by Bob Levy
Let’s look at one classic TV series as an example of this network–studio dynamic. The series Friends generated 236 episodes from 1994 to 2004. For those of us old enough to have watched Friends when it first aired, we associate the show with NBC, the network that aired all those episodes as a pillar of its “Must-See TV” Thursday night lineup. But NBC didn’t make the Friends episodes. It only distributed them. Those 236 episodes were made by Warner Bros. Television. They were all filmed on a Warner Bros. soundstage on the Warner Bros. lot a few blocks from NBC’s offices in Burbank at the time.
Warner Bros. Television initiated Friends by first developing the project internally within the studio. The studio took the pitch they developed with the writing team Marta Kaufman and David Crane to TV networks, and NBC bought the pitch. NBC then developed the pilot in concert with the studio, and NBC ultimately ordered it to series. NBC paid Warner Bros. Television a license fee for 236 original episodes over ten years and the right to air reruns of each episode. From 1994 to 2004 NBC enjoyed the profits of being the exclusive first-run distributor of one of the biggest hit shows in the history of American television. But, since the summer of 2004, when the final summer repeat of Friends aired on NBC for the last time, NBC has never aired another episode of Friends and most likely never will. Friends episodes have aired in syndication on American cable and local TV stations, and on TV stations around the world, every day ever since then, and Warner Bros. Television has earned every cent of those syndication deals. Beginning in 2015, Warner Bros. Television licensed the 236 Friends episodes to Netflix for an undisclosed but undoubtedly enormous sum of money. Warner Bros., not NBC, has earned every cent of that Netflix money. Warner Bros. Television has earned billions of dollars of profit from their ownership of those 236 episodes. One-hundred percent of all those ancillary revenues goes to Warner Bros. Television and will in perpetuity, as long as viewers want to watch those reruns (i.e., forever). NBC hasn’t made a penny on Friends since 2004. For ten years Friends was extraordinarily profitable to NBC, and was central to its brand and public identity. But the network’s relationship and financial interest in the series ended in 2004 when its last license fee deal expired.
Like networks that employ development and current executives to protect their investment in shows they license and distribute, TV studios employ development and current execs to protect their investment as well. These two layers of executives, network execs and studio execs, serve similar functions and both do everything they can to make the shows as successful as possible on behalf of their respective companies. (Studio execs also pay close attention to physical production and production budgets that network execs don’t worry about because their companies’ contributions are capped at the pre-negotiated license fees.) In other words, just about every TV series has two layers of executives overseeing it, network execs and studio execs. Similarly, and more importantly for the purposes of this book, almost all TV pilots have two layers of development executives evaluating and weighing in on every step of the process, a team of network development execs and a team of studio development execs. The costs of development are also shared between TV networks and TV studios, and the expenses of pilot scripts and pilot production are negotiated between the two companies.
The distinction between networks and studios used to be very clear-cut, but the boundaries between those two corporate entities have grown murky over the years. When Friends was being developed in 1993, US law kept TV networks and TV studios as distinct companies. Those regulations (known as the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, commonly referred to as “fin-syn rules”) were repealed in late-1993, however, and now the large entertainment conglomerates that own TV networks also own TV studios. Disney owns ABC, for example, and it also owns ABC Studios. ABC Studios is the TV studio sibling of Walt Disney Studios, the movie studio it shares a studio lot with. The ABC network is geographically across the street from the Disney studio/ABC Studios lot in Burbank.
Since 1993 when fin-syn was repealed, the goal of most entertainment conglomerates has been “synergy,” which translates in the TV business to TV studios creating, producing and selling its product to its sister network divisions, thereby providing the parent company with two ways to make money from one show (producing and owning the show and all the various revenue streams ownership provides, and distributing the show to a domestic US audience). Most shows produced by Twentieth Century Fox Television (known in the industry as “20th Television”) are licensed to the Fox network, their corporate sibling. This is referred to as “vertical integration” in corporate terminology. All the large TV studios operate this way, but they all sell outside their corporate family as well. As mentioned, 20th Television’s most successful series This is Us is licensed to its sister network division’s rival NBC. Most of NBC’s programming is produced by its sister studio Universal Television (they’re both owned by Comcast), but Universal Television also produces Brooklyn Nine-Nine which, for many years, it licensed to Fox.
Whether a studio and a network that do business together are owned by the same parent company or not, there are still corporate distinctions between the roles they serve (even if they’re only different divisions of the same company) and most pilots and series are still overseen by separate teams of network and studio executives. When a writer writes a pilot script he has to please his network development execs and his studio development execs. We’ll explore this complicated dynamic throughout the book.
