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Writers’ Room and Showrunner: Discourses and Practices in the German Television Industry

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The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development

Abstract

This chapter analyses how television professionals in Germany negotiate and practice the showrunner and the writers’ room. It is based on 19 interviews conducted with writers, producers and commissioning editors, and on participant observations at multiday industry workshops on series production. The chapter first looks at the showrunner and the writers’ room against the background of different production contexts in Germany’s heterogenous television industry. Where can approaches using one or both production modes be found, and where are divergent production modes dominant? Secondly, the chapter concretises practices around the showrunner and the writers’ room in individual project networks of recent series productions from Germany, such as Deutschland 83/86/89 (2015/2018/2020) and Dark (2017–2020). Thirdly, it discusses production cultures that become visible in these project networks and are related to hierarchies in the script development. It becomes visible that both the showrunner and the writers’ room are used to discuss broader transformations of the current television fiction industry in Germany.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In German: ‘Ja, ich will jetzt nicht diese ewige Diskussion um Showrunner und Writers’ Rooms aufmachen. So einfach ist das glaube ich nicht.’ At the time of the interview, Bartel was head of fiction for the broadcaster Vox, which belongs to the RTL Group.

  2. 2.

    The interviews discussed in this chapter were conducted between 2015 and 2019 as part of the research for the project ‘Quality Series’ as Discourse and Practice. The project is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, 2018–2021).

  3. 3.

    The industry workshops by Erich Pommer Institute in Berlin and Potsdam were ‘Winterclass—Serial Writing and Producing’ and ‘European TV Drama Series Lab’; participant observations from 2015 to 2019.

  4. 4.

    The UFA includes some of the most important TV production companies in Germany and now consists of four units: UFA Serial Drama, UFA Fiction, UFA Show and Factual and UFA Lab. The UFA GmbH is a subsidiary of RTL Group’s production division, Fremantle.

  5. 5.

    In German: ‘die leichteste Form des Writers’ Room’.

  6. 6.

    In German: ‘[D]as Beat-System [kann] dir eine Art dramaturgischen Bauplan vorgeben, der in einem Writers’ Room […] dazu führt, dass man einfach effektiver arbeitet, weil jeder quasi weiß: Okay, dramaturgisch haben die immer so ‘ne Art von Dichte […], von Rhythmik […], von Erzählgeschwindigkeit’.

  7. 7.

    In German: ‘Technik’.

  8. 8.

    In the final credits, Rauhaus is listed under ‘according to the idea of’.

  9. 9.

    In German: ‘[E]s gibt ja vier Familien im Kern dieser Serie, sozusagen hat jeder eine Familie genommen und die Biografien dieser Figuren geschrieben’.

  10. 10.

    In German: ‘frische Ideen’.

  11. 11.

    In German: ‘Ich bin ja quasi ein Staff Writer’.

  12. 12.

    In German: ‘Jetzt verändere ich den Charakter zu sehr und der geht dann in eine Richtung, die […] derjenige, der die nächste Folge schreibt, wiederum gar [nicht] gebrauchen kann’.

  13. 13.

    In German: ‘Fernsehfilmtradition’.

  14. 14.

    In German: ‘Weil der [Showrunner] hat natürlich […] mehr kreative Macht und auch als Executive mehr Macht als ein Redakteur, sonst macht es keinen Sinn’.

  15. 15.

    In German: ‘Ideenhierarchie’.

  16. 16.

    In German: ‘verschiedene Visionen’.

  17. 17.

    In German: ‘Bread-and-Butter-Serie’.

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Participant Observations At

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Funding

This article is an outcome of the research project ‘Quality Series’ as Discourse and Practice: Self-theorizing in the German TV Series Industry that is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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  1. University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Florian Krauß

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  1. Florian Krauß
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Correspondence to Florian Krauß .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Stayci Taylor

  2. University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Craig Batty

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Krauß, F. (2021). Writers’ Room and Showrunner: Discourses and Practices in the German Television Industry. In: Taylor, S., Batty, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7_18

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