Ever wonder why so many TV showrunners are tyrannical monsters? After 20 years watching bosses abuse their power, veteran TV writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach wrote a scathing 86,000-word essay exposing the dysfunction—then rewrote it "nice." His 11 laws reveal how to manage creative people without being a complete asshole. In this book summary of "The Eleven Laws of Showrunning," discover why the creator of The Middleman thinks your "creative process" is bullshit.
- Book: The Eleven Laws of Showrunning
- Author: Javier Grillo-Marxuach
- Pages: ~48 pages (original essay)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
- Recommended for: TV writers aspiring to showrun, current showrunners who suspect they're the problem, anyone managing creative teams, and people fascinated by how television actually gets made.
The 30-Second Summary
After two decades watching showrunners turn million-dollar productions into psychological torture chambers, TV veteran Javier Grillo-Marxuach wrote the management guide Hollywood desperately needed but never asked for. His core argument: running a TV show is just managing a startup with a $60 million budget—so stop pretending your "creative process" excuses abusive behavior. The most surprising insight? The worst showrunners aren't inexperienced newcomers but seasoned veterans who've convinced themselves that genius requires being an asshole.
In a nutshell: You can make great television without destroying everyone around you—but first you have to stop making it all about you.
About the Author
Javier Grillo-Marxuach is a TV writer-producer with credits on Lost (first two seasons), The 100, Helix, Medium, and creator of the cult series The Middleman. A Carnegie Mellon and USC graduate, he worked his way up from staff writer over 11 years before becoming a showrunner. He co-hosts the "Children of Tendu" podcast with Jose Molina, offering free advice about breaking into television—because unlike most industry veterans, he believes knowledge should be shared, not hoarded.
The 3 Big Ideas
1. It's All About You—Now Stop Making It All About You
This paradox captures the entire showrunner dilemma. Yes, you're the visionary who sold the show. Your name's on it. Nothing goes on screen without your approval. You get the biggest paycheck, the best parking spot, and the executive producer credit. Everyone knows you're in charge—which is exactly why you need to stop reminding them.
The moment you accept that your staff works for a paycheck, not out of worship for your genius, everything changes. Your job isn't to be the sole fountain of creativity. It's to create an environment where other talented people can enhance your vision. Every moment you spend protecting your ego is a moment stolen from making the show better.
Key takeaway: Share information freely, empower your staff to contribute, and remember that everyone already knows you're the boss—you don't need to prove it.
2. "I'll Know It When I See It" Is Creative Theft
These seven words represent the most cowardly abdication of leadership in television. When a showrunner says this, what they really mean is: "I have no original ideas but will let everyone exhaust themselves so I can cherry-pick their best work and claim it as my own."
Your staff can't read your mind. Without clear direction, they're slaughtering lambs and reading entrails trying to divine what you want. Meanwhile, production is waiting, budgets are burning, and everyone's spinning their wheels because you're too insecure to commit to a vision. Being a showrunner means articulating what Maya Lin called "a strong, clear vision"—drawing the sandbox boundaries with precision so others can build castles within them.
Key takeaway: Your job is to define tone, story, and characters clearly enough that others can execute them. The creativity of your staff is for making your ideas bigger and better, not for coming up with them in the first place.
3. Your "Creative Process" Is Not Sacred
That precious creative process you protect? The one that requires everyone to accommodate your 3 AM writing sessions, your need to rewrite everything from page one, your inability to make decisions? It's not the source of your genius—it's the prison you've built from your trauma.
Every professional writer knows the truth: when deadline comes, you sit down and bang it out. Your creativity isn't some finite resource that requires mystical rituals to access. It's renewable, fed by everything around you—especially the talented people you hired. The price of playing to millions is making peace with being a professional, not a tortured artist.
Key takeaway: You can preserve your creativity without making everyone else participate in your daily reenactment of childhood trauma. Build a scaffold of professionalism around yourself.