Several streaming networks have recently begun challenging these traditional network–studio distinctions. Netflix led the way, performing both roles without any corporate separation. With some of its shows Netflix serves only the role of network (like Orange is the New Black, made by the studio Lionsgate), but, beginning in 2015, Netflix began to produce and own some of its shows as well (like Stranger Things and The OA). Other online digital video distributors like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and YouTube also both license shows from traditional studios as well as assume the studio role and make and retain ownership of the scripted series they distribute. Executives at these companies, talent agencies, producers and industry lawyers hammer away at new (and potentially transformative) deals on a daily basis, redefining Hollywood television’s traditional rules of distribution, ownership and financial participation. In the meantime, the traditional network–studio distinction applies for the great majority of TV shows on the air and in development.
Preamble #2: Hollywood’s Creative Pecking Order
The second thing readers need to understand before diving into the next chapter is the power structure of the creative people who make movies versus the people who make TV shows.
In movies the director is top dog. The director has the most power and creative control of the movie she’s making. Second in the pecking order of the creative staff in the movie business is the producer, who is in charge of the project until the director is brought on board, and, once that happens, the producer’s job is largely to help the director achieve her vision. Lowest among the top creative staff that makes the movie is the writer. Screenwriters in the movie business are notoriously disrespected. In general their job is to do what the producer and director tell them to do, and feature screenwriters are hired and fired by producers and directors easily and often.
In TV, the pecking order is exactly the opposite. In TV the writer is the top dog. Writers have the most power and the most creative control of series they work on. Writers in TV serve in producing capacities as well and receive producing credits. When we see TV credits for Executive Producers, Co-Executive Producers, Producers, Co-Producers, Executive Story Editors, Story Editors and Staff Writers, we’re actually looking at credits for writers who work on the writing staffs of the shows (in the order of authority listed above).
Creative producers who are not writers typically have the second most amount of power and creative control of TV series. Producers who are not writers typically receive Executive Producer credits and are known in the business a
s “non-writing EPs.” We’ll talk more about the role of the non-writing EP in a moment.
The other key non-writing producer on a TV series is the line producer. The line producer, unlike the creative producers, oversees physical production, including the budgets, schedules, logistics and manpower. The line producer – there’s almost always only one per show – is designated in TV credits with the title “Produced by.” There might be three or four “Producer” credits – who are all writers – but only one “Produced by” credit. That’s the line producer.
Directors in TV typically have relatively little power and creative control. They’re in charge on set during production, of course, but they report to the writers (the exact opposite of the movie dynamic). They are hired and fired by the writers. The TV director’s job is primarily to execute the writer’s vision of the show; they work in service to writers.
It’s this power dynamic that leads people to refer to TV as a “writer’s medium.”6
The most powerful writer and producer on a TV series is the showrunner, who is credited as one of the show’s Executive Producers. We’ll look at that role in a moment, but let’s look at the non-writing Executive Producers first. Non-writing EPs tend to come in four categories.
One is the Executive Producer who runs a company that controls IP. Jeph Loeb is one of the Executive Producers of Jessica Jones on Netflix. He earns that title and senior-level creative control of the show because he runs the TV division of Marvel Entertainment, the company that owns the comic books the show is based on. His job is to work as an executive not a writer. As an executive responsible for managing an enormous library of extremely valuable IP, he earns a say in how that IP is executed in TV in the form of a non-writing EP role and EP credit.
Another kind of non-writing EP is the brand-name EP. Steven Spielberg is credited as an Executive Producer of the series Bull on CBS. He hasn’t directed any episodes of the show, and his company employs executives who manage the day-to-day hands-on creative involvement with the show. Even though he’s not really involved in the series he earns an Executive Producer credit because his company owns a stake in it and because his name lends stature and prestige to the show. He has a household name that connotes quality and entertainment value to the audience and within the industry, and the value of his name merits crediting him and paying him fees for every episode even if he rarely, if ever, renders any actual producing services. Ridley Scott, J.J. Abrams and Brad Pitt are other brand-name non-writing EPs in TV today.
A third kind of non-writing EP are talent managers. All writers, actors and directors are represented by agents and many are represented by managers. While agents were traditionally prohibited from working as producers by California state law, managers were not. Managers of the most successful and valuable writers and actors sometimes serve as producers on behalf of their clients. In some cases the managers perform actual producing services on shows their clients work on, and in some cases they merely leverage their clients’ value to earn credits and fees for themselves. If a manager’s client adds enough value to a TV project, and if the manager has enough standing within the industry, he can be granted by the network and studio (who have contractual approval of all credits) an Executive Producer credit. Michael Rotenberg is a non-writing EP on the HBO series Silicon Valley and manages the career of Mike Judge, the most prominent of the show’s co-creators.
