Anonymous Interview: The Network Showrunner (Part 1)

A candid conversation about what a showrunner is and isn't

For our first in a series of anonymous interviews with film and TV industry professionals, we spoke to the showrunner of an hourlong drama airing on one of the major networks. In this first of two parts, we have a candid, in-depth discussion about the myths around showrunning, the challenges of the job, and the specifics of how (and how much) a showrunner gets paid.

When you meet somebody out in the world and they ask you what you do for a living, how do you describe your job?

I think I still identify myself as a writer first and foremost, which I don’t know that I am anymore, strictly speaking. But if somebody asks me what I do, I say I’m a writer. And then usually the second question is some form of, “Have you written anything I would have seen?” And then I get into what my actual job is, and it becomes clear that I do a lot of other stuff besides write.

I’d worked in television as a writer-producer for over a dozen years before I became a showrunner. And I thought that meant that I knew exactly what I was getting into. And the biggest shock, or the thing that I underestimated the most, is that there’s this perception about showrunners — a perception that showrunners cultivate for themselves — that showrunning is an auteur job. And on some level it’s true, in the sense that you’re responsible for making every creative decision from writing to hiring directors and casting and production design. You get presentations from every department head that in film would normally go to the director. And because you’re trying to create a unified vision across episodes, you end up having an approval that is higher than the director’s approval.

But that’s counterbalanced by the fact that television is a long-term relationship. If you do a movie, you get in bed with a group of people for a couple of months, or if there’s a really long prep, maybe it’s a year or something, but there’s an end date to it. The thing you’re making is going to end on a certain day and you’re going to release it, and then it’s over. And television, there’s this open-endedness to it. That means that you’re married to these people indefinitely. And so the thing that I underestimated about showrunning is how much of it is managing other people’s expectations and egos and needs and being responsive to all of that.

It’s a level of accountability that I wasn’t used to. For years in my career, my accountability was to one person: to the showrunner. And I just had to write scripts that were usable and producible and exciting. And I had to go produce them sometimes on set, and all that meant was that I was representing the showrunner’s vision on set. It was a job that I got good at and understood and felt very much like it wasn’t overwhelming.

But as a showrunner, you’re managing up: you’re pitching your vision for the show to executives at the studio and the network. On a macro level, you’re spending time in the writer’s room and coming up with a pitch for the season that is sales-y and compelling and talks about emotional arcs at a 30,000-foot level. You’re narrating what your characters are experiencing and how it’s changing them. And then you also have to repeat that sales process on a more granular level for each episode, where you’re submitting a story document that will get them excited about the world that your episode is going to live in and what the characters are going to be going through, and signing off on the budget for it.

And then you have to do the outline and then you have to do the scripts and you’re managing down or managing within your production. You have to make sure that the actors are on board with what their characters are doing and excited about it, because it’s really important that they continue to show up day after day excited about what they’re doing and that they aren’t just fulfilling their contracts.

You’re managing a group of writers — we have a large group, ten writers on staff this year, and each of those people is somebody who has their own artistic journey that they’re on and they have certain objectives that they want to get into the show creatively. And they have certain expectations and desires for writing scripts and being able to bring something to the table, as well as making us happy. And so you want those people to feel engaged and feel like their ideas are being heard. And also, I’ve hired them for a reason — I like their ideas and I want to make sure that there’s a place for as many of them as possible.

And then with directors, it’s making sure that you’re putting directors in a place where they can succeed. It’s hard to direct episodic television because, as a director, you’re coming in and trying to put a stamp on something. We really do try and bring back directors who bring something new that we were surprised and excited by, but you also have to understand what the pattern of the show is. The only way that a director is in a position to understand all that is if the showrunner explains it to them. You can’t just hire people then expect them to figure it all out. And we have people to help with that, but then there’s also department heads and, you know, making sure people like your wardrobe supervisor and production designer are being given opportunities to stand out and demonstrate why they’re visionaries in their own right.

All the various departments need money and need direction. And then also, when you go onto set — I’m naturally, I guess, an introvert. So I have to make an effort when I’m on set to just make sure that I’m available to people and saying hello and checking in on them, because we have a crew that we love, and we want them to stay.

