The term showrunner was created to identify the executive producer who holds ultimate management and creative authority for the program.
In a January 1990 submission to the United States Congress House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Administration of Justice, Barney Rosenzweig (Executive Vice President and Chairman, Television Division of Weintraub Entertainment Group) wrote:[8]In the early days of Hollywood, no one questioned what Producer David O. Selznick was to Gone with the Wind, or Pandro Berman to all those Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers [sic] films, or Walt Disney to his early work, or Arthur Freed to the MGM musical.
[8]Los Angeles Times columnist Scott Collins describes showrunners as:[9] "Hyphenates", a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers.
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.
And they don't care how they get them.In a 2011 article in The Australian, Shane Brennan, the showrunner for NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles, described the position thus: He explains 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.
[11] In an interview that same month with Vox, writer Erica Saleh, who developed the series One of Us Is Lying, listed the function and structure of the personnel in WGA writers' rooms, explaining that showrunners determine the tone and genre of the show, and break down the structure of a season, its episodes, and storylines, prior to actual production of the program.
[26] In an interview, Davies said that he felt the role of the showrunner was to establish and maintain a consistent tone in a drama.
[27] Doctor Who remains the most prominent example of a British television programme with a showrunner, with Steven Moffat having taken over the post from Davies from 2010 until 2017.
The term has also been used to refer to other writer-producers, such as Cash Carraway on Rain Dogs,[31] Tony Jordan on Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach, Ann McManus on Waterloo Road, Adrian Hodges on Primeval[32] and Jed Mercurio on Bodies,[25] Line of Duty,[33] and Critical.