Running the Show

Elizabeth Guider talks to showrunners, network executives and studio chiefs about managing scripted series in the era of peak TV.

Showrunners are in the catbird seat—and that seat is especially hot right now. Hot in that these folks are in demand and hot in that their high perch is being shaken as never before.

If “disruptive” is the operative word used to describe the current TV landscape, the role, even the very notion, of showrunner has also come in for a rethink.

More people are vying for or being drafted to do the job, with sometimes mixed results. In some cases, the competencies needed to run a show smoothly and effectively are being split between two or more people. Sometimes, especially at players like Netflix and Amazon, directors are being given a greater role in creative decision-making. Or, as with Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, the series is now being run “like a republic…with senior powers in every aspect of the realization of the show,” as David Zucker, its executive producer, told TV critics this summer.

In any case, the rethinking of roles and responsibilities in managing scripted series is a far cry from how things were done in the relatively staid broadcast-TV world of yore.

“Back then, everything was very much the same—like the car industry: same wheels, same chassis, just a different color dashboard, as it were,” recalls Jeff Melvoin, a producer whose 30-plus years of credits include Remington Steele, Picket Fences, Army Wives and, currently, a project for Amazon set in pre-revolutionary Cuba called Tropicana. “The television system was industrial too—and by and large, it worked. Moreover, if you were a writer-producer back then and you came in to pitch, you had to sound like everybody else before you had [the right] to sound like nobody else.”

But with the explosion of new outlets clamoring after new voices, and the insatiable appetite for dramatic fiction from audiences, the need for a lead voice who sparks collaboration but then hones a single vision—and keeps it intact during intrusions from the outside, including from the studio hierarchy—has, in the view of many senior executives, never been greater.

MULTITASKING MASTERS
“Showrunners? They’re indubitably the CEOs of a series,” says Kevin Beggs, chairman of Lionsgate Television Group. “They’re the ones in charge—of writing, casting, establishing tone, marketing and messaging. So yes, their role is essential for effective production.”

In addition to their writing and producing chops, these guys or gals should, Beggs suggests, possess two other necessary qualities: excellent organizational skills and empathy.

The only rub: such résumés are arguably in short supply.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Given the mystique surrounding the process and the elevation of some series to cult status, the very designation “showrunner” has started to smack a little of the “self-congratulatory,” suggests Frank Spotnitz, who as a writer-producer likes to consider himself simply “the primary creative voice” on the productions he runs. (It was Spotnitz who adapted the aforementioned Philip K. Dick dystopian novel and “ran” Man in the High Castle, leaving mid-second season. Per Amazon, his exit was because of conflicts with the planned shooting schedule; per Spotnitz, because of creative differences over the direction of the script. He has moved on to Ransom, a 13-parter for TF1 and Global—with RTL and CBS also on board—about an international crisis negotiator, and to The Indian Detective, a dramedy for CTV in Canada top-lining Russell Peters.)

“The great thing about the American system is its being collaborative without being chaotic: a lead writer-producer refines the vision,” Spotnitz says, adding that the preeminence of the showrunner started as a practical matter. It was the writer-producer who was historically the one who could fix the script on a tight deadline. That’s how the broadcast-network system for episodic drama evolved in the States.

Nowadays, though, with shorter runs on cable and no hard airdates on online streamers, the showrunner role is splintering, sometimes leading to more input from directors or to roles split among different producers.

With a staggering 450-odd scripted series airing every year now in the U.S. (and a growing number abroad as well), finding experienced players to oversee the entire creative effort is, in Beggs’s words, “quite difficult.” (For one thing, many of the more seasoned showrunners are tied up in long-term deals with the major Hollywood studios, which all have a corporate mandate, spoken or not, to supply their own sister networks with a constant flow of series.)

That’s why Melvoin and others at the Writers Guild of America took it upon themselves a decade ago to set up a training program to prepare a new generation of showrunners. “We felt that we were losing the collective wisdom of those producers who had honed the craft of showrunning and established the template for long-running series,” he explains. (A number of those graduates have gone on to success, including Matt Nix of Burn Notice and Kenya Barris, who oversees Black-ish.)

TALENT SCOUTS
That’s also why some cable outlets, taking a page from the majors’ playbook, have methodically nailed down overall deals or first-look arrangements with those talents with whom they want to be in ongoing business. Take FX Productions, which has contracted with Noah Hawley (Fargo), Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans) and Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story), among others.

“In our experience, it’s really about carrying on a robust dialogue with writer-producers we’re in business with, not riding herd on every creative choice they make,” says Eric Schrier, the president of original programming at FX Networks and FX Productions. “What we’re looking for among pitches or from producers sent our way is almost always a fresh or arresting point of view.” The goal at pitch sessions, Schrier says, is “to excavate everything interesting from the writer’s concept, turn that into a blueprint for the project, and then send him or her on their way to build it out.”

