Conversations with Women Showrunners

Featuring over forty interviews with America’s leading showrunners, this book provides unique perspectives and insights into the TV industry, and demystifies the craft, backbone, skill, strategies, challenges, and persistence it takes to succeed in Hollywood and internationally.

Marygrace O’Shea’s conversations with women showrunners are part master craft lesson, part backstage pass, part career guide from the geniuses who create the best TV. The book shines a light on what it truly means to be a showrunner working in the industry today, and reveals how to navigate a career and a future in the global marketplace. Interviews include Angela Kang (The Walking Dead), Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Barbara Hall (Madam Secretary), Charlotte Brown (Rhoda), Chris Nee (Doc McStuffins), Elizabeth Berger (This is Us), Gloria Calderón Kellett (One Day at a Time), Ilene Chaiken (The L Word), Liz Meriwether (The New Girl, The Dropout), Liz Tigelaar (Tiny Beautiful Things, Little Fires Everywhere), Marta Kauffman (Friends, Grace and Frankie), Tracy Oliver (Harlem, Awkward Black Girl), Sierra Teller Ornelas (Rutherford Falls), and many more.

Ideal for professional and aspiring television writers, as well as students of screenwriting, film and TV, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the art, craft and business of creating television.

Marygrace O’Shea is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Undergraduate Film and Television Department. She has also taught at Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program, has been a Visiting Professor of the Arts at Sarah Lawrence, an instructor at the Media Arts and Technology Department at BMCC, and has also led master classes for students from La Femis. She has worked on shows for ABC, PBS, NBC, HBO, and FOX including Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Law and Order: SVU, HBO’s In Treatment. She is an active member of the WGA East.