A Guide to Your Favorite Showrunners' First Shows

With the spike in popularity of television over the last decade, young artists are starting to talk about wanting to be television showrunners in the same way that aspiring filmmakers have long spoken of hoping to direct feature films. While the long, arduous road to becoming a feature film director is well-documented, we very rarely talk about how people like David Chase, Matthew Weiner, and Liz Meriwether rose to their prominent positions at the creative pinnacle of their field.

While feature directors crop up from various places, getting their start in commercials, music videos, or in front of the camera, there is a more predictable path to becoming a television showrunner. To this point, artists who catapult into the industry like Lena Dunham have been the exception, not the rule. Almost every showrunner starts off as a staff writer on other shows before they are given the keys to their personal creative kingdom.

What is surprising, however, are the shows that many showrunners come from. One writer who would go on to create one of the greatest crime dramas of all time got his first writing job on a Paul Reiser sitcom. A showrunner of prominent procedural started out on a Canadian show about loggers. The creator of an acclaimed HBO period drama first wrote TV dialogue for Bill Cosby.

As critics, we often force a chasm between the shows we love and those that we wish would just go away. When you look at the career of an average showrunner, you see that these shows often have a closer relationship in reality than we would like to admit. Shows like Nash Bridges have more overlap with the staff of The Shield and Lost than you would imagine. Many great creative minds must rise up through terrible shows before they get a shot a greatness, and some of the greatest gigs in TV history can be followed up by a series of flops.

They came from a variety of places, but they all started somewhere. This is A Guide to Your Favorite Showrunners' First Shows.

Written by Brenden Gallagher (@muddycreekU)

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Best known for: Spartacus

Nudity has been a common theme in Steven DeKnight's career, though it is difficult to find much more common ground between Undressed and Spartacus. Undressed was an anthology show that chronicled the sexual exploits of different groups of young people in and around Los Angeles. The show often shifted between characters, juggling several numerous plot threads told through vignettes.

After leaving the unconventional MTV show, DeKnight became a steady employee of Joss Whedon, working on Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse before landing his own showrunning gig. Whedon clearly had a greater impact on DeKnight than anyone he worked with at MTV. He often mentions or quotes Whedon in interviews. He has praised Whedon's "singular vision", which he missed when he worked on shows that were more network controlled, like Smallville.

Now that Spartacus has wrapped, it is safe to say that DeKnight was successful in bringing the idea of a "singular vision" to Starz's burgeoning stable of auteur showrunners with the critically adored, if Emmy ignored, series.

Best known for: Gilmore Girls, Bunheads

Sure, Roseanne's blunt, earthy tone strikes a sharp contrast with the witty patter of Gilmore Girls, but featured a blue collar slice-of-life sensibility. We couldn't see them as friends, but we could certainly see them as neighbors. This may come as no shock to Bunheads fans, but Palladino's career in TV writing began when she left her life as a ballet dancer behind to seize the opportunity to write for Roseanne.

It's likely that Roseanne had a hand in forming Palladino's distinctive, uncompromising writing style. Thanks to Roseanne Barr's stardom, the network and the studio were not allowed to give notes on Roseanne. Palladino admits that she was "so spoiled" on Roseanne, and felt that once she went to her next job, "[she] thought, 'Who the fuck are all these people sitting around the table and why are we talking to them?'"

Best known for: Parks and Recreation

One tried and true path for brainy comedians to launch themselves to superstardom goes through the Harvard Lampoon to writing for Saturday Night Live and on to greater success; Michael Schur is a prime example of how well this trajectory can pan out.

Quickly after graduating from Harvard, Schur landed a job at Saturday Night Live, where he became the producer of Weekend Update. After six seasons of writing on staff at SNL, Schur went to work on The Office. Parks and Recreation began as a spin-off of The Office, though Schur eventually decided that the show would work better as a stand-alone series, beginning our national love affair with Leslie Knope.

Best known for: The Wire, Treme

There are many ways to break into show business, but David Simon's route has to be one of the most circuitous of all time. Simon was a journalist with the Baltimore Sun for over a decade covering the police. After a bitter strike, Simon found himself enjoying his work at the paper less and less, feeling lasting tension with the higher-ups.

He began to seek an excuse to take a leave of absence from The Sun. He settled on writing a book, which became, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The book chronicled a year Simon spent shadowing the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. The book's publishers quickly began shopping the film rights and Simon found himself gearing up for a career change.

Best known for: Six Feet Under, True Blood, Banshee

The master of that fine line between life and death got his start on a pair of female led '90s sitcoms, Grace Under Fire and Cybill. Chuck Lorre, later the creator of Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory, ran both shows. Ball speaks highly of Lorre, though his broad style of multi-camera comedy is starkly different from the cinematic, darkly comic space that has become Ball's playground.

Despite a fondness for Lorre, Ball, who was a New York playwright when he got the call to write on Grace Under Fire, didn't exactly make a smooth transition from theatre to television. Ball said of his experience on Grace Under Fire, "In a lot of ways it was the perfect first job to have because nothing will ever be that bad." He went on to say, "It was just hell at the beginning, and I really got sort of a slap in the face about—not in all TV shows, but in that show, particularly, how writers were just considered to be expendable and the script was kind of secondary to the persona of the star. And that was real new for me, because I had come out of the theater where writers have a certain amount of respect and control."