So it’s just being a leader. I guess I just used a million words to say you just have to be a leader to this big, sprawling, expensive team of people that is responsible for putting this thing on the air that has to arrive on a certain schedule and at a certain budget point.

Making that transition from being a writer-producer to being a showrunner seems like a big shift. Does anybody train you to do that? Did you go to a boot camp? Was it just sink or swim, or were there things that were done to make you feel more comfortable in that position?

It’s a chronic problem for the TV business that I think is beginning to be addressed. There are boot camps. The Writers Guild has a showrunner training program. I didn’t do it. It’s good, from what I’ve heard. Some of the studios have similar types of programs where they try and take writer-producers who are on that track and give them a little formal training and expose them to, you know, “This is what a budget looks like, and here’s the etiquette of dealing with executives.”

When you get your first writing job in television, your title is staff writer, and then you go up to story editor, and then it’s executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and then executive producer. There are a lot of rungs on this ladder. And traditionally, as you ascend those rungs, you are given more responsibility as a writer-producer. And so, in my last few jobs, part of what I would do as a co-executive producer was be an advisor to the showrunner. They start to let you in on some of their high-level decision making and ask for advice on it. And in that way, you learn some stuff.

Another thing that for me was invaluable was I was a showrunner’s assistant before I was even a writer. Obviously, not everybody does that. But that gave me the most exposure to what I’m doing now, in terms of just being on all those emails and being on all those calls. Just understanding the types of crises that pop up throughout the day that have to be resolved, the order in which you have to tackle them, who has to be kept happy, how much power the various executives and representatives have, and so on.

I remember when I went from being a showrunner’s assistant to a staff writer, I felt like I had all the access in the world and then things became a lot more myopic. Now all I had to do was come to work every morning and pitch ideas. And maybe if I was lucky, I’d get to write a script or half a script. When I was the showrunner’s assistant, I felt like I had so much more riding on my shoulders and also so much more exposure. I knew everything that was going on. If we were about to push our schedule or we were going to do a production shutdown or some crisis was coming up, I knew before any of the writers. And then I get a promotion to writer and suddenly everything is just coming in blind. Cause I don’t know what the fuck’s going on anymore. That was interesting.

But because I spent a lot of time on staff, I knew at least some of what I was going to be up against as a showrunner, and now there are a lot of showrunners who are being thrown into it quicker. Although that’s something that might be changing, and we might be going back to the old ways now. But typically what the studio always does is if you’re a first-time showrunner, they pair you with another showrunner who has more experience. And so maybe you’re the person whose creative vision is more essential to the show, but you’re with somebody who really knows the ins and outs of the producing side.

Would you say that most TV writers want to be showrunners one day? Or are there people who are just happier to clock in and do the job and not have to worry about the big picture?

There’s a mix. I know a lot of people who have had this hero’s journey where they get into television believing that someday they want to be a showrunner and create a show, and they gain more experience in television and see how it really works, and then realize that they don’t want to be the showrunner, and that they would be much happier just being at that co-EP level or consulting producer and have jobs where they can come in and be responsible for the writing, but not have to shoulder the other stuff. There’s a lot of those people that are out there. People kind of sort themselves into one of the two categories where you either know that they’re going to be a showrunner someday or that they’re very happy to just staff. Both, I think, fill really essential roles within the ecosystem.

What are the best and worst things about your job?

I would say the best part of the job is that I don’t have to worry as much about fitting into another person’s management style. So much of writing in television and working on a staff is about molding yourself to be what the showrunner needs, and only thinking about problems in a way that helps them more than it helps you.

On a superficial level, it’s like, I’ve worked on TV shows where the showrunners use a different screenwriting software. So you start and on day one, they’re like, “Oh, by the way, we want to switch you to this new software.” And you sit down to write and all the shortcuts are different and it feels like you’re typing with your non-dominant hand. And that just extends to everything — having to joke around in the writers room in the way that they want to joke around, or having to start the room at the time that they want to.

