelist two years after I’d been a ‘student.’ I remember looking at that sea of hopeful faces and thinking, ‘Damn. We were just as hopeful. And just as clueless.’”
The program is very selective. You have to be either a writer/producer or you have to have development that’s current. You have to be recommended by either a showrunner, or a network, or studio executive. We usually get about 90 applicants for 20 slots. We give out about 25 slots, but technically it’s supposed to be 20. Out of those 90 applicants, we interview 40 and then we select about 20 or 25. That’s the hardest part of the program. I hate having to eliminate anybody, but it makes the class much more interactive. Part of the value of the program is hearing from everybody else’s experience, because that is part of the reason for the program: to share experiences and so people can learn from each other.
1http://www.wga.org, Showrunner Training Program.