Showrunning 2024: Personal Brand Building is Now Part of the Gig
Top writers on new pressures in the influencer age, trolls, and anxiety — even when you don't have a show
Happy Monday, Series Business readers. How are we all feeling about the back half of the year? Better than that dreary first half, I hope.
I’m back stateside after last week’s Banff World Media Festival, during which I moderated the “Who Runs This Mutha: Showrunner Superpanel,” which consisted of an impressive group of five women including All American and Found’s Nkechi Okoro Carroll and Girls5Eva’s Meredith Scardino. Some of the things we talked about had me mulling over the business of running a TV show as I returned to L.A.
What does it mean to be a showrunner in 2024? They’re writers, of course, but also are a manager of projects and people, a budget overseer, a story wrangler, and increasingly, a public figure. When you say Shonda or Ryan, industry folks know exactly who you’re talking about. Showrunners also pique the curiosity of many a TV viewer outside of Hollywood, thanks to appearances on morning shows and at fan conventions, or interactions with viewers on social media.
In some ways, it makes sense. Finding success as a modern writer or artist increasingly requires you to become, to use that loathsome word, a brand. (Ask any author trying to sell copies of their latest book, or any journalist trying to strike out on their own and outrun the crumbling of institutional news.) But the demand is often antithetical to the nature of a scribe.
“My happy place is in front of my keyboard. But somewhere along the way, the showrunner became a public figure,” said Okoro Carroll on the panel last Monday, when I asked how they thought about branding themselves. “It’s a title [that] writers fought for so that we could control our stories, our sets. It was meant for an internal thing, and then it became this thing [where] it got to the point where I’ve got fans yelling at me over storylines they don’t like in the show.
“The public showrunner part is always very tough because we are not naturally inclined to be in front of the camera, having those kind of constant interactions,” she continued. “But I always feel like brand comes out of your voice.”
This conversation is more important than ever, as we see some signs of life in the first-look and overall deal market (as we discussed on The Ankler podcast this week). The rich are getting richer, putting more pressure on TV writers to — sorry — think of themselves as brands.
So how does the modern showrunner juggle all this? In this issue, you’ll learn:
How to define your reputation in the industry
How not to get pigeonholed as only being able to do one kind of show
Who’s still allowed to be “difficult” — and who isn’t
When to let your work dictate your brand rather than trying to predefine it
Whether brand-building is a luxury in a world with more showrunners than shows
How to manage your show’s most vocal viewers
How to deal with the imposter syndrome of being a showrunner without a show
The anxiety of being a “baby showrunner” today
