Writers, Showrunners and Television Auteurs: Ideas of One Vision

Abstract

Television production is a complex process with input from many people along the way. The collaborative nature of the workflows is generally acknowledged as the nature of creating new series, and in television studies there has been remarkably less interest in singling out the individual contributions behind specific productions than among scholars focusing on the film medium, traditionally found to be the place for more individual, artistic expression. Within the extensive ‘how-to’-literature for film and television writing, the collaborative process is often addressed from the very outset of books on writing for the small screen. Whereas classic ‘how-to books’ for film often address the singular writer and rarely comment extensively on the mode of production as such, several books on writing for television start by emphasizing the collective nature of the process. In Writing the TV Drama Series, Pamela Douglas states that ‘if you go on to write for television, you’ll never work alone. Series are like families, and even though each episode is written by one writer, the process is collaborative at every step’ (2007, 11). Moreover, many screenwriting manuals for television address the industrial context, stressing how television writing is not only about being good at storytelling but also about the industrial rules of the game.