Few would argue that television series showrunners have one of the toughest jobs in all of entertainment, having to keep track of essentially every element that goes into a show as well as every person on both sides of the camera. And while carrying a sense of confidence is one of their most essential skills so as to make cast and crew feel the person has their back, self-doubt can creep into the equation since they are, after all, human. To that end: what is their greatest fear as the man or woman in charge? We put the question to six top showrunners who joined Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A roundtable panel. They include Jen Flanz for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” Francesca Sloane for the Prime Video drama “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” Chad Feehan for the Paramount Plus western saga “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” Francesca Delbanco and Nicholas Stoller for the Apple TV+ comedy “Platonic” and Erica Lipez for the Holocaust drama “We Were the Lucky Ones” on Hulu.
Watch the full roundtable discussion above. Click on each person’s name to watch an individual chat.
So, what is their biggest nightmare as a showrunner? For Sloane, the thing that kept her up nights was not nailing the proper tone on “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” her first effort as the co-creator and producer in charge. “It has an unusual tone, and it’s sort of like trying to do so many things at the same time,” she emphasizes. “John and Jane are no longer getting along, it’s starting to feel a bit bleak, they’d be arguing, and I would say, ‘It’s funny though still, right guys? Everybody? It’s still funny?’. And it wouldn’t be. So you have to sort of sit down and be honest with yourself in the writing. I got a nightmare moment of one episode feeling really like a drag and having to pivot and rewrite it. It was a complete restructuring. That’s sort of how we faced the nightmare.”
Stoller and Delbanco talk about facing their worst-case moment “when the story collapses and you’re in production because we also direct all of them,” Stoller says. “It’s having to kind of re-break an episode while we’re shooting, and it did happen, as it often happens in television, because a big part of it too is keeping a clear eye on what’s happening in your show. And it’s very hard to do that when you’re also in production and directing it. It happened for us in Episode 9.” Delbanco agrees, painting the following scenario: “It’s the feeling of when the clock is ticking and all of the things are in motion and cameras are rolling and suddenly a script just doesn’t work.” In the case on “Platonic,” it was star Seth Rogen, who is also a producer, that called the issue to the showrunners’ attention. “He was correct,” Delbanco admits, “but you still don’t want to hear it. It’s very scary.”
While working on a World War II-themed series, Lipez stresses that her fear stemmed from potentially getting the history wrong, calling it “a daily anxiety nightmare, making sure from the smallest details of what was on the table that it was accurate.” She adds, “I knew if somebody was coming to our show to hear this family’s amazing story that they might also actually learn something if we got the history right. So it became a bit of a joke in our show. We ended up with a 300-page research packet that we offered up to anyone involved in the show to casually read, which I think a lot of people took us up on. But we didn’t test anyone.”
Feehan, for his part, also had history to get right in telling the story of the first Black deputy U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi in the 1800s. But his greater fear was issues outside of his control, including acts of God. “Everybody thinks you have so much control (as a showrunner) and there’s a lot of things you can’t control,” he stresses. “The pilot opens with a battle sequence where we had 600 extras and 150 horses and six functioning Napoleon cannons and had brought all of these people in because we were shooting in Texas, and this stuff does not exist readily in Ft. Worth. And the day before we were scheduled for a three-day shoot, Texas got hit with an ice storm and we shut down production for two weeks. We had to house all of these people for two weeks in hotels. And then you get terrified that the big boss is going to tighten the purse strings. What you cannot control is always the biggest fear for me.”
The biggest nightmare for Flanz as showrunner on “The Daily Show” is also an element for which she has no control: death.
“The great fear is that sometime in the hours between taping and air, something very tragic happens to somebody that we wrote a punchline about and we make a joke about somebody that died. We joke about it all the time. It used to be worse. At least now we have social media and can put something out immediately that’s like, ‘We’re so sorry to the family of so and so.’ But you stop making Jimmy Carter jokes after a while. You’re getting too close. You’re really tempting fate.”
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