Transcript: The Showrunner & the FedEx

Rob Long on unemployment and lessons from an unseemly delivery

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

One of the things that's happened recently, since the sharp drop in the number of scripted shows being bought or produced, is the corresponding sharp rise in the number of television showrunners who are hanging around unemployed, reading the entire newspaper and sitting in coffeeshops with notebooks filled with pages that say: "Pilot Idea: Person, workplace question mark question mark. Marriage conflict difficult. Family. City question mark question mark."

With all of these showrunners on the beach, available, the studios and networks are in a great position to do what they've always wanted to do: go showrunner shopping.

Not too long ago, the person who wrote the pilot was pretty much the person you were stuck with for the series, unless the show became a giant sudden success and the star became a giant sudden lunatic. (These two things never happen separately, or in any other order.)

In which case, the grownups got together and figured out a way to solve the problem, which was always to pay the showrunner a lot of money to go away, which the showrunner took, gratefully, because everyone’s a grownup, and everyone realizes that, you know, life goes on, especially with that many zeroes on a check.

These days, if you're a studio or network or a streamer and you don't like whoever is running a show — or if you just want to trade up, or more cheaply, or whatever— you're not stuck. The labor market in showrunners is pretty loose right now, so chances are there are a couple of them right now, at the Whole Foods or the Erewhon just orbiting the business, waiting for reentry.