Showrunners on Casting Obsessions and the Weight of Being Number One

Katori Hall, creator and showrunner of "P-Valley," spent her hiatus between seasons earning a pilot's license. "Only a showrunner would relax by getting their pilot's license," Elizabeth Meriwether, creator of "Furious," quipped at Variety's annual Night in the Writers' Room: Awards Season Edition.

Seven drama creators shared the stage, and most agreed on one pleasure: landing the actor you wrote the role for after a long pursuit. Hall and Meriwether credit their theater backgrounds for the habit of falling hard for performers.

"Am I an actor whore?" Hall joked. "I guess I am. Just beautiful performers that you want to be a part of your tribe, and you want to grow with them and give them an opportunity to grow and give them really amazing work."

Which actors did they fight for?

The shared answer for Hall and Malcolm Spellman, creator and writer of "The Drop: A Snowfall Saga," was Gail Bean. "She is so good at embodying that same spirit that she sort of just saved the country," Spellman said. "She really brings that indomitableness to it."

Meriwether's chase was Steve Way. She spotted him on a panel about caretaking in television, where his whole bit was that he had no work and couldn't pay for his wheelchair. "I was in the writers' room for 'Furious,' like, 'I can give him work,'" she said. Way then slowly revealed details of his life in his wheelchair, which Meriwether folded into his role as Alden.

Brad Caleb Kane, showrunner of "Crystal Lake," wanted one name only: Linda Cardellini. "They sent me lists of people, and I said, 'The only one I want for this is Linda Cardellini because as we write these scripts, I see her. I want her and I want to write to her strengths going forward,'" Kane said. Cardellini signed on after a five-and-a-half-hour conversation about the character.

Chris Mundy, creator of "Lanterns," shapes both characters and his writers' room around the people in it. "We'd be doing a really bad job if we weren't taking the things they're bringing and incorporating them and growing," Mundy said.

What changes when you're number one?

The final say, mostly, plus the pressure that comes with it. "It's a very sobering experience when you realize you're number one," said Ben Watkins, creator of "The Greatest." "The amount of pressure that you feel from deadlines or budgets or just being in that seat and having everybody saying, 'Where are we going?' There is some pressure, and it will change you and I think it's really important to acknowledge that."

Kane framed leadership as captaincy with a catch — hire people with better ideas than yours. "Good leadership is obviously you're the captain of the ship, and people are looking at you to steer the story to its ultimate destination, but if you're smart enough to hire people who have really good ideas and they almost inevitably are going to have some ideas that are better than yours, that's what makes it a collective and a room," he said, adding that putting your ego aside is part of the skill set.

Hall promised herself a different room back when she was a staff writer. "As I moved up and grew into my showrunnern-ess, I always felt that everyone's voice was equal. I wanted the staff writer on my show to feel as if they could speak, not as much as me, but maybe as much as the co-EP," she said.

Meriwether skipped the staff-writer route entirely, becoming a showrunner at 29. The grind of network television cost her, literally, her voice. "I lost my voice, and I went to the doctor and the doctor was like, 'Have you been drinking a lot of coffee and or trying to sound authoritative?' I was like, 'Yes, both of those' and then I twinkled that experience into 'The Dropout,'" she said.

Watkins and Spellman, meanwhile, started out in Hollywood together and reunited on the panel 40 years later. "Our journey is so intertwined," Spellman said. "We've handed our pilots back and forth to each other, our wives are tight, the struggle was so real for us for so fucking long, so it means a lot."

The panel's quiet takeaway: the writers' room may be collaborative, but the seat at the top still changes whoever sits in it.