 Internationally speaking, the one production process for TV series just doesn't exist. As it's impossible to give an insight into all worldwide production methods during this chapter or any, we have picked the US and German market to give just an example of how series are created and produced. Please, however, feel free to use the comment section below to share your own experiences, especially in huge important TV markets like The Aging, especially Bollywood and Latin and South American that we in Germany still know much too little of. Please really use it, put your information in, share it. Right now, to give an impression of how different production looks like for different formats on different continents, let's have a look at production specifics of US weeklies versus German daily, good times, bad times. In the US, a series, no matter whether serial or procedural, has its own show runner. I suppose the most basic explanation that you can say for what a show runner is is they are the person or the persons responsible for all areas of a television series, both creatively and logistically. What that really turns into, there's kind of an analogy I use, which is basically the show runners, the captain of the ship, and they've got a crew of anywhere between three and 500 people working for them, and each one of those people requires a certain amount of information from them on a daily basis in order to make things happen. So your job when you're sailing that ship, because there are all these other ships that you're racing against at the same time as you like, is to make sure that you steer it to safe harbor of renewal rather than crashing onto the rocks of cancellation. But it's a very, very challenging job. I don't think people, hopefully they will after seeing the film, get a much better understanding of how many levels are involved and what the job is. But I had a conversation once with James Duff, who was the creator on the showrunner on The Closer and also on the spin-off show, Major Crimes, and he was telling me, for each episode of a show that happens, the showrunner has to go to a production meeting, which is with the director and all the heads of staff, and the script is broken down into all the minor details, like everything, what costume is this person wearing, what glasses this person's looking, what camera are we shooting with, so on and so forth. And at the end of the meeting, he came out in his office, it was like a two-minute walk down the hall from where the meeting was, but it took him 40 minutes to get there, because everyone was coming out and going, Mr. Duff, I have one more question, I have one more question, I have one more question. And that's kind of what you spend your day doing as a showrunner is answering questions. And I think it's quite a shock for, because a lot of people I've spoken to are writers who've graduated to run in their own show, and it really is a shock to the system, because the thing they spend the least amount of doing, amount of time doing as a showrunner is writing. Everything else becomes just crazy important, excuse me. And there are things that they may never have encountered, budget meetings, casting sessions, network notes calls, which can be hugely challenging when you're starting off, especially at a pilot stage and in those first couple of episodes where you're building the world of the show. So yeah, it's a hugely challenging job. What do you think is the key to US TV that makes it so worldwide, accessible and valid in storytelling? There's a couple of things. I think audiences worldwide are pretty much indoctrinated is a very strong word, but there are a lot of their basic education in visual and storytelling comes from watching American films and TV series. American storytelling is profligate around the world, but there's almost nowhere that you can go that you can't turn on a TV and watch something. And there are also, I will certainly give them the credit for they basically have created that format. How you tell stories in that format is a creation of the American television system. I've heard a number of different people tell me a story that the whole concept of the writer's room was born with Woody Allen and a couple of the comedians in New York in the early 1960s. And you know, that became adopted as an industry standard very quickly when they saw how successful that was at generating ongoing stories and comedy. There's also the financial aspect, I guess. You know, an episode of network television, a show like Castle or Prison of Interest or something, their budgets are three, four, maybe up to five million an episode. That's very difficult for, you know, especially in Irish television, it's impossible for Irish broadcasters to compete with budgets like that. And budgets like that do allow you to really literally make a mini movie every week. There's a certain scale and a certain polish and finesse that you can achieve. Also think that they have, you know, fantastic writers. And the thing about it, I suppose, over there as well is there is a system, there is a channel for learning, really learning how to write for television to be, because it's quite a very, it is a very specific kind of way of doing things. And there is, you know, from university to some of the faculties to some of the awards and bursaries that people can win, studios like Warner Brothers and Fox and whatever have their own training programs while they'll bring in writers. Things like that certainly do not exist at all in Ireland. They're very, very rare in the UK. The UK operates quite a different system though as well in the sense that like, because they only produce normally anywhere between five to eight episodes of a show, one writer generally tends to be the person writing all of those shows or maybe two. There's a very limited number of shows that would employ a bigger writing staff than that. And even though they employ more writers, they don't have a writer's room. They don't use that system at all. So I think those are the contributing factors. And I mean, you know, Americans do it phenomenally well. And especially in the last 12 to 13 years, there's just been some absolutely amazing television made. You know, a lot of people talk about this is in the new Golden Age. And I would agree with that to a certain extent. You know, I mean, you really are a spark of choice now in how many good shows that you can, you can, there are too many good shows at this point in time. I actually, I can't keep up at one point last year. I think I was watching 47 different shows simultaneously. And you know, there is a point where your head just kind of explodes. But they're they are phenomenally good at what they do. And that's not to say like, I mean, there are some great British shows and certainly things are changing over there. Success of Broadchurch and Danton Abbey and shows like that, which are translating to American audience as well. You know, and I read a really interesting interview with Chris Chibnall, who is the showrunner, the creator of Broadchurch. And he was saying that he is now having everyone refer to him as the showrunner instead of the head writer. Because it allows him to win arguments that he wouldn't have been able to win before with the network. Because in some in some way the idea, the whole idea of a TV showrunner, because there's been so much publicity and interest in everything generated with these guys in the States, by osmosis, it is kind of filtering across the European TV landscape. I think people are latching onto it very much because I think they feel it empowers the writer in a much bigger way.