So I think the best part of my job is that I can just do it the way I want to do it. If I want to come in late one day because I was working super late the night before, I don’t have to feel bad about that. Or if I want to, on one episode, call a bunch of people into my office and have everybody spitball on a scene, I can just do that and not have to worry about the showrunner being like, “Why did you take all the writers?” I love that.

The worst part of the job… I mean, there’s certainly an adjustment period. Like I mentioned, a lot of showrunners are so into presenting themselves to the world as auteurs. And the reality, as I’ve experienced it, is that you’re still very much negotiating your vision. And it was difficult coming to terms with the fact that, you know, I can think that I’ve come up with the best ideas for the story and the best execution and the best idea for cast, and I can be told that I’m wrong by people who have the ability to stop me from making those decisions. And it kind of calls into question, like, okay, does that mean that I’m not as good an auteur as these other people who are out talking to the press about how they had a vision that was the same from day one to the end? That gets in my head sometimes.

We’re also in an era where there are high expectations for workplace behavior and mentorship and advancement. It’s very challenging to keep everybody happy. When I was coming up, there was more of a kind of military, regimented tone to the career of TV staffing, where you started at a lower rank and then you just moved up the pole by working hard and sacrificing your quality of life and paying your dues. And I’m not one of those people who think we should go back to that. But I do think that it’s become really important to explicitly set people’s expectations on the writer side — like, how many scripts are you gonna get in a season? What is the amount of rewriting that’s going to happen?

Twenty years ago, for a writer on staff to complain about being rewritten, and to do it in an official capacity — like, everybody bitches about it over beers or whatever, but to go to the studio and say, “I was completely rewritten by my showrunner.” It’s like, well, yeah, that’s the job of the showrunner. There’s just an expectation by some people now that they’ve been hired and empowered to be writers that are always going to get their words on the screen, and if you rewrite them, it’s demeaning or it’s bad.

This is something that you’ve actually seen writers do? Go above the showrunner, go to the studio and say, “My script was rewritten by my boss”?

Yeah. It hasn’t happened on my show, but I know showrunners who have had that happen to them. The specific cases that I’m aware of were newer writers, people within the first three or four years of their career. I do think we’ve done a really good job in a lot of ways of broadcasting that the TV culture is changing and it’s a place that encourages mentorship and nurturing writers. But I think that it’s set some people’s expectations too high.

You mentioned having to negotiate your vision. Is that against budget, is it against the network? Is it with your staff?

It’s partly the network. The people who are in charge of putting it on do like to keep some guardrails on. I also think that modern showrunning has to acknowledge the fact that cast — and in particular, your number one on the call sheet — has more power than in the old days where there was a certain expectation to television, because it moves fast, that actors just show up and do the lines. The reality of the job now is a little bit different and the actors get more input. And sometimes that’s good because actors do really care about their character and their corner of the project. Other times it can be difficult because there’s an overall vision for things that is hard to articulate on a scene-to-scene, episode-to-episode basis.

And then, yeah, budget is huge. There was kind of an era where shows that you wouldn’t even associate with huge production values were getting a tremendous amount of money and shooting days, compared to what I’m used to now. The emphasis was on just making something that really stood out cinematically. It trained a lot of writers to not have to worry about that so much. And now it’s being reined back in. And as time goes on with any show, including mine, the budget reins get tightened even more because your show reaches the period of maturity where it’s no longer growing an audience. It’s no longer about trying to launch and establish it, so it becomes a little bit more about just containing costs and keeping the show on the rail that people like it on. So, yeah, there’s a lot of, like, setting out to do one story in an episode and it ends up being 70% of what you wanted to achieve because of budget constraints.

How much influence does the network have on the content of your show?

We’re in a place right now where our network is really happy with the direction that we’re swimming. And so they tend to just listen to our pitches and give us their honest feedback, but it’s not as prescriptive as it’s been on other shows I’ve worked on. Like I said, it’s guardrails. We know what our show is and what we’re out to accomplish. We know what our audience is. We know the network that we’re on.

