Zack Stentz: My best experience was on The Sarah Connor Chronicles — Josh had such a clear vision of the show he wanted to make (which was challenging and appealing), John was such a master at guiding the room and getting the most out of all of us, and there were literally no weak links in a diverse room full of people at all levels of experience. You had seasoned hands like Toni Graphia and Natalie Chaidez, and you had staff writers like Ian Goldberg, Dan Thomsen, and Denise The, who made me seethe with envy when I saw them turn in work that was far more accomplished than anything I was doing at their ages. I still mourn the demise of that show, and confess to getting irritated when I see praise heaped on other genre shows that don’t have 1/10th the ambition that we did.

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John Rogers: This room. First year of Leverage, the studio had never done a show before, we had a tiny budget, we hired almost all staff writers because we had no money and we decided to go for volume — and we came up with one of the best years of television I’ve ever produced in 15 years. A rookie team with a lot of energy, a lot of gumption, a lot of ambition, and every single one of them worked their asses off. It was great to be in that situation where this is plainly impossible, and it turned out to be great.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach: I have to say, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I had a wonderful room on The Middleman. That was a show that I think was blessed in a lot of ways. We all loved the show, we all got along, and even though it was a fairly small room — I don’t think we ever had more than five people in it. It was just a room where everyone vibes really well.

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Without naming names, what’s been your worst?

John Rogers: I consulted on a show once, and it was hard to watch the network kind of beat up the showrunners. My relationship with TNT on Leverage is that they’re clearly supportive, they’re full creative partners, and they pretty much tell us when they don’t like something, but they hired us to run a show and they let us run a show. This other situation was very much that kind of...you could tell that the executive in particular was a frustrated showrunner or writer and he just beat the hell out of the guys who were running the room. I can’t imagine being in that situation; I actually quit. Whenever you don’t see the script department working — and I know I talk like a 1950s screenwriter when I say “script department” — but every script department has it’s own rhythms, and whenever somebody interferes with it, you’re interfering with the very guts of a show. A smart network or a smart studio finds that once a staff is working, they stay out of their way.

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Javier Grillo-Marxuach: I have worked with people who are absentee micromanagers, those are a lot of fun. The shows where the showrunner is never around and then they show up for 15 minutes twice a week and destroy everything and insist that everything be redone. The shows where the showrunner enters the writers room at 6:30 in the evening after we’ve been there since 10 am and goes “Right! Let’s go to work.” Look, no writers room is perfect, but the ones that work collaboratively are the best. The ones where you’re there to facilitate some emotional need of the showrunner are the worst.

Amy Berg: I’ve been confronted by misogyny on a staff before. It’s just sad that this sort of thing still exists. The really horrible thing about this kind of behavior is that it’s not something you can change. You can’t talk things out. I tried that. It’s just something that’s ingrained in people. And if you don’t have support from your showrunner (or if the person is your showrunner), all you can do is pack your stuff and move on to bigger and better things.

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Who have you, personally, learned the most from?

Amy Berg: On the page, I would have to say I learned the most from Ira Steven Behr. I went into my experience on The 4400 as somewhat of a raw talent. I was not refined by any means. But the time I spent with Ira was incredibly valuable. We wrote a script together during the final season, and I got to witness his process beat-by-beat. It was amazing. He had high expectations for me and forced me to raise my game. John Rogers is an amazing story breaker. I learned a lot from him during my tenure on Leverage that I will take with me everywhere I go. I added a few more skills to my toolbox thanks to him. As far as the kind of person I want to be as a showrunner, I have to look no further than Eureka’s Bruce Miller and Jaime Paglia. They are two of the best humans on the planet. And the fact that they’re super-talented is a double bonus.

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Jane Espenson: Joss Whedon, although there are other great candidates. Joss was the king of “why are we telling this story?” He really impressed all his writers with the sense that a story had to be about something other than the characters and their world. It had to really have something to say about the real world. I try never to forget what he taught me.

John Rogers: Two people. One was Dean Devlin. Because he’s a very emotional guy. Everything comes from heart. He’s always like “How does this make me feel?” And I was always a very technical writer, I mean, I write very complicated heist stuff, and having a guy who’s always like, “What’s the character beat here, what’s the moment?” — I’ve definitely learned a lot just working with Dean. Also Cosby’s David Landsberg, who was my first showrunner. David was relentless; we were in that writers room for 20 hours at a time and he sat at the head of that table and he never bitched us out, he never yelled at us — no matter how bad things got on Cosby, he never took it out on us. We were the lifeboat, we were gonna survive, we were gonna work together, we were gonna overcome this. He was just an inspiration; he was the showrunner I wanted to be. The guy that, no matter how it happened, the staff would turn to and he’d say, “Okay, I got one more trick in the toolbox.” He never gave up. That to me is what a showrunner is: the guy that’s got one more trick in the toolbox.