Key Frameworks
The Management Hierarchy of Television
What it is: The ranking system from staff writer to executive producer isn't just about pay grades—it's a producer/showrunner academy where everyone's responsible for teaching the person below them.
How to apply it:
- Recognize that writers at different levels will perform differently
- Grade junior writers on a curve while holding seniors to higher standards
- Use senior writers as your apostles to spread your vision to other departments
When to use it: Every day when assigning work, giving notes, and delegating responsibility.
The Multiple Targets System
What it is: At any moment, you're tracking five stories: one in development, one in outline, one being scripted, one being shot, and one in post-production.
How to apply it:
- Focus your personal energy on the writers room where stories are created
- Delegate oversight of other stages to your writer-producers
- Resist the "sexy glamorous jobs" that pull you away from story
When to use it: When feeling overwhelmed or tempted to micromanage departments that already know their jobs.
The Path to Success Framework
What it is: Never leave a meeting without everyone knowing exactly what they need to deliver next.
How to apply it:
- Define the goal clearly (even if it's "help me figure out the goal")
- Trust your staff to determine the strategy
- Follow up with specific feedback on whether they hit the target
When to use it: Every single meeting, every single day.
Notable Quotes
"Television is—quite simply—a business: with winners, losers, seasonal patterns, production schedules, budgets, and deliverables... just like any other business."
Why this matters: This strips away the mystical bullshit that enables abusive behavior. You're not a tortured artist—you're a manager with a big budget.
"I'll know it when I see it" is an act of intellectual theft on par with plagiarism."
Why this matters: This phrase reveals a showrunner who lacks vision but wants credit for others' creativity. It's the ultimate management cop-out.
"Your 'creative process' is what you did in the dark with your Speed Racer jammies around your ankles while mommy and daddy slept in the next room."
Why this matters: Brutal but true—stop using your process as an excuse to avoid the hard work of management and collaboration.
"A script is not just the cry of your wounded inner child... Scripts are work orders."
Why this matters: Without scripts, no one knows where to take the trucks, what to build, or how much anything costs. Your precious feelings can't hold up production.
"The more credit you give, the more credit you get—for being a genius and hiring a great staff, for being a good boss and a nice person who can acknowledge the contributions of others."
Why this matters: Credit isn't finite. Sharing it costs nothing and gains you everything.
"Every time you say 'I'll know it when I see it,' you're proving daddy right."
Why this matters: This perfectly captures how showrunners' personal demons sabotage their professional effectiveness.
"We all want to pretend there's geniuses and prodigies in all of the inexperienced people we hire—mostly because it bolsters the idea that we ourselves came from the ranks of the genial and prodigious."
Why this matters: The myth of the young genius lets showrunners avoid their teaching responsibilities.
"Your darkness and your writing come from different places... losing one will not affect the other."
Why this matters: The biggest lie writers tell themselves is that their pain is the source of their talent.
"There are only two sins for which a showrunner pays with a pink slip: wasting time and squandering money."
Why this matters: This explains why studios tolerate incredible dysfunction—as long as the show delivers, nobody cares about the human cost.
"The price you pay to play to an audience of millions is that you have to make concessions between the tempestuous artiste you idealized for yourself and the reality that you are now a grown-ass adult professional."
Why this matters: This is the core challenge every showrunner faces—letting go of the romantic self-image to embrace professional responsibility.
"What we do is nothing more—or less—than hard work... hard work that can be done efficiently, thoughtfully, and in a way that doesn't ask anyone involved to sacrifice their personal life, dignity, and—sometimes—personal safety."
Why this matters: This challenges the entire culture of television production that normalizes suffering for art.
"If you repeatedly find yourself 'looking for the show' in post, it is because you most likely lost it in the writers room."
Why this matters: Post-production becomes a hideout for showrunners afraid of the collaborative messiness of story creation.
"Hierarchy is the flak jacket that allows each member of your staff to reach their highest potential without being shredded by gunfire."
Why this matters: Structure isn't oppression—it's protection that enables creativity.
"To say 'I'll know it when I see it' is to abdicate the hard work of creation while hoarding the authority to declare what is or isn't good."