I think that part of being a good showrunner is when you set your show up at a particular network, you understand what that network’s objectives are and what kind of audience they’re after and what that audience responds to. And you just factor that into some of your storytelling decision-making. We do that and we like the way that our vision lines up with what their audience is. So, yeah, the network, every once in a while they’ll be like, “It might take away from what people love about your character to have them go through this really traumatic thing. Maybe think about that.” Every once in a while we’ll get a caution on stuff, but it’s not too bad.

If your creative vision isn’t complimentary to what that network is putting out into the world — if you’re swimming in different directions — it gets ugly fast. I think that’s true pretty much everywhere. It’s not just broadcast, it’s streaming too. If a network decides that there’s something wrong with the tone of the show, or if they feel like there’s a better way of telling the story, then that’s when things get really tough because they ask for big changes and you’re usually on a compressed timeline. It’s always hard to make TV and sometimes there’s no helping that type of friction, but I also feel really grateful that we’re in a situation where it’s going well.

You mentioned needing to know what kind of audience the network is after. Is that something that’s based on age, ethnicity, income, geography?

I would say that it’s a little bit age and a little bit gender and they’re generalizing from that. If you’re on a network that’s female-focused, for example — and I know this is a generalization, and it’s not representing my personal philosophy — but, you know, the network might be endeavoring to tell stories that have some soapier elements or more romance. So, for example, a typical CBS drama is identifiably different than a typical ABC drama. The CBS audience that they’re chasing, regardless of demographic, it’s like, they’re looking for viewers who are into hard-procedural, who are really into mystery storytelling, who are into really glossy worlds. A lot of their procedurals have a slick visual element to them. ABC, you look at their stuff, and even stuff that might present as procedural, like Grey’s Anatomy, is still very relationship-heavy and there’s a lot of romance.

And you can see that just from watching TV. It’s a great benefit, I think, to watch a lot of TV and love a lot of TV when you’re doing this, so you can have an intuitive feel for what audiences are responding to.

So do you watch a lot of network television?

(Pauses, laughs.) I guess I’m outing myself as somebody who doesn’t exactly practice what I’ve preached.

When I was younger, I watched a lot of network television. And when we pitched this show, we brought out references from network television that we grew up with and loved. I was always talking about things like ER and The West Wing, shows that I watched hundreds of episodes of. I watched a lot of Law & Order. That type of storytelling is wired into my brain.

In modern times, I haven’t watched as much. But that’s partially because I went through a phase where I was working on shows that were more genre. And so I would watch a lot of those, and I just fell down those rabbit holes, and that came at the expense of watching broadcast. So yeah, when I got this show going, I had to go back and study up.

There are certain shows that I always go back to every time I sell a pilot. I have this ritual where I go back and I watch the pilot of The X-Files. I watch the pilot of House. Sometimes I watch the pilot of ER. And I watch the pilot of The Sopranos. And I always feel like the goal is to take all of the great things about those pilots and find a way to put them together in a new and interesting and surprising way.

How long ago was it that you were an assistant to a showrunner?

God, it was over twenty years ago now. That’s horrifying.

In that time, how have you seen the job of showrunner change?

It’s become more public-facing. Like it or not, it’s different making a show in the age of social media. And also in an age of media saturation, where there are just so many more websites that cover television. I remember when I was coming up, there was Television Without Pity, and there were a couple of websites that were more business-oriented, like Zap2It or whatever. But now we have a bunch of sites that will track a show in depth. There’s a lot more accountability to the stories you’re telling. And then also the direct interactions with the audience via Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. It’s more of a feedback loop that’s immediate and loud. In the past, you wouldn’t have to really think that much about what your strategy is for that. Now it’s a thing where you have to really make decisions about how much you’re going to listen to.

And is that something you discuss in the writer’s room? Are you guys looking at Reddit and social media and talking about what people are saying?

Yeah. For a showrunner, there’s a sense of authorship to the show. And so it does feel personal. I don’t go on Reddit and I don’t read the tweets. I do read reviews. When we do publicity and there’s commentary about the show, I read that. But in our writer’s room, there’s a boisterous group of people who are working for hire and are excited to just throw things into the world and then see how it bounces back at them. We have people who check the Reddits, and yeah, we do process it. We know which relationships are resonating with the audience and who people are cheering for and who they don’t like. We know which episodes were favorites.