Ball seems to have gotten into television at the right time, as the rise of HBO has created circumstances in which TV can be a writer's medium.

Best known for: Girls

You probably already know a lot about Girls creator Lena Dunham, but you may not be as familiar with her co-showrunner Jenni Konner. Konner has intentionally been a silent public partner with the outspoken Dunham, but without Konner, Girls may have never come to be.

Konner took it upon herself to shop Tiny Furniture around Hollywood after she was blown away by the indie film. She was instrumental in bringing Dunham to Judd Apatow's attention; with Apatow onboard, HBO had the firepower they needed to pull the trigger on the series. Though Konner has amassed an impressive resumé, featuring work on over a half-dozen sitcoms, it was her first job that ultimately allowed her to land the show that would thrust her into the zeitgeist.

Best known for: Modern Family

Though the series doesn't often top critics' Best Of lists, Modern Family is an Emmy darling and fan favorite. It is tough to make a sitcom that has mass appeal that also takes home hardware during trophy season, but if anyone can do it, it would be a man with Levitan's sitcom pedigree.

Levitan's resumé is filled with a list of shows that you just can't turn off when you catch the reruns on cable. After getting his start on Wings, Levitan worked on Frasier, The Critic, The Larry Sanders Show, and Just Shoot Me before providing a long term anchor to ABC's comedy line-up with Modern Family.

Best known for: The Sopranos

David Chase is notoriously dismissive of network television. He has been quoted as saying, "The networks had great instincts for how to cut a script so they just ruined everything. You would give them something and they would just cook the vitamins out of it, until it was this big, blobby mass." He has even been critical of his own past writing gigs; he referred to Northern Exposure (a Pop Culture Channel favorite) as "self-conscious and self-congratulatory and precious."

Though Kolchak was cancelled after just 20 episodes, it has influenced more successful paranormal television that has been created since. X-Files creator Chris Carter has cited Kolchak as "30 percent" of the inspiration for the show. Despite Kolchak's street cred among paranormal TV enthusiasts, it's still probably a safe bet that Chase has his share criticisms of the former ABC show.

Best known for: Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, Hannibal

It isn't often that a writer's first gig in the business is as prestigious as scripting stories for the Star Trek franchise. Bryan Fuller's incredible passion for Star Trek landed him writing credits on Deep Space Nine, which he eventually parlayed into a co-producer role on Star Trek: Voyager by its seventh season.

Despite his various successes in the industry since he worked on the Star Trek shows, Fuller would still like to get back into the Star Trek game. In 2009, he told iF Magazine, "I want to create another Star Trek series and have an idea that I'm kicking around. I would love to return to the spirit of the old series with the colors and attitude. I loved Voyager and Deep Space Nine, but they seem to have lost the '60s fun and I would love to take it back to its origin."

Best known for: Friday Night Lights, Parenthood

There aren't many better shows to begin your career with than My So-Called Life if your endgame is to become king of network family drama. In the time since his stint on My So-Called Life, Katims has become the envy of showrunners and TV writers as he has found the sweet spot of running shows that earn both critical acclaim and network eyeballs.

Katims refers to his time on My So-Called Life as his "graduate school," allowing him to realize the possibilities of character-driven storytelling on television; the job was his first taste of work in television after spending years in the New York theatre scene. After the ex-playwright left the My So-Called Life writers room, he began to create shows, and has worn both producer's and writer's hats on most of his jobs since.

Best known for: Justified, The Americans

Considering his recent critical victories with action-packed television like The Americans, Band of Brothers, and Justified, and his successful past in feature writing, which has included Speed and Broken Arrow, it seems strange that Yost got his start on the Nickelodeon tween comedy, Hey, Dude. It would be easy for Yost to overlook his time on the dude ranch comedy, but the Justified creator is still proud of his time on Hey, Dude. Yost recently claimed that he "still runs into people" who tell him, "I loved Hey, Dude."

Though we don't see much similarity between the Bar None Dude Ranch and Harlan County, Yost considers Hey, Dude an important part of his development, calling the experience "a writer's bootcamp."

Best known for: Bones

Bones creator Hart Hanson spent years in Canadian television before he made the jump to Hollywood. His first job was as a writer on the dramedy, The Beachcombers. The premise of the series might be the most Canadian thing we have ever heard: The show chronicles the travels of a lumber salvager and his friends.

Hanson's career in Canadian television zipped along for a decade until he was lured to L.A. in 1998. Hanson's jump to Hollywood was occasioned by mounting interest in Canadian-produced series due to tax advantages. After turning down the offer to run a show seeking lower tax rates, Hanson made the move to L.A. and joined the staff of Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia before creating Bones.

Best known for: The Shield

We have Nash Bridges to thank for many of our favorite television shows. The show, which was created by eventual Lost executive producer Carleton Cuse, featured a murderer's row of writing talent including Glenn Mazzara (Walking Dead), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and even Hunter S. Thompson.

Though Nash Bridges opened up many doors for Ryan, and is often cited as the job that helped him break int to TV, it was not his first television writing job. His first job was a somewhat less well-regarded show called My Two Dads, which basically sounds like Full House, but starring Paul Reiser, and featuring fewer cast members. The show somehow lasted for three seasons.