“Running a show is just running until you die”

Five showrunners on what changed, what broke, and what they’d tell someone starting now.

Edited for length and clarity.

Describe a shift in your career and how you survived it.

Jon Hurwitz: I started in R-rated feature comedies, and there was a nice run in the early 2000s. But slowly a bunch of those got made over and over, and the appetite got smaller. So we had to pivot.

At the major studios there were maybe five actors who could green-light a movie, and after writing several that couldn’t get made that way, I was driving down the Sunset Strip and saw Kimmy Gibbler on a billboard for Fuller House. And I thought — maybe I could do something in television with nostalgia.

We had this idea for Cobra Kai that had been sitting dormant for years. And we thought: Ralph Macchio and William Zabka could be on billboards.

Marta Kauffman: When Friends ended it was the same year I turned fifty. And David Crane and I, after twenty-seven years as partners, wanted different things. So we decided not to be writing partners anymore — though he’s still one of my best friends.

And I had to learn how to write alone.

I’d been writing with a partner for twenty-seven years, and he was always at the keyboard. So I wrote out loud. I had to figure it out by having conversations with myself. Is that a stupid idea? Yeah, you f*cking idiot.

It took me such a long time.

Dan Goor: I was a biochemistry major and I was literally enrolled in medical school.

My then-writing partner broke up with me, and it was like a divorce. Genuinely devastating.

Marta Kauffman: That’s when you started —

Dan Goor: To drink. So the shift was into alcoholism.

I also didn’t want to be a doctor. I find the sight of blood disgusting and I don’t like sick people. At my med school interview they asked what the hardest part would be for me, and I said: being around sick people.

They said, what?

And I said, I mean, I’m very empathetic.

So I applied with Charlie Grandy for a job at The Daily Show, then with Craig Kilborn, and we got hired two weeks later. I told med school I wasn’t coming.

Katie Robbins: Mine’s an industry shift. My first job was on The Last Tycoon with Billy Ray and Chris Keyser, and Chris was adamant that we get to be there through production as staff writers. I even got to help edit my episode. Same on The Affair.

But my first show as showrunner, Sunny for Apple — and to be fair we were shooting in Japan — I didn’t have a lot of help. No writers on set. I was writing the episodes and doing later drafts on my own, with nobody covering episodes.

That was hard for me, and hard for my writers, who didn’t get to shepherd their own episodes.

So on my next show, Good American Family, I had a bit more say. And I said I really want the writers there to shepherd their episodes through as much of post as possible.

That was a shift I tried to shift back. Which is hard, and you can’t always do it. But it was important.

LaToya Morgan: The biggest one is going from twelve or fifteen episodes to eight, which is what we had on Duster. So you’re telling a serialised story in a shorter time with fewer writers, less money, fewer of everything.

My first job was on Shameless and we had twelve episodes. Even that seems like a luxury now.

Dan Goor: We’d do twenty-two, twenty-three.

LaToya Morgan: Twenty-four.

Dan Goor: It was hell. Truly hell. There’s a famous Mamet line — writing a movie is sprinting an entire marathon, and running a TV show is just running until you die.

What contributes to longevity?

Marta Kauffman: You have to have a happy set. When you have a happy set, people want to work with you. They want to come back.

As a showrunner I sometimes felt like a camp counsellor, which was actually kind of fun. A lot of joy, a lot of good laughs, a lot of stress — but so many happy people that it was a pleasure.

Jon Hurwitz: And understanding that you don’t know everything. Knowing what you don’t know, surrounding yourself with talented people and trusting them to do their jobs.

Don’t have the ego where your idea is the right idea all the time. Great ideas can come from anybody.

Marta Kauffman: We always said we were idea whores. We had our gaffer pitch a really funny joke.

Dan Goor: You have to love it. You can hate it in the moment — and you often do, it is truly hell — but you have to love it.

Something that’s both a strength and a flaw for me is that I really love my characters. You see shows where the writers clearly hate the characters, and eventually you turn on the characters and on the show.

And in this era of potential AI devastation, I love writing an action line that mentions a costume and then asking the costumer: what’s your idea, how are you going to do this?

Props is my favourite department. When I started in late night we did a bit called Bulimic Trojan Horse, and they built a wooden horse that could lift its front paw so little green army men could be pulled out of its mouth. In a day. It was insane.

Katie Robbins: I haven’t figured this out yet, but I hear that achieving some kind of balance is helpful. Sleeping. Taking care of yourself. Seeing your family.

I think that’s a fallacy.

Having a very, very nice husband has been helpful for me.

LaToya Morgan: Having both a long and a short memory. Short, so you can get past the problem in front of you. Long enough to know that vengeance will one day be yours.

