15. Mitch Hurwitz
Major Shows: “Arrested Development,” “Lady Dynamite”
It can hardly be a disappointment to Hurwitz that as of now, his most famous legacy project is the brilliant, unequalled “Arrested Development,” which he created, ran and wrote for throughout its initial three-season run on the Fox Network, and during its welcome but off-the-boil, long-after-the-fact fourth-season revival on Netflix in 2013. Hurwitz and the entire cast are apparently primed for a fifth season, with producer Brian Grazer saying as recently as January 2017 that it could film this year, but there’s no confirmation as yet. Still, if you’re jonesing for a Hurwitz fix, we heartily recommend checking out the even-more-batshit “Lady Dynamite,” a co-creation with Pam Brady, starring and loosely based on the life of Maria Bamford. Postmodern, meta-textual, referential and populated with some of the most random cameos and side characters you can imagine, it’s also a brilliantly moving study of mental instability and depression that Netflix renewed for season two last year.
14. Matthew Weiner
Major Shows: “Mad Men”
Having cut his writing and producing teeth on no less a foundational Peak TV text than “The Sopranos,” Matthew Weiner went on to create the inspiration for a thousand theme office Christmas parties with AMC‘s “Mad Men,” his impeccably slick mordantly amoral drama about Madison Avenue advertising execs in the 1960s and ’70s. Making stars of half the cast (and an icon of urbane, whiskey-swilling, suit wearing masculinity in Jon Hamm‘s Don Draper), for all the surface pleasures of costume, set design and cinematography (it really was one of the most beautiful shows ever), over the course of its seven seasons it also elegantly mined the fault lines of class, sex and race in 20th-century America in a thrillingly meticulous and intelligent manner. That sober, stylish sensibility is what has us agog for “The Romanoffs,” the Amazon show that Weiner has in the pipeline detailing the ill-fated last first family of Imperial Russia. Bring it.
13. Jonathan Nolan
Major Shows: “Person Of Interest,” “Westworld”
Despite an enviable writing career co-authoring screenplays like “Memento,” the “Dark Knight” trilogy and “Interstellar” with his brother Christopher, until recently there might have been the slight sense that Jonathan Nolan was a little in his director brother’s (admitted immense) shadow. CBS paranoia drama “Person Of Interest,” which he created, wrote for and ran (alongside co-showrunner Greg Plageman), played for five seasons without really attaining the kind of breakout success he might have hoped for, and for a long time his expensive and ambitious “Westworld” TV remake for HBO (which he co-created with Lisa Joy) seemed bedeviled with delays and rumors of on-set problems. All that was quickly forgotten, however, when “Westworld” debuted to huge fanfare, acclaim and viewership numbers (it’s the most-watched first season on HBO ever), and Nolan’s brand of cerebral, stylized, tricksy storytelling now seems as established on the small screen as his brother’s is on the big screen.
12. Jenji Kohan
Major Shows: “Weeds” “Orange Is The New Black”
Her utterly terrific women’s-prison-set Netflix show “Orange Is The New Black” tends to be the show that, for the diversity of its cast, and its recklessly iconoclastic take on gender and sexuality, gets the headlines these days — sometimes even unwanted headlines, like this week when some little twerp pirated and ransomed the first 10 episodes of season 5 and then uploaded them in advance of the proposed June airdate when Netflix refused to participate in the shakedown. But we should also regularly pour one out for Showtime‘s “Weeds,” which has many of the positive attributes that “OINTB” displays in such abundance, especially a female antihero lead, which was a rarity back in 2005 when it debuted. Kohan has such a sharp, authentic eye for the telling character detail, and such a vibrant, witty, spiky tone of voice that the hallmark of her auteurism, if she has one, might just be that you’re so busy being entertained that the subversion and transgression that is part of her shows’ DNA often doesn’t strike you until later.
11. David Benioff & DB Weiss
Major Shows: “Game Of Thrones”
When a show reaches the level of cultural penetration that David Benioff and DB Weiss’ adaptation of George RR Martin‘s “Song Of Fire And Ice” series has, it seems, from the outside at least, less like a career stepping stone than a lifestyle choice. For the past seven years, and for 60 episodes (42 of which the co-creators and co-showrunners also co-wrote), the masterminds behind this blockbuster have had nothing else on their CVs except “Game Of Thrones.” Episode to episode, the show can of course vary, and even season to season, but overall it’s more remarkable for its consistency than anything else, though, as they ramp up to the big finale (July’s season 7 will be the penultimate one), we have to hope for even more lavish, gory and shocking spectacle. After 2018, honestly, it’s anyone’s guess what Benioff and Weiss will do, separately or together, but our guess would be “anything they damn well want to” with no shortage of channels willing to pick up the tab.
