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Showrunners are celebrities now. They’re the face of a project, responsible for nearly every component of developing and managing a television show. No longer are they hidden in the studios, sheltered and anonymous from the public. They’re writing, producing, directing, being interviewed, managing, scheduling, budgeting, casting, editing, publicizing - and man, are they stressed out.

“These people must not only have the vision of a creative entertainer but also the smarts of a good manager - they’re director and producer and executive in one package. What’s more, they have to do this every single week, on impossible deadlines, always aware that the fickle tastes of the public could turn against them at any moment.” - Devin Faraci, Birth.Movies.Death

Showrunners (2014) is a documentary that goes behind the scenes without employing much of an agenda. Self-described as being made by the fans, for the fans, the piece is a way for television fans to peek behind the curtain a little more than ever before, and high-five the people who make their favorite shows go. It also shows what an incredibly daunting job these people have. As famous, successful, and thrilled they all seem to be with their work, they are all equally miserable.

Janet Tomaro of Rizzoli & Isles (2010) addresses this conflict of emotion, effectively saying she would be extremely excited and absolutely horrified by the idea of her show being on the air for eight years.

Bill Prady notes the “burnout rate for showrunners is 100%.” Joss Whedon says “It’s draining, it’s awful… I miss it terribly.”

Showrunners approaches the interesting angle behind statements like that one. What type of character does it take to do this job?

“You have to be very driven, and not afraid to piss people off,” says Des Doyle, the documentary’s director, speaking to Film Courage on YouTube. “You need to be very certain of your own vision in a show.”

Hart Hanson, showrunner for Bones (2005), says “If you’re doing it right, everyone from actors to crew to networks should always be just a little annoyed with you.”

Not everyone is good at all aspects of showrunning. One of the more melancholy showrunners featured, Matthew Carnahan (House of Lies (2012)), admits he’s mostly uninterested in the budgetary, business ends of the job. For those duties, he has a non-writing EP who takes over. “Showrunning is as much a feat of choreography as it is anything else,” he says.

“There’s something magical about doing 16 hour days and directing every neuron at your project. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t have that gene, or maybe who have never found the project that made them want to work that hard, but every one of the showrunners in this documentary knows the feeling.” - again, Birth.Movies.Death

Showrunning teams, like The Good Wife’s (2009) Michelle and Robert King, genuinely don’t know how people sometimes serve as showrunner on multiple projects at once. Joss Whedon comments on the year he had three shows going at once, with Firefly (2002), Angel (1999), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997):

“Once you get them all spinning, they kind of balance a little bit. You can go from here to here to here, a little bit. But only for a certain amount of time, and then you die of extreme old age.”

What each showrunner has - undeniably - is a powerful, overwhelming dedication to the project they’re working on. It’s impossible to half-ass the job of showrunning. Like they say in Ocean’s Eleven (2001), “you’re either in or you’re out.” It takes someone not afraid of working 12, 15, 17 hours per day, seven days a week, to make a show have even a chance of success. That is one of the most important takeaways of Showrunners in regard to the character of the people it’s profiling. Confidence and dedication are massively important.

That, and it’s not something you can do forever. If Bill Prady and his burnout statistic are right, most showrunners are happy if they get a chance to helm one truly successful project.