

The Writers Guild of Canada, the union representing screenwriters in Canada, established the Showrunner Award in 2007, at the annual Canadian Screenwriting Awards. "It had got to the stage where it was incredibly confusing there were so many production credits no one knew who was responsible." Canada 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.

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. Shane Brennan, the showrunner for NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles, stated in an interview that: In the " long tail" entertainment economy, viewers don't watch networks. It's one of the most unusual and demanding, right-brain/left-brain job descriptions in the entertainment world.howrunners make – and often create – the show and now more than ever, shows are the only things that matter. 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.

They're not just writers they're not just producers. "Hyphenates", a curious hybrid of starry-eyed artists and tough-as-nails operational managers. Los Angeles Times columnist Scott Collins describes showrunners as: The blog and book Crafty Screenwriting defines a showrunner as "the person responsible for all creative aspects of the show and responsible only to the network (and production company, if it's not production company).

The term showrunner was created to identify the producer who holds ultimate management and creative authority for the program. Over time, the title of executive producer was applied to a wider range of roles-from someone who arranges financing to an "angel" who holds the title as an honorific with no management duties in return for providing backing capital. Traditionally, the executive producer of a television program was the chief executive, responsible for the show's creative direction and production. The definition of who does what in television today is not that different from what it was generally in Hollywood before a few critics in France coined the term " auteur" and the Writer's Guild took the producers, their traditional nemesis, to court – thus all but destroying the Producer's Guild and giving leave for the studios themselves to usurp the name producer." Ask the people who make and stand behind their shows – from Aaron Spelling to Stephen Cannell, Stephen Bocho, Len Hill, Edgar Scherick or Phil de Guerre. Today in television, the producer is still that person: the show-runner." Television is a producer's medium. Selznick was to Gone With the Wind, or Pandro Berman to all those Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers films, or Walt Disney to his early work, or Arthur Freed to the MGM musical. "In the early days of Hollywood, no one questioned what Producer David O. 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 (then Executive Vice President and Chairman, Television Division of Weintraub Entertainment Group) wrote:
