Showrunners: What they is, What they Aint, And How The WGC's Trying to Frame The Discussion

A few days ago I got an email in my email box that made me feel happy.

Not just because it had to do with the Canadian Screenwriting Awards, though that would be reason enough.

See, the Canadian Screenwriting Awards are pretty much the most awesome party of the year on the Toronto production calendar. Forget the Genies. Never Mind the Bollocks. (not actually an award, but still a mighty good album) P-shaw to the Geminis, DGC Awards, Toronto International Film Festival Galas or whatever lame what have yous. The annual writers award dustup is, hands down the place to be. Partly because the awards themselves are pretty painless. They're in and out in forty minutes. Then there's the food. It's good. Then there's the drinks. There's lots. People enjoy them. A lot. And when writers enjoy themselves, and when writers are cleaned up and start talking -- well, they're funny. Even the drama writers. I've laughed out a lung at some of these awards.

But that's not what made me happy. What made me happy was this email:

A new award will make its debut on April 23, 2007, at the Canadian Screenwriting Awards - the WGC Showrunner Award. Help us celebrate our country's best showrunners by submitting a nomination.

A showrunner is a writer/producer who holds the creative vision for a television series. He or she controls all creative decisions and oversees the series from development, through prep and production, to the completion of post. In other words, the showrunner is the creative force behind the series, and it is time for our best to step forward and be celebrated by their peers.

All nominees must be a WGC member and the recognized showrunner of a series working under a WGC writer/story editor contract.

IMPORTANT: At least one of the episodes of the showrunner’s series must have had a FIRST broadcast date between December 1, 2005, and November 30, 2006.

To nominate your showrunner, you must be a WGC member working on the nominee's series under a WGC contract. Go to http://www.wgc.ca/cscs_awards/index.html (you may have to copy and paste this link into your Internet browser) for a complete list of rules, a partial list of eligible shows and a nomination form. If a series you have worked on aired during the eligibility period and is not on the list, please call the guild and we will verify its eligibility.

The deadline for nominations is March 1, 2007.

Now, why is this award so important?

It's important because in Canada it's still semi-heretical to actually insist that a writer can be someone who holds the creative reins on a series. It used to be that the Producer class who ran Canadian shows came almost exclusively out of Line Producing. This is because deals and financing are so difficult to put together in this country that the person who sells something has a lot of power. Networks have relationships with these people, not generally with individual writers, as in the USA. They haven't always seen the difference. So the net result is that you have a lot of series pitched and developed to a point and then sold by people who are, effectively, lawyers. Or nuts and bolts producers, trained to watch the budget -- but not creative producers.

In this scenario, series are pitched, bought and sold by people who don't write. So the characters may be vague or non-existent, the concept may not be sound. Smarm sells the series, not the kickass pure quality of the idea.

Then writers are brought in. Writers are brought in, usually not for a lot of time because you want to save the money, and they have to try to make something meaningful out of the show. Then they write scripts and are paid out and sent on their merry way, and the series gets shot, edited, and delivered.

Well, you might say, what happens when you need to do production changes?

Good question. What happens is that the Producer does them. Or the Actors, or the AD's -- or maybe there's a writer there with the title of story editor or head writer who doesn't really have any power to change anything, it's just their unlucky fate to have to implement the faustian bargain that the series has become. Changes are made without a regard to story. Actors get to write their own dialogue. Directors get to change whatever they want to make a cool shot whether or not it serves the story, and because there's nobody there that really understands the story like a writer does, from the top-down, god's eye view... the changes that happen tend to throw out things like structure, and coherent story and character development for atmosphere, and cool "moments."

...or it might be, as it often is, that there are several Producers on the show who all jockey for influence and position. There is no one person who's the final word on creative questions. Instead, there's infighting between producers, each pushing their own agendas, burning money, crew, and goodwill as the show comes apart around them.

And the series turns out an incoherent, under or overcooked mess.

And then, you know what they do?

You guessed it. Usually they blame the script.

So for years, the reality is that if you were a TV writer with any ambition, you had to get the hell out of Canada. Don't take my word for it. House's David Shore is a pretty smart guy who thinks the same thing:

There is obviously a smaller market, and therefore less money and greater limitations, but I think the problems are deeper than that. I left Canada because I knew I had a lot to learn as a writer and I saw very few opportunities to do that without moving. In my opinion, Canadian television so often fails for the same reason American movies so often fail: They're not controlled by writers. Now I'm biased on this one and there are obviously great, smart directors out there and great, smart producers but no one knows the story like the writer. American movies are controlled by directors; Canadian television is controlled by producers; American television is controlled by writers.

