I’ve found this aspect confusing trying to rationalise how a show can have a consistent theme to tell a story whilst having many different directors throughout a season, but it seems to be quite common practice while filming.
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Because they are filming all episodes at the same time. And a director can only do one episode at a time. The story is done by the screen writers in advance so it is consistent. This way you can produce an episode much faster and can release a new season every year. If you do one episode after the other you will take much longer and it also will cost more in staff and actor salaries.
So you can film a lot of them in a row. It takes longer than 1 week to produce an episode of a show. So while one director is actually filming one episode, you can have another director already working on the next one coming down the pipe.
The “consistency” is going to be provided by the show runner and their team of writers, sometimes in the form of what’s known as a “bible” that contains important information about the setting, plot, and characters that should remain consistent through the episodes.
A movie and a TV show are run quite differently.
In a movie, the producers are mainly there as investors into the project, and the directors are in full control of the creative process. But even then, there are examples of movies where there is someone who has creative control above directors. For example, the Marvel movies have Kevin Feige as executive producer, and he controls the creative process across the series of movies.
Single episodes of a TV show can have their own director, but that director is only responsible for the direction in that single episode. The continuous direction across all episodes is at the direction of the show runner. Things that affect multiple episodes, such as character traits/evolution, are going to be at the discretion of the showrunner.
Directors aren’t nearly as important to establishing the overall vision of a TV show as they are with movies. In TV shows, the showrunner and/or producers are the ones that are overseeing everything, ensuring that there’s cohesion between episodes and that the season’s narrative is being followed.
Most TV shows are filmed at a pace of one episode per week, but there’s more than a week’s worth of work to be done for each episode, and the director has to oversee all of it. For any given episode, there might be a week of pre-production, where the director needs to plan each scene, scout locations, oversee props, wardrobe, and sets, etc, followed by a week of shooting, followed by a week of post-production where all of the shots are edited together.
So during one week of a production season of a TV show, you might have one director that’s overseeing the editing for episode 4, you have another director that’s shooting the scenes for episode 5, and you have a third director that’s scouting locations for episode 6.
You don’t want the director of the episode you’re filling this week worrying about the episode that’s going to be filmed next week or working with the editors on what was filmed the week prior.
Things need to be worked on in parallel. It’s the job of the show runner(s) to make sure the look and feel of a show stays consistent episode to episode
A TV show or a movie goes through several group of people, most of them only work on the project for a period of time. You have pre-production where you have the writer, casting, scouting locations, preparing any sets and costume, etc. Then you have the actual filming, and now you will have actors, cameraman, electrician, etc. Finally you have post production where you will have editor, music added, etc.
But even if the product (tv show or movie) go through different group of people, you need a unified vision for it, someone in charge from throughout the whole project to keep a sense of direction. This is where the director come in.
So the director work with the pre-production group, then with the production group, then the post-production group. In a movie, after a group is finished, they start working on other projects while work continue on the movie by other people.
During a TV show they need to have a chain. So for example while episode 1 is in post-production with Director A, episode 2 is in filming with Director B, and episode 1 is in pre-production with Director C. Then when the post production is done on episode 1, Director A will start pre-production on episode 4.
That’s not exactly how it work, depending on the TV show some phase can be longer or shorter, some work also can required less work as the show progress so some phase can be shorter and longer. So that’s why the number of director will vary throughout the show and not be a simply 3 people rotation. Also, sometime episode might not be done in order.
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