Lastly, the fourth kind of non-writing EP are producers who serve a hands-on role of working to assemble the other creative elements of a show and help initiate and guide it through the development process and then serve in an executive capacity on the series, supporting and supplementing the showrunner. Warren Littlefield, The Handmaid’s Tale Executive Producer I quoted earlier, is a non-writing EP working alongside fellow EP Bruce Miller who is a writer. Littlefield was a longtime development executive at NBC and its president in the 1990s before he transitioned to producing. Aaron Kaplan, one of the Executive Producers of Life in Pieces on CBS and one of the most prolific non-writing EPs working in TV today, worked as an agent at the William Morris Agency for 16 years before becoming a producer.
There might be two or six or more Executive Producers on a TV series, but the most important and most powerful of all of them is the showrunner (which is an industry term but not an official credit). The showrunner is the auteur of TV. The showrunner is the creative visionary of the series, and literally every creative decision on a series is the showrunner’s responsibility. Every word in every script is the showrunner’s responsibility. Every edit in every episode is the showrunner’s responsibility. Every stitch of every article of wardrobe in every scene of every episode is the showrunner’s responsibility. And while the showrunner delegates much of the work to other writers and to his editors, wardrobe designers and other department heads, the showrunner weighs in on and approves all of their efforts.
The showrunner is almost always the head writer of a show’s writing staff (which might number anywhere from four to twenty writers). There are a small number of non-writing EP showrunners, but they are few and far between. Almost all showrunners are seasoned TV writers. As head writer, the showrunner leads the writing staff in creating every story for every episode, assigns the writing of episode scripts to writers on the staff and to freelance writers, notes (gives creative feedback to) writers on all the many drafts of episodes and, when necessary, rewrites other writers’ scripts herself. When a showrunner delivers an outline of a story to the network and studio current executives, or delivers a final draft of an episode script to the cast and crew of the series, the buck stops with the showrunner – he or she is responsible for its content and quality.
The showrunner is usually but not always the creator of the series. The word “creator” and by extension the phrase “created by” aren’t just titles, credits and job descriptions; they have legal, contractual meaning and are important fundamental terms in TV development. The terms are defined by the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents screenwriters, whose contract (known as the WGA Minimum Basic Agreement) all American TV networks and studios are signatories to and abide by. By the WGA’s definition, the “creator” of a show is the writer who writes the pilot episode.7 That writer may never work on another episode of the series, but for the life of the series he will be credited as the creator and receive a “Created by” credit on every episode.
Almost always the writer who writes the pilot does continue to work on the series she created and most often serves as the showrunner. In some cases the creator is a writer without very much TV experience and therefore might not be deemed to have the producorial and managerial skills to serve as the showrunner by the network and studio, and in those cases an experienced showrunner will be hired over the creator to run the show, and the creator will report to the showrunner. In most cases, however, the showrunner is the creator of the series.
The showrunner is also the manager of the cast, crew and staff, and in that capacity is responsible for ensuring that episodes are produced on schedule and on budget. The showrunner hires and is the report-to for all writers, producers (except some fellow Executive Producers who are the showrunner’s partners), actors and department heads (production designer, costume designer, director of photography, editor, etc.). Managing a team of creative people and keeping them focused on her vision of the show is one of the many huge challenges of being a showrunner.
If all of these responsibilities aren’t daunting enough, the showrunner is also a diplomat, serving as the show’s primary interface with the network and studio executives who not only pay the showrunner’s salary but also finance the entire production. The showrunner talks to the network and studio current executives on a regular basis, typically several times a week, and usually develops a close relationship with the presidents of both companies as well. The showrunner fields creative notes from the network and studio current executives (and occasionally the network and studio presidents) and disseminates them among her staff a
nd cast as she sees fit.
Managing an enormous army of people, navigating the egos and foibles of actors and other artists, running a business with a budget of tens of millions of dollars per year and answering to hugely powerful multinational corporations is an overwhelming task and one of the hardest, most demanding and most time-consuming jobs in all of entertainment. It’s known in the industry as “the worst job that everyone wants.”
While the goal of almost all TV show creators is to be the showrunner of their own show, the focus of this book will be on the creator, the writer who enters the development process, writes a pilot script and lays out a vision for multiple seasons. If the creator’s pilot script gets ordered to pilot production, the writer/creator then typically transitions into showrunner mode and effectively completes the development process as a producer. But for the purposes of this book we’re going to focus mostly on the screenwriter as creator, one of the most essential – if not the single most important – members of the team that develops new shows.