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Zack Stentz: I’ve learned a ton from every single person I’ve worked with, from Andromeda’s Matt Kiene and Joe Reinkemeyer teaching me the concept of the “two-one punch” (leading with your most powerful emotion instead of building to it) to Jeff Pinkner masterfully pulling apart the structure of a Fringe episode to diagnose a problem. But I think I’ve learned the most from Josh Friedman, in how he constantly challenged me to look beyond the obvious way into a scene or an episode or a character, and to strip away unnecessary incident to find the core of truth and drama in whatever story we were telling.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach: I have learned things from so many different people. Lost’s Damon Lindelof is one of the most ingenious twisters of scene and story I’ve ever seen at work. He’s a guy that you give a scene that is very stock and he comes up with a genius way of making it different. Watching that muscle at work is an extraordinary thing — and you learn it by watching a guy do it. Graham Yost, who ran Boomtown was a guy who — Boomtown was a non-linear cop show, and he was a guy who could generate those non-linear stories in his head. And learning how to break story like him was an amazing education in lateral thinking. David Greenwalt is an extraordinary manager, and is also a guy who brings a lot of courage of his convictions to his storytelling. From him, I learned about being very committed and gutsy. Silvio Horta, on The Chronicle and Jake 2.0, is a guy who’s tremendously eager to give and to delegate and to let people flourish. That was a lesson in and of itself. I believe, very strongly, that a showrunner’s legacy is as much in the show they create as it is in the number of people that they train and they groom and put out into the world — and that dynamic, that teaching, happens in the writers room.

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What’s it like as a baby writer? As a showrunner? Aside from the pay grade, how does the job differ?

Zack Stentz: The thing that makes a showrunner’s job so difficult is that one has to simultaneously be an artist and a manager, and those are two very different skill sets that only occasionally overlap. It’s a reason why so few make it all the way up— it’s a rare thing to find someone who simultaneously has an interesting and compelling vision and can effectively manage their staff, deal with temperamental actors, make a budget, and effectively interact with the executives from the studio and network.

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Deric A. Hughes: As a baby writer, your first and most important job is to help contribute ideas to the room. When you have 13 episodes to tell and only a few short months to get scripts into production, you need to be a fountain of ideas for your showrunner. Because sitting there like a bump on a log and not saying anything is not going to help anyone achieve that goal. Even if you’re afraid what you have to say is a bad idea and it might get rejected, you need to get over that fear and speak what’s on your mind.

Amy Berg: The difference between a baby writer and a showrunner is enormous with regards to both responsibilities and expectations. The only real job of a baby writer is to take the episode they’ve been given and make the most out of it. There aren’t high expectations for them in the room because of their lack of experience. But if they give you something extra — if they work their asses off by doing research and constantly generating story ideas — they will work their way up the ladder very quickly. A showrunner is the overseer. They’re responsible for supervising every aspect of the production. Story breaking, script writing/rewriting, casting, editing, you name it. It’s a massive undertaking, both time-consuming and pressure-filled. A show’s success or failure is often placed squarely on the showrunner’s shoulders. Which is why they need a talented and supportive staff to back them up.

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Jane Espenson: They can both be fun jobs and they can both be very stressful jobs. A baby writer has to worry about themselves a lot more — am I going to “stick” in the business? Am I good enough to do this for a living? Have I contributed today? The showrunner usually has done this long enough that those questions have receded. But now they have to worry about everything else — all the details of getting a show made. These are very different jobs.

John Rogers: I was raised by guys who trained young writers and taught them to write and work and give them production responsibilities. And that’s what we did with all of these writers and those first-year baby staff writers are now leaving to go be producers on other shows on year three. Because we threw a lot at them, we didn’t just throw them on the first, we tried to teach them at the same time. And they learned really wonderfully. A lot of showrunners are just making a show, man. And there’s two reasons you shouldn’t do that. One, no show should be dependent on one guy. Personally thinking, I kind of refute the auteur theory in pretty much all produced television. And, two, if you don’t train your young writers to be producers, who’ll give you a consulting job when you’re in your 50s? I mean, the whole point of my career is to launch young writers so eventually I can work three days a week on their show.

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Are there any times as a showrunner/executive producer, you wish you were a baby writer?

Amy Berg: Sure. You sleep more. You’re in better health. You have the time and energy to enjoy an active social life. There are some trade-offs. But writers like me didn’t get into this business to work for other people their entire careers. We want to be creators. And with that goal comes great responsibilities.

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Jane Espenson: Oh yes, all the time. Well, maybe not a baby writer, but a mid-level writer — the level at which you get to have a lot of input on the show and write a lot of scripts, but at which there is still someone above you with whom to confirm your instincts and decisions.

Javier Grillo-Marxuach: The thing I learned about being a showrunner that has become crucial in my development, both as a showrunner and as a person: Credit is a self-renewable resource. So the more of it you give away to people who rightfully deserve it, the more of it you get back anyway. And that there’s more work than any one person can do, so delegating work shouldn’t be an object of fear. Frankly, after being in a lot of rooms, I don’t necessarily yearn for my days as a baby writer because I feel like as a showrunner if I’m willing to delegate and willing to trust and willing to teach and communicate, the writers will step up and do great work. Being the boss is nice and being a nice boss is better.

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John Rogers: Oh, man. Yeah! Sometimes, you really don’t want to be the guy with the toolbox. Sometimes, it’d be great if it was somebody else’s problem. But you know what? Television, we make stuff. We make it. We write stuff and then people shoot it and it’s on the air. It’s the fastest turnaround for narrative or storytelling you can have. It’s worth paying pretty much any price for that, if you’re a guy who makes stuff up for a living...