Showrunner - History

History

Traditionally, the executive producer of a television program was the "chief executive", responsible for the show's production. Over time, the title of executive producer became applied to a wider range of roles, from those responsible for arranging financing to an honorific without actual management duties. The term "show runner" was created to identify the producer who actually held ultimate management and creative authority for the program. The blog (and book) Crafty Screenwriting defines showrunner as: "...the person responsible for all creative aspects of the show, and responsible only to the network (and production company, if it's not his production company). The boss. Usually a writer."

Los Angeles Times columnnist Scott Collins describes show runners as:

"Hyphenates", a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers. They're not just writers; they're not just producers. They hire and fire writers and crew members, develop story lines, write scripts, cast actors, mind budgets and run interference with studio and network bosses. It's one of the most unusual and demanding, right-brain/left-brain job descriptions in the entertainment world....how runners make – and often create – the shows, and now more than ever, shows are the only things that matter. In the "long tail" entertainment economy, viewers don't watch networks. They don't even care about networks. They watch shows. And they don't care how they get them.

An interview with Shane Brennan, the showrunner for NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles, states that:

... the moniker was created to identify the producer who actually held ultimate management and creative authority for the program, given the way the honorific "executive producer" was applied to a wider range of roles. There's also the fact that anyone with any power wanted a producer's credit, including the leading actors, who often did no more than say the writers' lines. "It had got to the stage where it was incredibly confusing; there were so many production credits no one knew who was responsible."

Traditionally, the showrunner is the creator or co-creator of the series, but this is not always the case. In long-running shows, often the creator of the show moves on, and day-to-day responsibilities of showrunning falls to other writers or writing teams. Law & Order, ER, The Simpsons, The West Wing, Star Trek: The Next Generation, NYPD Blue and Supernatural are all examples of long-running shows that went through multiple showrunners.