Showrunner, producer, executive producer, director? What do they all do? Because they all sound like the personne in charge to me.
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For a TV show, the showrunner is usually credited as “Executive Producer.” There’s no “showrunner” credit in any TV show – though they might also get “created by” or something similar if they were also the creator. Executive Producers in TV can mean a wide variety of things – it applies to the showrunner, it applies to studio execs who may not have been directly involved. Showrunners are, typically, the last word in creative control. They assign writers, they’re involved in casting choices, they make the big creative choices and delegate smaller ones to the other positions.
Director in TV is usually different than it is in film. For films, the director is usually the top of the creative food chain, and they have control over the whole thing. In TV, directors usually only direct an episode, and then go off to do something else (or they may come back for a future episode here and there). They’re in charge on set for the filming of that episode, but they’re still below the showrunner in terms of creative control. For shows, since the showrunner is often involved in work for other episodes (editing the ones already filmed, writing or planning the ones that haven’t been filmed yet, etc) the director is hired to be on set for their specific episode(s), to keep the process moving and make things easier on the showrunner.
Each job can look a lot different depending on a lot of factors, but in general it’s like this:
Showrunner: creator of the show. biggest boss.
Director: person who tells actors what to do. boss of all the crew.
Producer: helps director get things done.
Executive producer: pays for everything.
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