Why this matters: This exposes the power dynamic that makes this phrase so toxic.
"You don't earn daddy's love by hoarding all the good stuff and claiming it as your entitlement. You defeat daddy by raising an entire generation of daughters and sons who don't perpetuate his legacy of abuse."
Why this matters: Breaking cycles of abuse is the real victory, not achieving success through the same toxic methods.
The Two Versions: Nice vs. Not-So-Nice
The essay exists in two versions, revealing the author's own journey from anger to constructive criticism. The original "angry" version was twice as long, filled with profanity, specific horror stories, and what Grillo-Marxuach calls "bile and contempt." It was 86,000 words of accumulated rage from watching talented people get destroyed by incompetent managers.
The "nice" version—the one he actually published—strips away the war stories and reduces the profanity while maintaining the core message. It's still harsh (he addresses the reader as "Sparky" in increasingly sarcastic tones), but it focuses on solutions rather than revenge. The difference reveals something profound: even justified anger needs to be transformed into something constructive to create change.
The original version would have been cathartic for victims of bad showrunners but ultimately destructive. As a friend asked him: "If this is the last thing you put out there, do you want to be remembered on your best day or your worst?" The nice version represents his best day—still honest about the problems, but focused on fixing them.
Interview Insights: Behind the Laws
In a revealing interview with the LA Times after the essay's publication, Grillo-Marxuach provided crucial context about why he wrote the laws and what he hopes to accomplish. The interview reveals both the personal cost of speaking truth to power and the calculated decision to use his privilege for change.
"For all intents and purposes, I am a middle-aged white male with a reasonably well-established career and a bit of success. If I don't use all that privilege to try to challenge some bad behavior, then what was the point?"
This statement frames the entire essay as an act of calculated courage. He waited until he had enough career security to survive the potential backlash, then used that position to say what junior writers can't.
The genesis of the essay came from a dark conversation with fellow writer Jose Molina:
"Several years ago, Jose and I were getting drunk before our 'Dungeons & Dragons' game—you know, like you do—and had a very dark conversation about some of the abuse we each felt we had received at the hands of some of the more terrible bosses in our careers. Rather than leave it at that, we began to talk about how we could make it better."
This origin story transforms the essay from a mere complaint into a constructive mission. Rather than just commiserating about bad bosses, they decided to create resources for the next generation.
On why he shares knowledge freely when most Hollywood veterans hoard it:
"I'm doing all this because I hope that, on the other end, people start showing up in writers rooms I work on who are a little bit better prepared for it. There's not nearly as much altruism to this as you may think: I just want to make my life easier!"
This pragmatic admission is refreshing—he's not claiming pure altruism but enlightened self-interest. Better-prepared writers make his job easier.
Perhaps most tellingly, he reveals his inspiration from Star Trek showrunner Michael Piller:
"What's most interesting about Piller's career is the depth of his 'coaching tree'—if you go back and look at the credits for 'The Next Generation,' and the other 'Star Trek' shows on which he worked, you will see a very interesting group of people whose careers started on the ground floor at 'TNG,' came up in the ranks on those shows, and went on to become showrunners."
This provides a counter-model to the dysfunction he criticizes—proof that mentorship and humane management can create not just good television but entire generations of capable showrunners.
On the pervasiveness of the problem:
"It's pervasive, and it comes out of two root causes. One is that there is just so much television out there... a lot of it is being created by novices who may be wonderful writers, but have no idea about how to manage a staff of writers or a production as a going concern. The second cause is this idea that 'my creative process' is some mystical intangible that requires complete genuflecting servitude."
This diagnosis identifies both the structural problem (inexperienced showrunners) and the cultural problem (the myth of the tortured genius).
Most powerfully, he addresses his purpose in writing for the next generation:
"My favorite scene in the history of television is in an episode of 'The Sopranos': Carmela goes to see a psychotherapist who straight up tells her that her husband is an evil man and that her only option is to leave him. The therapist then refuses to take Carmela's money for the session, telling her that now 'You can't say you were never told.' That's who I wrote that essay for—the next person who gets the brass ring and thinks it gives them license to indulge themselves and run a bad ship? I don't want them to say they were never told."
