By Forris Day Jr.
I’ve been reading a ton of books about entertainment lately and I just finished “The TV Showrunners Roadmap” subtitled “21 Navigational Tips for Screenwriters To Create and Sustain a Hit TV Series”. To be honest, I didn’t know what a “Showrunner” was until I checked out this book written by Neil Landau. He’s a man who wears many hats including screenwriter, author, producer and professor at the UCLA School of Film. You get the idea. Landau knows what he is talking about. What I learned: A Showrunner is to TV what a Director is to feature films. The Showrunner is usually the head writer and many times the creator of the television show. They make the big decisions.
The book has 21 Navigational tips in it. Each tip is a chapter. They are very in-depth tips. Each tip or chapter covers a certain topic that a Showrunner should be aware of on each episode or series. For example chapter 9 is called “Determine the POV” (Point of View). He discuses what the POV is , types of POV and he uses many different TV shows to show us an example. The chapters are all formated the same. The first 10 or 12 pages Landau touches on a subject, then teaches us about it to give a basic understanding about each principle. These sections alone could comprise the book and it would be an awesome read, but it gets better. Each chapter has an interview with a Screenwriter/Showrunner from a popular TV show who discusses the topic at hand. In the interviews Landau picks the brains of the interviewees to help us, the reader, to understand the topic in greater depth.
The interview section of each chapter is incredibly informative and we get to meet and learn about a new person or two in each session. These interviews are with top notch Showrunners who are successful and are sharing knowledge that you just could not access any other way short of being an actual Showrunner yourself or being personal friends with one. Some of the TV programs that these folks head up are Breaking Bad, Homeland, The Walking Dead, House, M.D. and many others. Each chapter is easy to digest so you can pretty much read them in any order and fully understand the book.
I personally do not have the organizational skills to ever be a Showrunner. I lose my glasses and keys all the time. Organization eludes me. If you are the type of person who loves being organized and structured, loves writing scripts and being in charge, you may have what it takes to make it in the TV world. I learned a ton from this book. Coming in at around 290 pages there is a lot of information to be had, but again, the format makes it easy and fun to learn. Read the book and get ready to have the confidence to begin your dreams of creating or running a successful TV show.
Rating: 8.5/10 – “Every journey starts with a map”
