Resource: 10 Essential Showrunner Interviews from 5AM StoryTalk
There's no more coveted role in television than showrunner, so let's see what we can learn from some of the intimate artist-on-artist conversations I've had with some of the biggest names in the game
showrunner
/ˈʃəʊˌrʌnə/
noun
North American
the person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television program.
the person every you want to be if you’ve ever dreamed of writing TV.
Since I launched 5AM StoryTalk as a newsletter more than two years ago, I’ve interview more than 100 artists — most of them screenwriters and a huge number of these are showrunners. I bill these artist-on-artist conversations, but another way to describe them are intimate chats between me and friends and other peers who trust me and let me peek behind the curtain a bit. Instead of asking the generic, predictable stuff, I ask questions “from the inside,” as some have described it. I’m also interested in the more facets of the job and creative life than just story, as you’ll find.
To help you on your own creative journeys, I’ve combed through my archives and identified 10 specific interviews with U.S.-based showrunners that I believer provide you a wide array of perspectives, life experiences, and creative sensibilities. These artists have created and/or overseen shows such as “The X-Files”, “The Shield”, “The Chi”, “House”, “House of the Dragon”, “Bones”, “The Good Doctor”, “The Lincoln Lawyer”, “S.W.A.T.”, “Leverage”, and many, many more.
Basically, I tried to put together a mini-showrunner bootcamp for you.
Enjoy!
Q&A: Screenwriter Shawn Ryan on His Evolution from Rebel to Establishment
Shawn Ryan is one of those TV writers I find it hard not to refer to as a titan of our craft. After gifting “The Shield” the world in 2002, a landmark series about corrupt L.A. cops that many hail as the start of TV’s golden age, he went on to create or co-create and/or showrun a train of other hit series including
Q&A: Filmmaker Lena Waithe Has Made It to the Emerald City
Today, Lena Waithe and I are going to discuss what The Wizard of Oz has meant to her through the years and explore how Dorothy’s story informs her own journey to the Emerald City - er, I mean Hollywood. In doing so, we’re also going to reveal how, like Dorothy, she found her way back to where she came from.
Q&A: Screenwriter David Shore Has Questions About the Value of Art
The artist-on-artist conversations I have here at 5AM StoryTalk require a lot of research, as I’m sure you can imagine. But one of the more surprisingly challenging aspects of each of them is identifying the perfect first question to start with, one that I’m willing to bet will generate an unexpected, but intriguing answer that I can then begin to interrogate to better understand the artist in question.
Q&A: TV Vets Dawn Prestwich & Nicole Yorkin on 30 Years As a Writing Team
I’ve been a professional screenwriter for more than fifteen years, an experience that has been both creatively satisfying and spectacularly lonely. Every single time I sit down in front of my computer, it’s just me and an empty white screen. No one else knows what goes into every word I wrestle onto the page, the decisions behind them, why they mattered to me. This isn’t the case with all writers, of course. There is a small percentage of us who opt to write in partnership with others. Most of these writing teams do so intending to build a long-term relationship together - such as
Q&A: Screenwriter Ryan J. Condal Is Playing with (Dragon) Fire
When I landed my first manager — a man who insisted on wearing tracksuit pants to every meeting—he sent me a great spec script called Galahad to check out. It was by another newbie screenwriter client of his named Ryan J. Condal who, like me, was relatively new to Hollywood and focused on writing period action-adventures. The significant difference between the two of us was that Ryan had already sold his spec and was suddenly hot shit around town while I was still six-or-so months away from making a similar splash. Over the years, I’d always hoped to meet Ryan if only because I had imagined some kind of unrecognized bond between us in space and time; unwittingly, we had been hatched by the same rep, doing similar things, and found success at pretty much the same time. But that meet-up never managed to transpire, and so I’ve had to settle for finally getting to chat with Ryan for one of my artist-on-artist conversations.
If you feel my writing adds anything to your life and/or understanding of being a professional screenwriter, but you’re not up for a paid subscription, you can always support this work by “buying me a coffee”.
Q&A: 'X-Files' Creator Chris Carter Isn't Waiting For Inspiration
At the end of the day, we don’t know shit about shit when it comes to the mechanics of the universe or humankind’s relevance to it (if it has any). Despite science and religion’s attempts to explain any of this, they’ve never succeeded in any way that could remotely cast out all doubt or even most doubt, which is also probably why religion always goes to great lengths to argue doubt is a normal part of faith. Doubt persists even as many of us cling to extraordinary claims about the divine, about our origins, about the secret goings-on we imagine just beyond our limited mortal perceptions. It persists for scientists, too, but in a very different way, of course; theirs stems from a willingness to constantly be wrong and keep searching for better, more provable answers. I bet you’re starting to wonder where I’m going with all of this, right?
Q&A: Screenwriter Melinda Hsu Knows How to Change Hollywood
When I asked journalist Maureen “Mo” Ryan, the author of Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, for some suggestions about powerful women I should invite to be part of 5AM StoryTalk’s artist-on-artist conversation series — women who might offer new perspectives about film and television that would challenge outdated, but still pervasive ideas in our still male-dominated industry — she immediately suggested TV creator/showrunner
Q&A: Screenwriter Hart Hanson Isn't Sure If He's an Artist
Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk’s podcast, a place to talk about stories in all their forms, the craft that goes into them, and the role that art plays in our lives. Today, I'm joined by screenwriter and author Hart Hanson who is probably best known as the creator of
Q&A: Dailyn Rodriguez on the Challenges She Had to Overcome to Become a Successful TV Showrunner
When I started my artist interview series, it wasn’t just to spend a lot of time talking shop with artist friends. I also wanted to get to know people I had previously only admired through their work. This was the case with TV showrunner Dailyn Rodriguez
Q&A: Screenwriter John Rogers on a Lifetime of Found Families
There was a stretch of my early years in Hollywood where screenwriter John Rogers blog Kung Fu Monkey and John August’s blog were regularly shared between aspiring and emerging screenwriters. People would email things like, “Yoooo, you’ve got 2 read this. It’s gonna blow ur mind!” And very often, his posts did. He seemed to be striving to demystify the career of a screenwriter in a way I’ve often tried to do here at
Hell yeah. Time to dig in.