This week, Neil Calloway looks at one of the most important jobs in entertainment…
This week The Hollywood Reporter announced their list of the most powerful 50 showrunners in television. It’s a feature they’ve been running for a few years and just shows the ascendancy of the small screen when it comes to story telling.
Ten years ago only the most clued up, geeky TV insider would have heard and used the term, and now it’s part of everyday conversation, which is not only testament to how media literate the general public has become, but also how television has become the primary outlet for great drama.
At a Royal Television Society event this week, Susanne Bier, who went from winning an Oscar for In A Better World to directing The Night Manager on TV, noted that the best scripts she is reading right now are for television rather than films. The fact that Bier even made the journey from film to TV says something – twenty years ago a director of that pedigree would not be making a TV show, no matter how high end it is, but now the best writing can be found there, and that is largely down to showrunners.
Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, which lists when words are used in books, the word showrunner didn’t appear at all until 1989, then took off just before the year 2000, probably connected to shows such as The Sopranos and Buffy The Vampire Slayer; TV that had strong authorial voices.
For decades Stanley Kubrick attempted to make a film about Napoleon, telling the story of the French Emperor’s life. The scale of the project meant it never got off the ground, despite apparently having the backing of the Romanian Army, who would provide extras for battle scenes. Now, of course, it would be perfect for television, and Steven Spielberg and Cary Fukunaga (who directed the first season of True Detective for HBO) are indeed working on the project for HBO.
What television gives the writers and producers who act as showrunners is time; time to tell stories, to build characters and construct worlds that aren’t available when you have two hours in a cinema. They also have time to build audiences; they aren’t at the mercy of the opening weekend’s box office. People can relax with a box set and enjoy it at their leisure, in the comfort of their own home. You can’t do that with a film; it’s over and done with in two hours.
In fact, while people complain that TV is better than film because all you get in the cinemas are comic book movies, they neglect that comic book movies – at least the MCU films – are so successful, at least in part, because they have the equivalent of a showrunner; someone who oversees that all the parts have connecting threads to keep people coming back for more.
Showrunners are the 21st Century equivalent of great 19th Century novelists who first published their books as serials; Dickens or Dumas reimagined for the television screen. You may not have heard the phrase ten years ago, but it is now one of the most prestigious jobs in the whole entertainment industry, and will only increase in the future. The rise and rise of the showrunner is well underway.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
Originally published October 16, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