Dan Goor: That’s genius, and it’s true for breaking story too. Being able to let go of what you pitched yesterday and not even remember you were sure it was the solve — and then having the long memory to say, but the thing I liked about this story is that these two characters are in conflict.

Marta Kauffman: It’s like giving birth. You don’t remember the awful parts, you remember the beautiful parts.

Dan Goor: And you’re not wearing pants.

Tell us about a collaboration you cherish.

Marta Kauffman: Mine’s obvious. I loved working with David Crane. We started in New York and it was such a joy, and we never fought — that was a big piece of it.

We’d hear other partners screaming horrible things at each other. The worst thing David and I ever said to each other was it’s fine. Or we’re having one of those days, aren’t we? And as soon as we said that, it was over.

It’s a marriage. Except you don’t have to cook for them.

LaToya Morgan: When you work with someone you start to know their sounds. Working with JJ on Duster, I could always tell if he didn’t like something and he could tell when I didn’t. It’d be silence, or oh, okay, well, I guess let’s find something better.

We were never stuck in our spots. We were always looking for the version that made both of us crack up at the crazy assassin hidden behind the next door.

Marta Kauffman: I didn’t have a sound, I had a look. And we had a writer who loved that look, so he’d make puns — and I hate puns — just to get it.

Dan Goor: Mine are Mike Schur and Andy Samberg. Mike and I go back to college; we did serious experimental theatre and comedy plays together.

I started on Parks and Rec as an executive story editor, which is pretty low in the hierarchy. But good showrunners don’t give a sh*t what your title is. They care what your contribution is. By episode three I was the number two.

What made it work was that I could speak the truth to him. And I’d pitch solutions, not problems.

Mike’s so good at pitching that he’d come into the room and say, oh, it’s simple — act one is this, this, this. Very detailed. And then act two, they get in a fight, act three, blah blah. And by the end you’re going yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you put the cards up and you realise the whole of act two is missing.

Because I knew him, if he was in editing I’d just go and rebreak act two.

And I cared. We’d text each other in the middle of the night. I can’t tell you how few writers ever did that — not that you should, it’s a job, you can go home and have a life. But my number two on Brooklyn, Luke Del Tredici, would do it all the time. Almost nobody else would say, hey, I was thinking about this over the weekend.

It really increased my estimation of them, beyond what they produced in the room.

Jon Hurwitz: Same. Hayden Schlossberg I went to high school with. Josh Heald I went to college with. These are people who knew me before the business, so we can be honest with each other. There’s some fighting, especially now there are three of us, but the fights are short-lived.

And I think back to Harold and Kumar — my first movie, first set I’d ever been on. We got to know John Cho and Kal Penn, and it was a big opportunity for them too. We’d collaborate on set, and then after work we’d hang out every night, have a drink and a meal, look at tomorrow’s sides and come up with stuff together. They’d wake up and the sides had new material in them.

When you love it, it doesn’t feel like work after hours.

Dan Goor: Also, don’t keep score.

Don’t think about who had the best jokes or the most jokes. When you’re running a show you genuinely don’t remember who pitched what. You’re just so f*cking happy that somebody pitched a joke and you can all go home. That they solved it. That there’s a blow to the scene.

And what frequently happens in a room is you pitch something and it takes time for the person running the room to process it. It’s not that they don’t like you. It seeps in. And then somebody else pitches it, or they pitch it themselves twelve minutes later, and you’re thinking — I pitched that.

You can go up afterwards and say, I’m really not trying to keep score, I just want you to know I also pitched that, I don’t want you to think I’m not participating. That’s fine. We understand you have normal insecurities and you’re a normal human being.

You won’t be rehired.

Marta Kauffman: I have found, and still find, that women’s voices are harder to hear in a room. You’ll pitch something, then a man pitches it, and suddenly everybody hears it.

So it’s important that we make our voices heard without screaming — and that others in the room amplify them.

Dan Goor: There was a study about this. Women get cut off a lot. When you’re running a room, remember if anyone — but especially a woman — has pitched something and been cut off, and come back to it.

Also, boys in classrooms who are funny get encouraged, and girls who are funny get punished. I have two very funny daughters, and all through elementary school I’d tell their teachers: I’m a professional in this field, my kids are professionally funny, and I expect them to be applauded for it and not punished.

What have you learned about pitching?

Jon Hurwitz: You want people to leave the room thinking: they’ve got it. They’ve thought this through inside and out.

What you’re looking for is that they have confidence in you. They have to like the idea, but they need confidence that you can deliver it.

Do you think about the audience?

Marta Kauffman: Never. I think about what show I would watch. What makes me laugh, what makes the other writers laugh, what makes the actors laugh, and whether the characters are relatable.

Jon Hurwitz: Exactly the same. My thought is, I’m fairly normal and mainstream in some ways — so if I’m loving this, others will too. You never think, oh, there’s this demographic.

