One More Quickie...

ONE FUN THING from a Canadian angle...and I promise I'll post something non-strike related soon. (Though I don't know exactly what - I'm not going to write about struck shows.)

Today, the WGA supposedly is going to marshall a bunch of showrunners to march the line in solidarity together. One unintended effect of the coverage has been, I think, more exposure in the last three days than ever before to the term, "Showrunner," and the fact that the most important thing all these people in charge are is writers.

Here in the frozen north where quarters of the industry have recently woken up to the term -- there's all sorts of non-writing producers looking to glom onto it as a sort of claim of legitimacy. All part of the ongoing power struggle about who should have a vision for a series. If you need a "head writer" - you may be a producer, or an executive producer, but you aint a showrunner.

There are certainly other ways to organize the show -- and it's not like in the U.S. the girl who comes up with the show always gets to run it. But as long as we're throwing language about, we should be clear about what it means. Writers are sticklers for that stuff.

All those stories about the difficult choices showrunners face now help to put forth the truth. It's not show-runner or show runner -- it's showrunner. One word.

It means, "writer."

Heh heh.