This Sopranos reference perfectly captures his mission: to remove the excuse of ignorance from future bad behavior.
Finally, on whether he's trying to break a cycle of abuse:
"As treacly and mired in the language of self-help and recovery as that may sound... yes."
The simplicity of this answer, after all the elaborate explanations, carries tremendous weight.
Related Ideas
David Simon on the writing room as "a safe place for dangerous ideas": The Wire creator's philosophy aligns with Grillo-Marxuach's emphasis on creating environments where creativity can flourish without fear. Both see the room as needing structure to enable, not stifle, creativity.
Michael Schur on "believing in the comedy democracy": The Good Place creator's approach to comedy writing—where the best joke wins regardless of seniority—offers a practical application of Grillo-Marxuach's principles while maintaining necessary hierarchy for story decisions.
Shonda Rhimes on "owning your voice": While Rhimes emphasizes the showrunner's vision must be clear and distinctive, she also demonstrates how that vision can be inclusive rather than tyrannical, building an empire on empowering other voices within her framework.
Dan Harmon on story structure as liberation: The Community creator's "Story Circle" provides the kind of clear framework Grillo-Marxuach advocates—specific enough to guide writers but flexible enough to allow creativity within boundaries.
Vince Gilligan on the collaborative process: The Breaking Bad creator's famous willingness to accept ideas from any source while maintaining final authority exemplifies how to balance openness with leadership.
Natural Next Reads
- "Creativity, Inc." by Ed Catmull: How Pixar manages creative teams without destroying souls
- "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield: Confronting the resistance that makes showrunners hide behind "process"
- "Good to Great" by Jim Collins: Why the best leaders are often the most humble
- "Writing the TV Drama Series" by Pamela Douglas: The practical complement to Grillo-Marxuach's management philosophy
- "Difficult Conversations" by Douglas Stone: Essential skills for the confrontations Grillo-Marxuach says showrunners must have
Reflection Questions
- If your "creative process" requires others to sacrifice their well-being, is it really creativity or just organized selfishness?
- What specific fears stop you from making decisions quickly—and what's the real cost of that hesitation?
- How might sharing credit actually increase rather than decrease your authority?
- Which of your management behaviors would you be ashamed to see your children emulate?
- Is the show in your head clear enough that someone else could pitch it back to you?
Practical Applications
For Aspiring Showrunners
- Story Development: Practice articulating vision so clearly that others can execute without constant supervision
- Team Building: Start developing mentorship skills now—every level teaches the one below
- Decision Making: Build the muscle of committing early by making small decisions quickly
- Communication: Learn to give notes that describe what success looks like, not just what's wrong
For Current Showrunners
- Diagnostic Tool: Use the laws to identify which dysfunction is killing your room's creativity
- Credit Distribution: Start every meeting acknowledging someone else's contribution
- Time Management: Track how much time you spend in "sexy glamorous jobs" vs. the writers room
- Succession Planning: Ask yourself if your staff could run the show if you disappeared tomorrow
For Writers in Bad Situations
- Pattern Recognition: Use the laws to identify whether your showrunner can be helped or should be escaped
- Self-Protection: Build consensus with peers before challenging superiors
- Documentation: Keep records of dysfunction for your own future reference
- Career Planning: Learn what not to do when your turn comes
The Bottom Line
Javier Grillo-Marxuach spent 10 years writing and rewriting these laws because he realized a horrible truth: most TV showrunners become the very monsters they once feared. His 11 laws aren't really about television—they're about choosing between two definitions of success. You can be the genius whose vision was so precious that everyone around you had to suffer for it. Or you can be the leader who created great work while helping others become great creators themselves. The choice seems obvious, but the entire culture of television conspires to make you choose wrong. Now, at least, you can't say you were never told.
