And probably the easiest ways to show exactly how that is happening is to look at what is happening with the Marvel TV shows.
In the traditional model you might get a writer or a writing team pitch an idea for a show, and if it goes into development, a Showrunner is appointed, they build a writers room, and they start the process of breaking the story . Breaking the story is a critical part of the process. It’s how the show defines itself. It’s how a script or a show becomes more than just the log-line.
From there different writers would get allocated their episodes to write…but that doesn’t mean that the writer then disappears to a log cabin and knocks out their scripts overnight. The continue to break the story…this time instead of the breaking the direction of the show they are breaking down the direction of each script. They work through many the plot beats together, making sure the themes and the tone and the characters match the blueprint.
When the show goes into production, the Showrunner is still in charge. The Showrunner in television is the boss. They almost always come from the writers room. They are responsible for the show. In film the director calls the shots. When we think of film, we think of the Steven Speilbergs or the Alfred Hitchcocks, we don’t think of the Matt Charman’s or the Joseph Stefano’s.
In television that dynamic is reversed. Its the J . Michael Straczynski’s or the Joss Whedons that are the household names, not the David J Eagles or the David Grossmans.
In television, the Showrunner manages the production. They keep the story on track. And the writers are still very much part of the production. In the traditional model, one of the writers was always on set, typically the writer of that particular episode, but not always. And the reason for this was two-fold: it allows the script to be re-written or new lines added as need be, and it gives the writer valuable experience in what actually happens when their script goes into production.
So what model do the studios want to move towards?
There is a move to make a clear demarcation between the writers room and everything else. And we can see this most clearly with the Marvel TV shows.
Each Marvel show gets allocated a couple of executive producers. For the Falcon and the Winter Soldier it was Alonso and D’Esposito. For Ms Marvel it was Alonso
and Winderbaum. They oversee the production, taking on many of the roles that you would typically see being done by the Showrunner.
And the way each show was produced was much closer to a feature film production than a television show. The scripts would get written, then handed to the production team where the directors would take over. The “Creator” of each show doesn’t really fill the role of Showrunner any more. They are the Head Writer, they lead the writers room, they hand over the finished scripts to the production team then the director takes charge, with the executive producers overseeing the process.
On paper, this could work. And I think that the best of the Marvel TV shows (IMHO), Wandavision and Loki, show how it could work. Both of these shows (along with Falcon and the Winter Soldier) only had a single director, Kate Herron for Loki, Matt Shakman for Wandavision and Kari Skogland for FATWS.
And that singularity of vision made a strong difference because as a story, Wandavision and Loki both held together tonally from beginning to end. So in theory, this model could work.
But the realities of making a television show quickly caught up with Marvel. Episodes of television have to go through a pre-production process, then go into production, then into post. So in television you would have all of these things happening at the same time. One director would be working pre-production, another director on location shooting the show, another director working with the editing team helping them to put it together.
And so the television show Ms Marvel didn’t have a single director. It had three different directing teams, all of them extremely talented and very good at what they do, but they weren’t singing from the “same songbook.”
The two episodes directed by El Arbi and Fallah (episode 1 and episode 6) work really well together. So do the episodes by Obaid-Chinoy (episodes 4 and 6), and to a lesser extent (but not in any way her fault) the two episodes by Menon (episodes 2 and 3).
But as a whole? The show doesn’t work. Entire character arcs are introduced, played out and ended in the blink of an eye. Tonally things are all over the place. The playful sense of delight that we get in the first episode just disappears and doesn’t really come back until the finale.
Its a mess.
Because the “showrunners” here, the executive producers, are working from within a box. They paint with a broad brush. Fortunately they are fans of the genre, very experienced at what they do, so what we got wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
But they literally don’t have the same skllset that a Showrunner from the writers room would have. And part of that job is making sure that once a show goes into production things adjust and pivot and are tweaked so that the story continues to make sense. They see the bigger picture because they created that bigger picture. The directors can’t see that picture, because they are only seeing what is happening in the episodes they direct. And the producers can’t see that picture because that isn’t what they are good at.