the cult of the "showrunner"

"Since the late 1990s, cable television has yielded up a fresh batch of the sort of selfish, morose, profane, scheming, sometimes violent, sometimes seriously ridiculous male characters we used to have to seek out in movies by Sam Peckinpah and David Fincher, in novels by Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy, or in the poetry of John Berryman and Frederick Seidel. Grunge music for the eyes, this new brand of TV offered an escape valve for the pent-up anger and frustration of many real-life producers, writers, and directors who were suddenly freed from the constraints of network sitcoms and genre dramas.

     It is from this cohort that Brett Martin pulls in Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad' (The Penguin Press, $28), a vastly entertaining and insightful look at the creators of some of the most highly esteemed recent television series. Not merely a collection of profiles of, among others, David Chase (The Sopranos), Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), David Simon (The Wire), David Milch (Deadwood), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), Difficult Men lays out a history of the TV industry from the late 1990s to the present, demonstrating how a confluence of pay- and basic-cable broadcasting philosophy, new profit paradigms, and the rise of the cult of the 'showrunner' (i.e., the producer given the most credit for the guiding aesthetic of a series) has reshaped the business, together with a boom in online fan commentary. Along the way, Martin also carefully explains just how all these forces combined to yield both high-quality TV and the enabling of some mighty big, needy, neurotic egos."
— Ken Tucker, Bookforum
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“[...] let the soda crackers be soda crackers” [which] “are mysterious enough as it is.” — Saul Bellow

For the nineteenth time in nineteen years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to a writer outside of the US. As with most people in this country, the members of Still Eating Oranges were previously unfamiliar with the work of Chinese author Mo Yan. If he is as talented as last year’s winner, Tomas Tranströmer, then we have reason to be excited. As usual, though, a certain group (comprised mostly of Americans) has come out to criticize the Nobel committee for snubbing Cormac McCarthy or Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth. Those familiar with this annual tradition will remember that Roth, in particular, has become the cause célèbre for angry American pundits. The US has not had a laureate since Toni Morrison, the logic goes; and so there must be bias afoot. […]

     A certain literary culture dominates contemporary American schools and publications. In the past, we have considered a few of the effects—brutish, ironic and conflict-based stories—of this establishment. Its heroes and models are the world’s Roths, Raymond Carvers, John Updikes and Jonathan Franzens; its laws are 'subtext over surface,' 'sincerity kills' and 'realism trumps exaggeration.' It began to take off in and around the 1950s, popularized by the writing of Norman Mailer, Roth and others. It took root irrevocably in the following decades. This coincided with the rise of ever-more-unavoidable, ever-more-strict MFA programs and writers’ workshops, which indoctrinated at least two generations of writers into the same mentality.
     Today, peer pressure, school curricula, editorial taste and online writing guides ensure that new American writers all feed from the same trough."
— still eating oranges
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