TVSquad

Interesting. But like you said, I already talk like that (i.e. credit and praise showrunners). It also helps that most of my friends also talk like that. So I just we'll keep doing it to help your noteworthy cause.

Shout out to Joss Whedon. He was the first one that made me CARE about/PAY ATTENTION to showrunners.

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Jay, I appreciate the hard work you put into this well thought-out and rather persuasive analysis. Unfortunately the televison business and movie business are both that - businesses - and as such they are motivated by making a profit, not by trying to provide the best quality entertaiment possible or enlightening the viewing audience. As no regular reader here needs to be reminded, though I will do so anyway, the areas of quality programming and profitability rarely intersect.

As for trying to raise the profiles of the creative personnel, there will always be a select few who can transcend that group's general anonymity, such as a Joss Whedon or J.J. Abrams, but the public will rarely make such connections unless they can put a face to the names. Viewers may remember the name of the guy who plays the wacky neighbor on "Hey, That's My Chimp" because they see his name below his face during the opening credits, but no other off-screen personnel get anything but their name flashed across the screen for a millisecond. Perhaps if more writers, directors and producers were able to get public exposure, whether on talk shows or other interviews, the public might begin to realize that without the creative talent, the only time the doctors on "Grey's Anatomy" would use the prefix "Mc" is when the show got a product placement as with McDonalds.

Finally, I think you give far too much credit to the viewing public. For every person whose awareness you may conceivably raise with this article, ten more people will be born who will look forward to the opening of "Larry The Cable Guy Scratches His Balls." The first five minutes of "Idiocracy" makes my point better than I could ever do here.

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Hey, Jay, I loved your manifesto.

Downside: Jay Mohr will be along in a few minutes to take you to lunch and fire you.

Upside: Renee Zellweger will fall inexplicably in love with you. That should put your soon-to-be brother-in-law surgeon in his place.

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Right now I think it's sort of difficult for the showrunner/producer type to become the auteur, partially because there's so many on just one show! I think creators and co-creators have a better chance (though I realize a lot of them are all of those titles). Right now the casual TV watcher doesn't know who Joss Whedon is, but the slightly more knowledgeable know about J.J. Abrams (my brother knew he was somehow behind Cloverfield because of the shakey cam + cool effects...so he does have some sort of definable style...) or maybe David E. Kelley. People like Darren Star are starting to get up there.

I think we're on our way there (baby steps) but if these auteurs were pushed to the limelight a little more, than sure, it could happen. Instead of crediting ABC, FOX, or NBC with the show, let's put it on the showrunner more (for example, we would emphasize Dreamworks a lot less than we would Woody Allen, wouldn't we?).

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Lucas isn't an Auteur. He's best known for Star Wars, which is based on The Hidden Fortress, a Kurosawa film, -someone else's vision. Alot of his other stuff is also pretty commercialized.

There are a ton of television Auteurs, Trey Parker is one, Gervais another, Chris Haddock... It goes on. They just don't produce commercial stuff usually (though sometimes they do.) From what I've seen of Steve Carrell's writing I think he could be an Auteur, but I don't know.

In my opinion Auteur theory can be carried to far though, resulting in people overly attached to bad concepts and Season 6 and 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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I am SOOOO with you on this one...in fact, I've been doing this TV auteurist thing for a while now too on my own blogs. Hope it works out for us.

As a former filmschool student, and current cinephile who is slowly becoming much more interested in TV than films, there is one more aspect to this. Unlike film, TV shows are sometimes run completely by the writers - they are actually Writer-Slash-Producers. LOST and BSG come to mind here. This is a new definition of auteur that varies immensely from the filmic definition. A roomful of writer/producers, led buy the writer/showrunner/producer, breaks the season's story together and then splits up to write the pieces. The directors in TV are secondary.

Fascinating in comparison to how feature filmmaking works in either Hollywood or Indiewood.

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It still wont make a shit as long as the tv business is controlled by the select few nielsen families. There could be 30 million people watching something, but if no nielsen families are watching it, it will get yanked faster than Secret Talents of Stars. I say everybody boycot all new shows and eventually the networks will figure out they need to reform the ratings system.

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Great Post. I would venture, however, that the ratio of good, auteur driven TV to bad, Made By Committee TV is the same as it is in movies. Or books, or opera, or anything else. That ration never changes, I believe. I'm sure the Greeks spent a lot of time wondering why not everyone could be as good as Euripides.

One possible factor in this discussion for TV is that the arc of an auteur in TV is the opposite of the usual arc in movies. A film director starts with a bang, with a sharp, ground-breaking indy. Their artistry, yea, their very soul are then slowly sapped away from them by Hollywood, and they end up making pablum.

With TV, an auteur begins as a staff writer somewhere, and gradually builds up the reputation, connections, and skills needed to make a show that stands out, that is a little off-kilter, or idiosyncratic. And yes, sometimes that is John From Cincinnati, but it is also Mad Men, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Deadwood, The Wire, The Shield, Lost, Pushing Daisies, and etc.

There is no tradition of popular entertainment that has ever had a higher ratio of top quality output to mediocre/bad output. I think it may be some sort of immutable law. It is only years later that we look back on a period and think that all of the art and entertainment produced during that period was somehow golden, or better than the the crap we have now. We feel that way only because we remember the great, and have forgotten the okay and the bad.

I like your thoughts about how to encourage proper credit for the people who make shows what they are. In the end, however, I think that audiences will always find shows that are worth watching, whether they know who made them or not. Maybe I'm wrong, but I am optimistic...

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One more thing--while I love Gervais, Stephen Merchant is every bit as responsible for the success of The Office and Extras as Gervais--maybe more so, since he was the motivation behind the original pilot of The Office, the one that got a full season from the Beeb. The full story escapes me, but he was the prime mover on that one.

