Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show

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The showrunner

of a series is responsible

for the creative direction

of the show,

keeping scripts and episodes

coming in on time,

dealing with notes,

trying to keep

the whole damn thing afloat.

Being a showrunner

is utterly consuming.

You're editing and writing

and doing a hundred

different things at once.

It's draining, it's awful...

I miss it terribly.

Showrunner is a fairly new term of art.

In the former days,

it was the head writer,

the executive producer.

But as the shows have

become much more cinematic

in their scope and intention,

the job has become

much more complicated.

And yet, we're expected to

deliver a show every seven days.

Showrunning is

incredibly brutally hard,

and you can't really lean on anyone,

because part of the job

is being the broad

shoulders of the show.

This is a crazy, crazy, f***ing job.

It's a really cool one,

but it doesn't make any sense.

It's like a controlled plane

crash every week.

It's a billion decisions a day.

You're the guy that has to

decide what we're going to do.

They only bring you questions.

When you're a showrunner,

you're getting squished by

the network and the studio.

You're feeling pressure

from the crew on up.

People look at you and you think,

"Oh, you're the boss,

you have nothing to worry about."

You're worrying about all of it.

Part of the job of the showrunner

is to set the tone

for what you're doing.

Many a time,

I've been standing on a set

where we're at some crisis,

and it's like,

"Okay, we gotta do this

and this and this."

And people are like this,

and I'll say, "But...

"we're not curing cancer here, guys.

This is a TV show."

It is, at the same time,

the best and the worst job.

You can't imagine quitting,

and at the same time,

it's a job that's exhausting

to the core of your being.

And I always say

it gives you the thing

of walking around and saying,

"I have such a bad back

from unloading all this gold bullion."

most show aren't smash hits.

84% of new shows in America fail.

So, you know, hopefully,

you beat the odds

because if you stay in the race

long enough, you're gonna win.

And it's just a question of

how you can stay in the race.

The showrunner is the life blood

of a television show.

It's a collaborative art form.

But you still need that one

central voice through which

all the marvelous creative

contributions are processed.

The age of writers and showrunners

being anonymous is... is over.

My day has the same shape.

There's a certain rhythm to it

that can change day to day.

If I have writing to do,

I come in extremely early.

Morning.

Because around about

9:
00 or 9:30,

I'm going to be talking to

people more than I'm writing.

Oh, that weighs a ton.

You always have, say, six episodes

at some station in the process,

so you've got one that you're

finishing the final mix on

and going to lock

and hopefully put on the air,

and then you've got people

pitching story ideas,

so you've got something to tend

to on each one of those things.

One of the downsides of

being a showrunner is that

if you're doing it correctly,

everyone that you've come

into contact with...

actors, the other writers,

the other producers,

the network, the studio...

You know that things are

going well on your show,

if everybody's just

a little annoyed with you.

Showrunning, I think,

is like painting a painting

while writing a novel,

while doing your taxes.

It's very, very, you know,

right brain, left brain, boom.

House of Lies

came from a book by Martin Kihn

about management consulting

and what a scam it is.

It felt very relevant to me.

Well, when you get to

the point of making a show,

it's pretty sexy in its own way.

I get to make a half-hour pilot.

If, god willing, the...

the show gets picked up,

I don't know exactly how I'll work it.

I wanna write as much as I can of it.

The showrunning part,

the administrative part,

it's really, uh, not for me, in a way.

As somebody who's a writer

as much as anything,

that's the reasons they

let me do any of the stuff

that I do, is that I can write okay.

When I moved to New York,

trying to write plays,

Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman

saw my first play

called Diary from Avenue B.

Joanne found something in it

that she liked.

They were just dead set

against any of their protgs

going to Hollywood,

moving to L.A., writing for film,

acting in films, um,

doing television especially.

They were absolutely against it...

of course, all of us have.

Part of what the showrunner has to do

is head in four different

places at the same time.

You're in a constant

situation of feeling

like you're doing,

uh, not a good enough job.

The idea for Men of a Certain Age

came from

when Ray Romano and I

were both between projects.

And he, uh,

he was kind of still in the wake

of Everybody Loves Raymond,

trying to figure out

what he was supposed to do next.

And as we started conversing,

it was all existential

mid-life crisis stuff

that we were both going through.

The more we talked,

the more stories we had

and the more it felt like,

well, this is what we should

be writing about

because a lot of people can relate

to this.

And it worked out very well.

We were extremely happy

with all of our episodes

in the first season.

We felt like, you know what,

we did a good show

so let's just get it out there

and see if people like it.

And people liked it.

We feel the same way

about this season.

This season,

people are still trying to find it.

If you have to remember only

one thing, 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?

But if quality scripts

don't come on time,

you're gonna be off the air.

If your script is late,

it's not enough

to simply say, well, it's good.

I don't care if it's

the fourth day of prep.

You got 180 people that are

trying to do their job,

and you've just made their job

so much more difficult.

You've made your budget soar

and when push comes to shove,

all things being equal,

when the network and the studio

look at the hot costs

and look at what the show has done,

they'll say, either we wanna be

in business with that person

again or we don't.

Nothing will get you out of it

quicker than arrogance,

ignorance and being, uh,

over budget and behind schedule.

You know,

studios tend not to like that.

I think there is

a renaissance going on in TV.

I think it's a combination of

so much of feature writing

has gone downhill,

and the middle class of feature writing

has disappeared.

So, I think a lot of people

who really felt frustrated,

come to TV and go, "Oh, my god,

who gave us all this freedom?"

It might be less money but, wow,

I have stories I wanna tell.

I'm gonna tell them.

As difficult and as time

consuming and as stressful

as it can be, I mean,

creatively to be able to, you know,

tell these stories and uh,

have the control over it that I do,

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