This is the age of the “showrunner”, the person who oversees the writing, producing, and financing of a television series. The premise of Des Doyle’s documentary Showrunners is that most of us don’t know enough about what they do or fully appreciate it as a form of “art.” Observing showrunners in their natural habitat, the documentary extols the likes of J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon. However, the film also fails to challenge the industry’s self-promoting celebration of these new auteurs, as it replicates some very industry conventions.
Much is made of the centrality of writing for TV, with the delivery of “quality scripts on time” being the key responsibility. The film dips in and out of the writers’ rooms at various series and emphasizes that showrunning is a “collaborative art form”. It asks us to let go of the persistent Romantic notion of authorship, where a tortured, solitary, inspired individual conjures great work, and instead think about a team of writers and producers investing in the creative process.
But the many of meeting scenes are mundane. Busy whiteboards in the background of repeated shots suggest that heated debates must go on. But we don’t see these discussions, only groups gathered around tables, feeding on donuts and cupcakes. Showrunners use the rhetoric of “family” and describe their writing “partners,” but, on the whole, it’s clear that these are hierarchical, patriarchal families. The film itself undermines any sense of participatory culture through the many interview segments. Its primary structural focus is on individuals.
On the upside, some of these individuals are engaging, articulate and self-reflexive on the other side of the camera. Damon Lindelof observes that the “benchmarks of my life are measured” by where they occurred in the making of LOST. Ronald D. Moore reflects on the fact that in writing the death of Captain Kirk, he killed off his childhood hero. And the wickedly witty Chris Downey (Leverage) quips, “More serial killers have been captured on network television than ever existed.”
However, these are isolated instances. Part of the problem is that Doyle approaches his subject from the perspective of a fan. He tells Word & Film, “This is a film made by fans for fans.” Such a fan’s perspective could have been usefully interrogated, but here it functions to disable the film’s critical potential, leaving it full of unreflexive admiration for showrunners’ multitasking, as showcased in its day-in-the-life type thread following Matthew Carnahan and House of Lies from pre-production to launch party. Here and elsewhere, the movie is reverential in its interviews with preeminent showrunners, who tell us that their job is “exhausting” and “awesome.” They not only write episodes, they tell us, but also negotiate with network executives, direct, and respond to real-time online feedback. And so the life of the showrunner emerges, in the words of one participant, as a “feat of choreography”.
The documentary skirts any possible conflicts with network executives, so it offers little sense of how commercial constraints might affect creative decisions, or how they might inspire particular modes of invention. Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) suggests that his “dark sensibility” needs “restraint,” but he’s not asked to elaborate on this seeming confession. Shawn Ryan (The Shield) posits that cable networks perpetuate the myth that they offer more freedom than broadcast TV, only for the documentary to move swiftly on to another topic. Most problematically, as the examples referenced so far suggest, Doyle’s subjects are overwhelmingly white males.
It’s true that female showrunners are a rare breed. A study by Boxed In estimates that women make up less than one third of American television writers and under 30% of series senior executives. Of The Hollywood Reporter’s “50 Power Showrunners of 2013,” 12 are women, and four women of 10 are on the 2014 Showrunners to Watch list. While this hardly represents equality, it is significantly more than the three out of 25, or the 12%, that the documentary manages to interview. In the Spartacus writers’ room, Misha Green is the only woman present out of six workers. Similarly, we see a lone female on the House of Lies team.
The relative invisibility of women in Showrunners perpetuates, even extends, the gender biases of the industry itself. Along with Janet Tamaro, showrunner of TNT’s female buddy crime series Rizzoli & Isles, we meet Michelle King (who works with her husband Robert on The Good Wife) and Jane Espenson, who, unlike every other participant, is unnamed when she first appears. Female stars like Shonda Rhimes (Scandal) and Dee Johnson (Nashville) do not appear.
As Tamaro comments, “Some people—both male and female—have an easier time being told what to do by a man.” She adds that men fetishize the ratings and women need to move into directing like their male counterparts. But gender politics remain at the margins of the film’s agenda. In its examination of the art of TV authorship, the film misses the opportunity to explore why mastery of fictional worlds continues to be gendered as masculine in our cultural imaginary. The politics of race gets even shorter shift, with Ali LeRoi (Everybody Hates Chris) appearing as the token black showrunner.
The film’s limits of vision extend to its own form. While it promotes showrunners as artists, or at least creative craftsmen, its music score is predictable (when an interviewee remarks that the end of a series is “terribly sad”, we hear melancholy music) and its visual aesthetic is static. Talking heads and fly-on-the-wall observations of writers’ rooms are interspersed with shots of posters, stills, show logos, and overhead cityscapes (to remind us that LA and NYC are the homes of television). To explain terms, we’re granted definitions on screen, along with book pages that handily list the differences between “procedural” and “serialized” television, even as the film is divided into chapters for easy consumption in undergraduate media classes. But even we understand it as an extended infomercial, Showrunners’ primary lesson is that this remains a man’s world.
"Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show" Is a Man"s World
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