Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show

and what a scam it is.

It felt very relevant to me.

Well, when you get to

the point of making a show,

it's pretty sexy in its own way.

I get to make a half-hour pilot.

If, god willing, the...

the show gets picked up,

I don't know exactly how I'll work it.

I wanna write as much as I can of it.

The showrunning part,

the administrative part,

it's really, uh, not for me, in a way.

As somebody who's a writer

as much as anything,

that's the reasons they

let me do any of the stuff

that I do, is that I can write okay.

When I moved to New York,

trying to write plays,

Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman

saw my first play

called Diary from Avenue B.

Joanne found something in it

that she liked.

They were just dead set

against any of their protgs

going to Hollywood,

moving to L.A., writing for film,

acting in films, um,

doing television especially.

They were absolutely against it...

of course, all of us have.

Part of what the showrunner has to do

is head in four different

places at the same time.

You're in a constant

situation of feeling

like you're doing,

uh, not a good enough job.

The idea for Men of a Certain Age

came from

when Ray Romano and I

were both between projects.

And he, uh,

he was kind of still in the wake

of Everybody Loves Raymond,

trying to figure out

what he was supposed to do next.

And as we started conversing,

it was all existential

mid-life crisis stuff

that we were both going through.

The more we talked,

the more stories we had

and the more it felt like,

well, this is what we should

be writing about

because a lot of people can relate

to this.

And it worked out very well.

We were extremely happy

with all of our episodes

in the first season.

We felt like, you know what,

we did a good show

so let's just get it out there

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