Introduction

What Is a Showrunner?

In movies, the director is king. In the television series business, the show-runner calls the shots. A showrunner is almost always the head writer and executive producer (EP) of a TV series. Very often, but not always, the show-runner is also the creator of the series. In many cases, a TV network will buy a series “pitch” or a completed pilot script that’s already been written speculatively (on “spec”) by a screenwriter who has little or no producing experience. In such cases, the studio and network will work together to assign an experienced showrunner to supervise all the writing on the series, and this Executive Producer will also be the last and final word on all production decisions, including casting, ...

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