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It's TARANTINO, not Tarintino...

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Kind of off-topic, but it's crazy that JJ Abrams still gets so much credit for LOST, Darlton RULES!

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One problem with trying to do the auteur thing in television: there's far too much for any one person to do. A lot of those film auteurs you listed go for years between each 2 to 3 hour movie. The average hour long drama is expected to produce roughly 15 to 16 hours of material each year. Unless a showrunner is an obsessed workaholic, they're going to have to delegate a LOT of responsibility.

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I'd nominate the following as TV auteurs:
Aaron Spelling
Stephen J. Cannell
Jack Webb (Mark VII)
Quinn Martin
Chuck Lorre
Mark Goodson (game shows)

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The problem with concept of television auteurs is that it's impossible for one person to have that much micro/macro control over a television show (especially a network show with 22 eps) and not burn out. A prime example would be A. Sorkin on the West Wing. Dude somehow wrote three excellent seasons of TV; yet scripts started coming in later and later, and he eventually ended up with a coke problem.

Most visionary film-makers can take three or four years between films, to spend as much time as is necessary on script, pre-production, filming and post. Can you imagine how much crap writer-directors like P.T. Anderson or the Coen Brothers would put out if they were producing 20+ hours of film every year?

Which is why network television HAS to be the way it is: Teams of talent producing a number of episodes in order to meet the demands of the business.

Reduced-season cable shows change that dynamic to a certain extent, but it's the BBC model that really works best for quality/auteur television. Short seasons. Short series. Fewer episodes. Creators change gears, and then produce something else entirely new. No seasons 7-9 of the X-Files. Or seasons s5-7 of Buffy. Or seasons 3-5 of Alias. Or fill-in-the-blank with your own series that just went on far too long for one "visionary" to sustain it.

The list could go on and on.

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Your first point that auteur-driven movies are inherently better, or that collaborative movies are somehow inferior is not really given any evidence. Sidney Lumet is a great American director who's directed many classic films and he is not an auteur; he goes out of his way to ensure the vision the writer of the material had is respected in the final product.

Also, you want TV to have auteurs, but then you talk about praising show runners, who drive the narrative of a show but very very rarely do they direct the final product, or even get involved in defining the directorial style of the show (that's usually the job of the Pilot's director).

I can't deny that shows fueled by a singular mind can be spectacular, as Babylon 5 alone would convince me of that, but other shows with collaborative writer's rooms can also be spectacular. One good example is Battlestar Galactica: Ronald D Moore is the showrunner and leads the narrative, but if you've ever listened to the writer's room conversations that RDM has posted, you'll see that he doesn't overpower them in that room. He might take their idea and twist it to achieve the final effect, or it could be better than the idea he originally had. The fact that a lot of like-minded smart guys (and girls) sit down and hash out the story means you get crystallization not dilution.

But that's just my personal opinion. Oh dear, I've gone and rambled.

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It's a noble effort, but unless you've worked in the TV business and know how it works, you're always going to miss the mark. There's a big distinction you're not making here -- creator versus showrunner. When all is right with the world, they are one in the same. But more and more, feature writers are paid five times as much as TV writers for a pilot. Most feature writers have no experience in TV and don't know how to create a show with a sustainable engine. Ergo, en experienced showrunner is brought in to fix the mess. More often than not, the show is fundamentally flawed and unfixable. You see, TV DOES have an auteur -- it's a writer/creator with a vision for his or her show, and the experience with which to pull off a successful run. You denigrate writers with experience because you think they've lost their creative vision by actually learning the business. Not true. Learning the business makes them much more able to protect their vision and produce the show THEY want to make. Regardless of the input of the writing staff, the showrunner is the final word. He or she doesn't get outranked or outvoted. The show can't be made without the writing staff (such as it is these days, which is negligible) or the crew, but it won't even get off its feet without a strong creative vision driving it. The problem isn't that there aren't any "auteurs" in TV, it's that the people with strong creative visions aren't usually deemed as important as big-time feature writers, or even writers who've created shows (even if they were massive creative and economic failures -- guy does Kidnapped and Bionic Woman, and they give him another show?).

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So...you're calling upon the democratic masses to swell up and fight for...a lack of democracy? What gives?

I think if you look again at the shows you love, you'll find there are a variety of voices in there contributing to what makes the show great. Not only do most of the shows you mention have multiple producers, multiple writers, multiple actors and multiple directors throughout their run, but the fact that television takes place in series or serial form means it takes much longer to produce than film, increasing the chances of turnover in the staff.

The nature of television is a collaborative one. You can make excuses for exceptional series by talking about them as "strong personalities," but calling for readers to support more auteurs in television obscures the importance of the medium's prominent qualities.

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I take issue with auteur theory in general, because there are so many people involved. I have no problem with the idea that directors have a tremendous impact on the final work, but take Spielberg, for example. He wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but all his other major projects have been written by someone else. E.T. wasn't his idea, nor was Jaws, nor was Indiana Jones. The comparison to solitary artistic works doesn't hold, just because it has to be collaborative - there's too much work to be done.

That said, I think showrunners have a tremendous impact on TV series. Compare Rod Lurie Commander In Chief to Steven Bochco Commander In Chief, and you can see how important they are. They're not the sole author of the thing, of course, a great showrunner can't elevate a bad idea, or a bad writing staff, or a poor cast into a great show. But a poor showrunner can ruin an otherwise great show. And since they have, in many ways, final say on a lot of the ideas that are going into the show, if I enjoy showrunners' work once, I'm genuinely interested in subsequent series with their names attached.

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