Now that's how it used to be, and it's changing, slowly -- there are some writers who actually have fought their way into production so that they have a seat at the table and are influencing the end product, and in some cases truly fulfilling that creative vision in the same way as, say, a David E. Kelley or Stephen Bochco or David Shore or Jenji Kohan or Shonda Rimes does.

But something else has happened along the way, too. Some non-writing Producers have discovered that, you know, that Showrunner title is pretty nifty. So now they're calling themselves Showrunners.

The problem, of course, is that the "Showrunner" title doesn't mean that. It means the Writer who runs things. If you don't write, there is a perfectly nifty and nice title available to you. Or several. "Produced by" is great. So's "Executive Producer." Hell, that's a smashing title. But you know what, just like I don't get to call myself "General" if I haven't served, you don't get to call yourself "Showrunner" if you can't write.

The Simpsons, in its many years, has had many showrunners. The end "big" exec producers don't change: James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon -- but they weren't the people actually running the show from day to day.

Sometimes the creator of the show is the showrunner, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they are for a few years, then they move on and do something else, and a new showrunner takes over. (See lots of long running shows like The Simpsons, E.R., Seinfeld, Sex In The City -- all of whom wound up with different showrunners.)

The thing that defines the showrunner is not the title, it's the job. And what's the biggest part of the job? Say it with me, kids:

It's the writing, stupid.

You may be an excellent producer. You may be an awesome manager, who keeps your show humming along smoothly. You may be the greatest Executive Producer in the history of executive producers. But if you don't write, you are NOT the showrunner. And if your writing is bad, and your ideas are not great, then covering that by hiring a bunch of writers to "realize your vision" does not make you a great showrunner. It kind of makes you a fraud.

A Showrunner is a writer in the development meeting, the pitch, the story room, the casting process, the shoot, the edit, the sound mix, and the press for the show. They are a writer first, last, and always.

It's a damned hard job. Because you have to learn about budgets and costs and you have to motivate and manage a small army of people, and supervise this and deal with the network and answer everybody's questions, and somehow you have to do all this and take all this pressure and not turn into a raging asshole, because that's going to hurt the unity of the production going forward.

It requires a number of skill sets that don't normally go together. So when you find a person who can do all that, they're special, and they're golden. I'm working for an honest to Betsy showrunner right now, and let me tell you, the hours are long like they always are in TV, but the creativity is front and centre and it's a little piece o'heaven.

So fie upon any charlatan who pretends to that throne without having the chops. You're wearing colors that don't belong to you -- and you're making it harder to identify the very types of people who will help us to make our programs better, and relevant, and popular.

So, back to what the WGC has done. By establishing this award, they are going to shine a light on these special people, these showrunners who actually can do it all. And it's not going to be a case of B.S. and credit stealing because whoever's nominated for the award has to be nominated by writers who work for them.

Simple. Elegant. Brilliant. Way to go, WGC. Bravo.

My money's on Haddock.

(*I'm adding a caveat here... there *are*, of course, other ways to mount a successful show. I would venture that Slings & Arrows is an example of a top quality show where the writing and conception, direction, and production all form a cohesive whole, and works, but were in the hands of different people, ie: there wasn't one person overseeing all of it. This takes nothing away from the producers of Slings & Arrows. Obviously, they're brilliant. Look at the show. But though development may have been a little bumpier at times, it wasn't dishonest. Everyone was allowed to function by bringing their full expertise to bear, and it worked out. When something is GOOD, there is ALWAYS enough credit to go around.)


*****

UPDATE: March 2010.  So I saw some traffic to this old post and thought I should update a bit of what I think, based on three more hard won years.


First -- the WGC finally came up with a list of competencies called the Showrunner code.  It describes what the basic functions of a showrunner are in a classic, U.S. based system.


FWIW, I think now that as it's currently run and constituted, the (weak) Canadian system requires a partnership kind of hybrid to have the best chance of functioning. And that's because of the lack of Canadian Studios.


Producers here are on the hook in a way that individuals aren't down south, and there's no level of studio in between (I know in the vertically integrated model a separate network/producer isn't the norm in the USA a lot either, but for the purposes of the discussion, that's the best way to explain it.


What's happened up til now is a lot of crappy shows have resulted from unfocused creative choices made by Producers who don't understand and can't internalize the creative because they don't understand it like a writer does. This is why writer producers in the USA became the norm.


Without studios, what's the future? What's the possibilty? Well, I think it's either got to be Writer-Producers or Partnerships where the two are equal, and trust and respect each other.  But one way or another, the "keep the writer in the dark and treat them like the hired help days?" Gone.