Like several other executives around town, Schrier indicates that there’s no longer much discussion about what used to be called “pushing the creative envelope” with regard to sex, violence or strong language. Certainly not at the cable outlets, but less so too at the broadcast networks. Not that there aren’t limits to decency, but instances of gross overstepping of those bounds are relatively rare—and arguably the broader culture has become much more used to provocative scenes.

Schrier points to one of his company’s latest projects, a series called Snowfall, set in the cocaine-crazed 1980s in Los Angeles, which had languished elsewhere. “When brought to us, we felt it created a world we hadn’t seen before on TV and did so from an angle that intrigued us. Plus, we’re comfortable with the people in charge of the project, that they can execute.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean the demands on these multi-hyphenate showrunning talents are any less onerous than they were in the old days. With programming budgets moving ever upward, and a plethora of writers not always with the necessary experience, background or personality traits, showrunners have often had to take on more responsibilities than preceding generations.

“It’s true: A-list writers have never been more in demand, their various talents more called upon,” says John Morayniss, the CEO of Entertainment One (eOne) Television.

Morayniss is in charge of putting together small-screen projects for broadcast nets, cablers and online streamers that can travel successfully around the world. And, as at so many other independent companies, often the core idea originates from outside the U.S. and the project is funded by players on at least two continents.

THE TOTAL PACKAGE
“As a general rule, I’d say that TV projects are being packaged more like independent movies used to be,” Morayniss says. “You have to corral a great script, then find a director, line up bankable acting talent and vie for one or another top showrunner. All that before one necessarily pitches it to a network.”

He and others suggest that bud­gets for the high-end “event” series continue to go up, though no one we interviewed wanted to be drawn out on just how much of the pie is now being sliced off for these top-tier showrunner talents. (Off the record, one analyst stated that the top 20 or so writer-producers in the U.S. are pulling in 20 to 25 percent more than they were three or four years ago, through upfront fees, a share of the back-end revenue or an actual tranche of the IP.)

“To my mind, the biggest change in this part of the business of late is that generalists—those folks who can write, produce, ride herd daily on a show—are back in vogue,” Morayniss says.

HEAVY HITTERS
Morayniss points out that there are some non-writing producers who are also in constant demand—folks like Jerry Bruckheimer, Barry Josephson and Mark Gordon. In the case of Gordon, eOne took a sizeable stake in his company in January 2015.

“What does Mark bring to the table?” Morayniss says. “He finds material, attracts writers and nurtures them, wields the scissors in the edit room, and knows the ins and out of marketing and promotion.”

The non-writing producers often boast movie bona fides as well as long experience in the TV business. Gordon’s credits include the Oscar-winning Saving Private Ryan as well as CBS’s long-running Criminal Minds and ABC’s Designated Survivor, a buzzy fall-season newcomer starring Kiefer Sutherland.

“In short, what we’ve done is combine the indie studio infrastructure of distribution and sales capacity with the talents and potential output of a creative producer,” Morayniss continues. “Our idea is to empower such companies—and we have an in-house M&A group exploring other such partnerships—to take more risks and allow them to own more of the assets they create.”

As for what most excites showrunners themselves these days, it’s the variety and range of outlets that are now vying for fiction material, according to the producer Tom Fontana, who made his name on crime serials like Oz and Homicide: Life on the Street and who has now branched out in several different directions.

“Every series I’ve done, be it for the networks, pay cable, foreign broadcasters or whomever, challenges me in a different way,” Fontana points out. Fontana recently joined Starz’s Havana Quartet as executive producer. He and his producing partner, Barry Levinson, are also working on a second season of the true-crime documentary series Killing Fields at Discovery.

As for what irks showrunners the most, Fontana notes, “Often when we go in to pitch nowadays we hear the same refrain: ‘We don’t know what we want, but we’ll know it when we see it!’”

What’s exasperating, and happens often at outlets that are rushing to leap onto the original-fiction bandwagon, is what comes next from the execs during the pitch session, according to Fontana: “OK, you have this great character, but can’t you make him (or her) a little more flawed—you know, like Bryan Cranston?” (The actor memorably played the highly flawed protagonist Walter White in AMC’s Breaking Bad.) “The worst thing that’s happened to TV is branding,” says Fontana, in that it prevents some outlets from “coming up with something that hasn’t been seen before,” instead pressuring them to wring variations on past successes until they no longer have any life in them. “The truly original thing to do,” he suggests, “would be to go for a character who isn’t flawed, or at least isn’t flawed in the same way or to the same degree as a Walter White.”

