11 laws of showrunning

Bottom line: the creativity of your staff isn't for coming upwith your core ideas for you, it's for making your core ideasbigger and better once you've come up with them. To say "I'llknow it when I see it" is to abdicate the hard work of creationwhile hoarding the authority to declare what is or isn't good.

Do not leave a meeting without letting everyone there know what they are expected to do/deliver next

Every clear directive you issue is a gift because it relievesyour staff of the stress of having to divine your goals. A cleardirective is an indication of trust: your way of saying "I havetaken the time and effort to figure out our goal. I nowacknowledge that you have the knowledge and resources to figureout the process."

It takes that level of ego to be a television writer/producer:the conviction that what you have to say matters so much that itis worth not only mastering the tropes of an entire medium, butalso the risk that all the intermediaries required to create thefinished product will ruin it all with some fatal blend ofincomprehension, or incompetence.

Are you strong and secure enough in your talent andaccomplishment to accept the possibility that other people -properly empowered by you - can actually enhance your genius...or will you cling to the idea that only you can be the source ofthat genius?

Most importantly, the sooner you make a decision, the sooner youwill know from your crew what is achievable, and the sooner theywill be able to expand upon - and use their talents to - elevateit. The time you spent not deciding is time you rob from yourstaff's ability to make whatever the object of the decision thebest it can be. The show simply ca... See more

Your job is to make ideas come to life. The first step is tocommit. Commit early. Commit often.

Your employees need specific knowledge of the tone, texture, andtechnique of the show to do their jobs. Even after producing thepilot episode, most of that crucial information still remains inyour head. The pilot episode was a prototype. Now you have todiscern what it was that worked so well in the pilot and turnthat into a reproducible result.

One of the great contradictions of the way we make television inthe United States is that writers are given managerial controlover the entire enterprise... but writers are very often badcommunicators outside the page. Also, talking to people non-stop,all day, with great specificity about a project this size ishard, and tiring.