Dan Goor: If you love your characters and want to hang out with them, you can assume other people will too.

Marta Kauffman: And television is far more intimate than film. People are home. They’re in their underwear. They’re folding laundry, cooking dinner. You are in their homes. So they have to be people you want to hang out with.

Dan Goor: And treat your audience as intelligent adults who understand the jokes. Don’t talk down to them, don’t preach to them.

There are so many options now. In the olden days — and I’m talking eleven years ago — if a show had a bad first two episodes you still watched it. You gave it a whole season. The Office was a disaster in its first season, ratings-wise. Parks and Rec was a bubble show its entire run.

Katie Robbins: A note I get a lot from the networks is that because people are folding laundry and looking at their phones, they’re not paying attention the way they used to. So we’re asked to re-explain things over and over. And I hate it, it makes me crazy, because I agree we should treat audiences as smart.

And yet I know that when I’m not paying attention, I can’t follow a complicated story.

Jon Hurwitz: Part of it is making sure every scene is compelling, so whatever they do pay attention to is entertaining.

But we get such horrible notes. When we started Cobra Kai, the first outline came back: can’t Johnny and Daniel just be friends right now? Can they just have a karate school together?

And we said — we sold you the show. We told you we have to build to that. Johnny Lawrence has to be this miserable dirtbag.

They always want everything up front. They want you to explain everything in the first episode, because they’re afraid the audience won’t stick with you.

Have faith in your audience. And when you’re writing for young people, give them credit too. There wasn’t anything tailored for us when we were kids. We watched programmes made for adults and we got it. We all watched The Golden Girls. I watched shows like that at seven and loved them, because it’s a human story and it was hilarious.

The worst note you’ve seen.

Marta Kauffman: Not mine, but it made me feel better. Warner Brothers opened a little museum with old scripts, and there was a draft of A Streetcar Named Desire with notes on it.

And the note was: does he have to rape her in the end?

Once I saw that, I thought — all right. They’re giving stupid notes to Tennessee Williams. I can figure this out.

Dan Goor: But sometimes you get good notes.

When we launched Brooklyn, Andy Samberg’s character was new to the precinct. The cold open was him doing something smart but alienating an important person, and getting sent to the Nine-Nine.

Kevin Reilly read it and said, basically: a person with Jake’s personality, when they’re new, is an as*hole. You can’t have that personality — you have to be friends with people in order to be a smart-ass.

He didn’t have the fix. But what we changed was making Captain Holt the new arrival. So Jake was a fixture, a person they all liked and laughed at.

That was transformative.

Sometimes the notes aren’t good, but the fact that the note exists is good. It means there’s something wrong.

Marta Kauffman: The solutions people give are stupid. But at the heart of the note, if something isn’t working, you have to address it and figure out why they gave you that note.

I always tell writers: don’t get defensive. Listen to the problem, ignore their solution.

Dan Goor: And sometimes even where they’ve located the note is wrong. A common note is the ending isn’t working, the climax isn’t right. And the real problem is you didn’t set up the stakes on page three.

That’s my favourite note to get, because it’s often a one-sentence fix.

We call it the note behind the note.

Marta Kauffman: When we did the main titles on Friends, the note was that it wasn’t fun enough.

All we changed was the music. That was it. They thought we’d made huge changes.

Dan Goor: What had it been?

Marta Kauffman: “Shiny Happy People.”

Dan Goor: So it turned out to be an amazing note. That’s the most iconic opening of any show.

Katie Robbins: Something I’ve started doing is writing quite a long response to notes. I respond to every note with how I took it — often I’m not answering the actual note but addressing it somewhere else, so they know they’ve been heard and feel part of the process.

It also keeps me honest about whether I’m actually addressing them. You get to a point where you’re so exhausted you don’t want to do anything at all.

Jon Hurwitz: And if you can’t explain to somebody why you’re doing it, maybe there’s something wrong and you should think about it more.

LaToya Morgan: On pilots especially, when you’re figuring out tone, be more open.

On Duster, one of our leads is a young Black woman, the first Black woman FBI agent. I was dead set on her journey — how she gets there, how she gets the CI. And everyone was excited, but they said: is there a moment where we could see a little more vulnerability?

So we added a scene where she calls her mom and says, oh my God, all these people in this office don’t want me to succeed. A chance to lower the curtain, and for the audience to see that even though she’s badass and good at her job, she still has doubts.

Really great note. It rounded her out.

Marta Kauffman: There was a point where our executives would say you first — because we were harder on ourselves than they were on us. We had a thing that good enough isn’t good enough. Very often we’d cover whatever they were going to say.

Best advice received, given, and ignored.

Marta Kauffman: The best I received was from my agent, who I’ve been with since 1985. She said: do television.

We ignored her for a while.