Spotnitz, who has spent the last six years working largely on the European side of the Atlantic, points to another challenge that studio and network gatekeepers need to address when making their greenlighting decisions. While there’s no doubt that the creative envelope has been pushed, and network executives now insist on writers and showrunners being daring, diversity on the small screen remains a huge problem, abroad as well as in the States, both in subject matter and in point of view.

“It’s the white-male, liberal point of view that still predominates,” Spotnitz claims. Minorities are stereotyped, if they appear at all—and women are imagined largely from the male perspective. “It’s disgraceful,” he says.

Not that Spotnitz and Fontana, like many other A-list showrunners, aren’t acutely aware of, and respectful of, the different needs and approaches of different outlets and that the business of television, starting with broadcast-network TV, is a brutal, relentless one.

“Television is an imitative art—more so and at a quicker pace than cinema, for example,” says Lionsgate’s Beggs. “It grinds on, and industrial business logic would encourage the repetition of what already has worked.”

That’s why, Beggs says, the process at the broadcasters is still very much about creating “a big, loud, cinematic pilot,” and then using that template to stamp the succeeding episodes. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. There are just not that many folks who can pull off that feat day in, day out, year after year.

EPISODIC ANGST
Spotnitz, whose past credits include the megahit The X-Files, adds, “As a writer-producer, I have huge respect for episodic drama, which requires enormous discipline and trust within the writers’ room. Now it appears everyone wants to run off and do serialized drama. Admittedly, in doing these we get to go deeper into the characters’ lives, but occasionally weaknesses in narrative slip in because of such long lag times between seasons.”

The broadcast networks are not going quietly into the night just because these serialized shows on cable are monopolizing so much of critics’ ink.

Jennifer Salke, the president of NBC Entertainment, says, “I think that given the new normal, creators feel that networks are no longer feeling beholden to overnight numbers, and with that comes a certain freedom, along with the ability to redefine what makes a show successful.”

Salke goes on to describe the blurring of the lines between procedurals and serialized shows on her network, and how that is affecting her team’s choices of material. “The challenge is in finding a balanced schedule that holds both procedural shows as well as buzzy serialized drama and comedy. We look to program shows like Blindspot and The Blacklist that offer close-ended, compelling stories but also long arcs and serialized character stories that keep fans hooked. We hope Timeless (from exec producers Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan) accomplishes the same balance.”

On the other hand, she continues, “This Is Us will deliver a compelling close-ended story but will feel more serialized as [it follows] a group of characters who are interconnected. Even Dick Wolf’s Chicago shows strike a balance—telling a compelling episodic story but drawing audiences into the characters and interconnected story lines. We believe that audiences love and invest in characters whether the series veers toward procedural story­telling or not. A straight procedural without compelling characters who get people talking won’t survive on our schedule.”

Make no mistake: the enduring appeal of the best procedurals is broad enough that there is still a substantial back end for the best ones in both domestic U.S. syndication and from foreign license fees. On the other hand, it is serialized stories that have caught the imagination of young audiences of late, in the U.S. and elsewhere. It’s not that one genre has replaced the other, it’s that they cater, to some extent, to different audiences and rely on different viewer habits. Serialized dramas tend to invite bingeing or online streaming, and indeed that’s largely how they’re making their back-end money, rather than through traditional syndication.

PREMIUM BLUEPRINT
If the highest form of flattery is imitation, then HBO, Showtime and Starz should be feeling pretty good about themselves. It can be argued that their consistent success in creating these darker, provocative, character-driven stories subsequently spurred a host of basic-cable networks and, more recently, internet streaming services to jump into the game.

“Not that much has changed” at Showtime Networks, says Gary Levine, the premium-channel operator’s president of programming. “We’ve been looking for and extracting the challenging and thought-provoking out of writers and producers for decades, daring them on occasion to dig deeper. It’s just that more and more outlets are now trying to emulate what we do.”

Competition for top-tier show­­runner talent in Hollywood is fiercer, and it has become “a little more expensive” to tie up certain key names, Levine says. He also argues that some tasks on a show can be split up. Regarding Billions, for example, the writer-producers in charge, David Levien and Brian Koppelman, were not “terribly experienced in TV” but otherwise “really talented and quick on the learning curve.” In Showtime’s relations with producers, Levine explains, it’s more about “ongoing conversations” than it is about flooding them with notes. One such director is David Lynch, who is reviving (and modernizing) his groundbreaking 1990 mystery series, Twin Peaks, for Showtime and who is predictably keeping details about the show, and footage, off-limits to outsiders.

Carmi Zlotnik, the managing director of Starz, points to another aspect of the competitive landscape. “I think there’s no doubt the talent pool at the deep end has thinned out, so one of the things we’ve started doing is mining the talents who’ve been toiling in the indie-film biz.”