Let’s talk about money. As a showrunner of a successful network series, do you feel like you’re compensated fairly for the work that you do?

Yeah. I think that in the grand scheme of things, the pay is fair, given it’s an all-consuming job. While we’re in production, it’s seven days a week. It’s really long hours. I’m constantly traveling back and forth from my home in Los Angeles to our location where we shoot. And in return, I do feel like I get fees that are good and worth that for me. It’s not going to be retirement-level money, but I’m saving plenty and I’m living well.

Another way to look at it, though, is if the show I’m doing right now had become a hit six or seven years ago, I would have gotten more. And the thing that’s interesting is there are plenty of showrunners who work in streaming who produce far less content on an hourly basis than we do in broadcast, that’s viewed by fewer people, who are compensated at a higher level. You read about these big overall deals that get signed by people, and you’re like, oh, okay. Like, it’s not that they’re bad writers, but if it’s a market-based system that’s becoming increasingly corporatized, sometimes those deals make me scratch my head. But ultimately, I’m not going to ever root against people getting paid. Anytime a writer is able to get a chunk, it’s great. It’s similar to a pro athlete’s career where, on average, you’re not working for many decades, so get a big chunk while you can, always strike while the iron’s hot. But, yeah, I’m happy with what I’m paid, even though sometimes I think about the timing. There’s a luck and timing element where I could have gotten more years ago.

It used to be that the big payday for a showrunner or creator of a show was when you got to a hundred episodes and got syndicated, and then you get a percentage of profits from that. Is that still how it works?

Not really. There have been a couple changes to it structurally. When you draft your contracts to create a show and run it, there’s the question of your points and your stake in the show. And traditionally, if you had a certain number of points, then that was an ownership percentage, so that when your show was then licensed for syndication or for whatever else, you would get a big payout from that.

And now most studios give you an option between sticking with that traditional ownership-based point system or giving you a schedule of bonuses based on your points. It’ll be like, per point, you get seventy grand an episode for every episode produced after season two, something like that, hypothetically. People refer to it as a capped system where you know exactly what your points are worth and what you’re going to get, but it’s capped at a far lower level than what you might otherwise get. So there’s no Larry David-style $100 million payday. But it’s not insubstantial money. If you have a long-running show, it could certainly get into the seven figures, but it’s a triple instead of a grand slam. And the calculation that a lot of creators have to make is that if you opt to take the traditional method, it can be a harder road to work your way through litigation. There have been a lot of famous lawsuits about it. Bones had a big one where all the profit participants had to litigate the studios to make the accounting make sense so they could actually get those payouts.

And the other thing is there are just fewer syndication deals. The library aspect of streamers has made it easier for companies to just take their popular material and put it on their streamer and they don’t have to do a giant deal. And if it becomes unpopular library material, then they just take it off instead of licensing it to someone else. So it’s definitely a very different world.

On our show, we opted into the capped system. We picked the safe road. No regrets. I don’t know enough about success to decide if we made the right or wrong decision, but I guess I’ll find out.

How much does someone in your position make?

The baseline for a first-time showrunner these days is around $50k per episode, and experienced showrunners can make anywhere from $100k to $300k per episode. My series is multiple seasons into its run and I’m still not making $100k per episode. But I’m closer to $100k than to $50k. And then you add on top of that things like the royalty you get for creating the show, your script fees, residuals. And if you get past the first season or are a monster hit, you get that bonus schedule money.

All together, my gross income for a season is low seven figures. Then you subtract things like commissions for your representatives — it’s usually five percent to lawyer, ten percent to agent, ten percent to manager. The guild takes a small percentage. And then there are taxes.

Another not-insignificant expense is, throughout the season, if you’re a good showrunner, you’re paying out of your pocket for things like food trucks and coffee trucks for the crew, holiday gifts and wrap gifts, bonuses for your assistants. I find all of the above to be fun and not burdensome, and I think it’s because I have a lot of great memories of showrunners taking care of me when I was an assistant and a writer working my way up the ladder.

In part two, we discuss the impact of the 2023 strikes, the future of the industry, and which era of television was the best for writers.