Jon Hurwitz: The one I ignored — when I first got into the business it was all think of the big concept. And whenever we thought of big concepts, everything felt less relatable.

Rebelling against that is literally what led to Harold and Kumar. Let’s think of the smallest concept of all time. What are the stakes? They don’t get to eat White Castle burgers and maybe they’ll eat McDonald’s instead.

Our thought was: there are plenty of love stories, but not everyone’s been in love. Everyone’s been hungry. If we make a movie about people wanting something that badly, that’s something we can all connect to.

Dan Goor: The bad advice I ignored — I’d also applied to law school and I was thinking maybe this isn’t for me. So I asked the head writer of Conan, who I didn’t really know, whether I should go.

He said absolutely.

Then later he hired me. He didn’t remember.

The best advice I received was Conan always saying that television is a visual medium. A lot of writers, especially comedy writers, forget that. You get cold opens that are radio plays.

All the best cold opens are visual. I pitched one on Parks and Rec where they’re in a meeting and Ron Swanson very casually takes out a pair of pliers and pulls out one of his teeth. That was all I had. But it was a great image. We had Terry with an actual live tarantula on his head.

The best advice I’ve given is: track your units. If you’re doing a maths problem, keep track of the units, don’t lose them. My dad gave me that.

It means keep track of the details. Track what each character is doing so they stay consistent. It sucks when a character acts one way in act one and completely differently in act three. People notice.

Jon Hurwitz: Mine is: always understand the character’s headspace. When I’m directing and an actor comes to set, it’s the same thing — right before this, you went through this. You want your actors living inside the character.

Enter every scene knowing what every character is thinking, and by the end of it something should have changed for several of them.

Marta Kauffman: People shouldn’t sit there and just talk. They should be doing something.

We once hired a writer based on one scene. A married couple having a huge fight while getting ready for a black-tie dinner — and while they’re fighting, he’s zipping her up and she’s fixing his tie.

So you knew they were going to be okay. They could fight as loud as they wanted. If you didn’t have them doing that, you might have been scared for them.

Dan Goor: That’s also a reason not to have AI read your scripts. The rest of that script might have been terrible, and a summary might not have included that detail — and the detail was the thing that spoke to you.

The other thing: in general, if a joke or a line could be said by any character in your show, you have a problem. Either with the joke, or more likely with the characters. You can’t imagine Joey saying a Ross line.

So if you’re thinking this person doesn’t have enough lines, I’ll just give them that person’s — that’s a problem.

Katie Robbins: The advice I give is specificity. I was a journalist before this, so I’m obsessed with research. I research every script to a level that’s probably unnecessary but makes me really happy. It gives the writing what I call crunchiness — when a scene is crunchy you can bite it and chew it and it crackles.

The worst advice I’ve been given, and I think it’s given more often to women and people of colour, is to be less exacting. Not to fight for the vision you have.

You can’t fight for everything — limited money, limited time. But for the things that matter most to making your vision what you want it to be, you sometimes have to fight. And that’s okay. It’s okay to be exacting. It’s okay to fight for the prop that makes the thing specific.

If people tell you not to be exacting, ignore that.

The best advice I ever got was from my dad: if you see a bathroom, use it.

Jon Hurwitz: That is great advice.

And knowing what to fight for is something you learn over time. If you’re fighting for everything, you become the problem. If you pick and choose the things that are truly important, people take note.

LaToya Morgan: This is going to sound cheesy, but it’s what my mom told me: follow your dreams.

I was really trying to take myself off the path, because I thought I had to have a certain type of job. I have to go be a lawyer. I can’t possibly do this thing I absolutely love and would do every day even if no one paid me.

But please pay me.

Follow your dream. Do the thing you’re scared to do. There’s only one of you.

Dan Goor: One more. And this doesn’t contradict the earlier point about not thinking about your audience — but know your audience.

When you’re pitching, your audience is the person you’re pitching to. Not the eventual audience at home. Then your audience is the studio, then the network, then the actors reading the script.

That doesn’t mean sell yourself out. It means know who you’re writing for. And it tells you which fights to have. If you want to rent a zeppelin in episode six, you don’t have to have that fight right now. Your audience is the person green-lighting the show.

Marta Kauffman: One more piece of advice I love: dress comfortably.

Dan Goor: That goes with the bathroom thing.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known?

Marta Kauffman: I wish I’d known that I could do it. It took me a really long time to figure that out — way beyond what you might be thinking.

I wish I’d known: I’ll be able to do this. It’ll be okay.

LaToya Morgan: A cousin to that — you’re going to be okay. Every problem seems astronomical in the moment.

Don’t have the ego where your idea is the right idea all the time. Great ideas can come from anybody.

Jon Hurwitz speaking on stage at State of the Story, Writers Guild Theater, Los Angeles