Zlotnik explains that doing so has enriched Starz’s aesthetics and also helped keep pricing under control, as fees in the indie trenches have never been disproportionately high. “What’s low budget for us can be substantial in some cases for them,” he says.

FOSTERING TALENT
Like Levine, Zlotnik emphasizes that in working with “really smart people,” Starz doesn’t have to micromanage them. What he and his team do is sniff out when a writer shows unusual promise for developing and exercising additional skills.

“The first year we partnered Courtney Kemp Agboh with a seasoned producer [on Power], but when we assessed her grasp of the process and her conceptual ideas, we took the training wheels off,” Zlotnik says. (Agboh had spent time on the CBS hit The Good Wife.) He describes a similar trajectory for Emma Frost, who is a British writer now turned showrunner on the historical drama The White Princess.

“The key for us with each of our drama projects is adaptation to the different skill sets and needs of the key creative,” Zlotnik stresses. Take the showrunner Ronald D. Moore (Outlander), for example: “Not much we can tell him. He knows the process, masterminds the logistics and knows how to go to market.” In other cases, it’s about pairing contrasting talents and always being alert to who can take on added roles. “In the end, it’s all about creating a good team that can work effectively together.”

CROSSING CONTINENTS
While there’s little doubt that compelling dramas are being produced across the European continent, and a noticeable number of those efforts translated for the U.S., the actual process of production overseas has not shifted dramatically. Especially in regards to the showrunner figure.

“We still tend to work with a single writer on a particular project, and it’s my job to encourage, protect and nurture that talent,” says Piv Bernth, the head of drama at the Danish pubcaster DR. “We typically divide the job of writer from producer, and we don’t utilize so-called writers’ rooms.”

For one thing, it’s a budgetary issue (in that more writers cost more money, and European pubcasters’ allotments for each show tend to have a fixed ceiling), and for another, series’ runs are typically shorter than in the States. Bernth also insists that, despite the world of television becoming more global, she believes that “the more local a story” the more likely it will travel. Specificity matters. “I tell them, develop and write what you know, without trying to guess what is fashionable.” The international success of Scandinavian series like The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen, all of which Bernth was involved in, would seem to validate her point.

Another producer who has experience in Europe and America, Stephen Cornwell, is actively choosing from best practices on both sides of the pond. The six-part The Night Manager, top-lining Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, is a prime example of how different approaches can be combined to good advantage (and rave reviews). Cornwell, his brother Simon and the London-based executive producer Stephen Garrett largely split duties on the series, with a notable assist from the Cornwells’ dad, David, aka John le Carré. They also utilized the talents of a script manager and a lead writer, David Farr.

“Each national system has its advantages and its drawbacks,” Cornwell believes. In the British system, where “a single writer typically goes off to pen a complete series on his own before anything airs,” the result is a “very distinctive authorship. At its best, you end up with an intimate voice, a consistency of quality and a strong narrative arc. On the other hand, such an approach can mean that a show starts better than it ends. In some cases I’d say British shows do that, tailing off rather than building on their momentum.”

From the U.S. system, which is where the Cornwell brothers have based their company, The Ink Factory, they have embraced “the more interactive process whereby every idea is challenged, every character dissected and every plot point debated.” And, at its best, Cornwell says, “that critical effort is sustained throughout the series.”

Not that it always works or that one single person can juggle all those balls. “I think it takes an exceptional talent to be both a writer and a runner,” Cornwell asserts. “In such a fragmented business, with so many creative breakthroughs going on in television, I do believe there’ll be a rebalancing and, eventually, the emergence of a new type of showrunner.”

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Given the admiration for the way TV is made in the States and a growing number of internationally set and financed projects getting commissioned, training for a more collaborative, multi-writer approach to drama production is starting to take shape in Europe.

Backed by the EU, a training program called Serial Eyes, conducted in English in Berlin, works with 20-odd writers each year from all over Europe to give them practical experience in working together and learning to run a writers’ room.

Admittedly, few European broadcasters have put their feet in the water in establishing writers’ rooms for prime-time drama. But there is “a fascination with how things are done in Hollywood,” according to Benjamin Harris, the head of programs at Serial Eyes.

“Showrunning sounds cool to a lot of European networks—after all, they are airing a lot of U.S. series that work well for them—but structural and cultural differences have limited a full-on embrace of the American methods,” Harris observes.

Still, he points out, things are slowly changing. A few of the course’s alumni have been busily at work on pan-European projects, including Jana Burbach, who worked in a writers’ room on the Teutonic thriller Bad Banks for ZDF and ARTE, and Wiktor Piatkowski, who wrote the pilot episode of HBO Europe’s Wataha (The Pack).

Pictured: A+E Networks’ UnREAL.