10. Shonda Rhimes
Major Shows: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice,” “Scandal”
It’s appropriate that Rhimes’ production company, which in addition to the titles above also encompasses shows she develops and executive-produces such as ABC‘s “How To Get Away With Murder” and “The Catch,” the short-lived “Off The Map” as well as her movie producing projects, is called ShondaLand. Not only is it a whole country unto itself, with an understanding with ABC Thursday night programming, but the shows she promotes also bear her signature style. Often they’re riffs on the professional procedural drama, whether set in a hospital, a law school, a political “fixer” firm or a private investigator’s office, usually with a dash of soap — sex, romance, or intrigue — to lather up interest. But they also tend to be strongly female-focused and diversely cast, with her audience, also made up largely of women, regularly delivering viewership figures north of 10m per episode. The shows that she herself creates and writes on, such as “Scandal,” also show her uncanny knack for moreish, addictive, twisty storytelling that’s smart and stylish enough to take the guilt out of “guilty pleasure.” It’s Shonda-land, and we all just live in it.
9. Vince Gilligan
Major Shows: “The Lone Gunmen,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”
Gilligan got his start when a spec script he’d written for “The X-Files” got him hired onto the Fox show, where he went on to write 29 other episodes, as well as work his way into executive-producer and producer roles. And while his first creator credit was for short lived ‘”X-Files’ spinoff “The Lone Gunmen,” which he developed with co-creators Chris Carter, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz, it suggests that already the tightly plotted, blackly comic, ironic vibe of “The X-Files” would continue to be elements of his writing style. And so it proved with “Breaking Bad,” a show he pitched to AMC on the promise that it would show the hero becoming the villain, and that gradually built up from a low base to a massive, devoted audience who saw it as the natural heir to the muscular prestige HBO shows of old. “Breaking Bad,” which Gilligan ran throughout its give seasons, ended in 2013, and while spin-off prequel show “Better Call Saul,” also a Gilligan creation, has not yet attained the same level of diehard fandom, it’s been universally praised by critics as another brilliantly conceived morality play disguised as a portrait of growing immorality.
8. Tina Fey
Major Shows: “30 Rock,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”
It’s impossible not to think of Tina Fey as the boss of her own TV show: seven seasons of watching her play one on NBC‘s “30 Rock,” the best network comedy of our time, has taken care of that. In fact, Fey is so associated with alter ego/surrogate Liz Lemon, who was inspired by her years as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” that, sacrilegious though it sounds, we were actually unsure as to what she might do after that show, with its strong inspired-by-experience elements. Oh, us of so little faith! Fey’s return to the showrunning fray with “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which she co-created with collaborator Robert Carlock, is an absolute triumph, a weirdly premised, off-balance mix of hot-pink optimism and scathing observation, dotted with breakout star performances and really, really good jokes. We’ll never doubt her again.
7. Damon Lindelof
Major Shows: “Lost,” “The Leftovers”
While Lindelof was just one of three co-creators of cultural phenomenon “Lost” (J.J. Abrams and Jeffrey Lieber share the credit), his status as showrunner (alongside Carlton Cuse) and writer or co-writer of over 40 episodes, as well as his pioneering way of interacting with and responding to fans while the show aired, all put him as the show’s main creative driving force. But it took a while for him to get back in the TV saddle after “Lost” ended. He had several movie credits, but nothing on the small screen until HBO‘s “The Leftovers” came along. The show, which he co-created with the source novel’s writer Tom Perrotta and all but a handful of whose episodes he gets a writing credit on, too, has quietly built, over just three seasons (the third and final is airing now) into a staggeringly complex and beautifully strange thing, constantly demonstrating Lindelof’s changing approach to the central tenet of his TV auteur style: mystery.
6. Donald Glover
Major Shows: “Atlanta”
We’re primarily a movie site, in case you hadn’t noticed, and so it feels a little disloyal to be hoping that Glover gets through playing Lando Calrissian in the Han Solo film, and voicing Simba in “The Lion King” and suchlike, and can get back to penning season 2 of “Atlanta,” 2016’s best TV show. Of course, we had high expectations for the first TV show from the absurdly talented multi-hyphenate (actor-musician-comedian-writer-producer-director-songwriter), but “Atlanta” exceeded them all: it’s an instant classic that is almost the definition of auteurist in how it simply could not have come from anyone else. Somehow, despite being so intimate in scale (a whole show can go by that’s just about Glover’s character trying to get his jacket back), “Atlanta” feels so much bigger than itself: it feels generational and gently revolutionary. And if it seems early to be dubbing Glover a TV auteur, we shouldn’t forget that his career as a writer long predates his career-making stint on “Community“: he was a writer on “30 Rock” for two years, meaning his TV godparents, if there are such things, are listmates Tina Fey and Dan Harmon.