Emmy-Nominated Showrunners Share Key Lessons from Their Hit Series at Variety TV Fest: The Nominees (2024)

The Emmy-nominated showrunners from “Fallout,” “Slow Horses,” “Shogun” and “3 Body Problem” shared the lessons learned working on their earlier shows and what they hope to take forward.

“Shogun” co-creators, executive producers, and writers, Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks joined, “Slow Horses” writer and executive producer Will Smith,” “Fallout” showrunner, writer and executive producer Graham Wagner, and “3 Body Problem” showrunner, writer, executive producer, Alexander Woo for a lively conversation with artisans editor Jazz Tangcay celebrating their recent Emmy nominations and lifting the veil on the early starts in their career.

Smith is entering his fifth season working on “Slow Horses” with Gary Oldman, the spy thriller based on the novels by Mick Heron, and says he fell in love with how Heron had crafted multi-dimensional characters on the page. And keeping that narrative was integral to the adaptation of the TV series.

When asked how long he hoped to go on with the show, Smith answered “Gary has said that he will play the character to the end of his career, which I can’t quite process.” He continued, “As long as we find new things to do with it and there’s an audience for it, and it can keep building without repeating. I think that’s the challenge we all grapple with returning series. It’s got to be the same but different. The audience wants to be satisfied with what they’re familiar with, but also you want to bring in new stuff, but you don’t want to jump that shark. So it’s just keeping that balance.”

His fellow showrunners found that a valuable lesson as they were ready to enter their sophom*ore seasons with their shows.

“Shogun” marked the first time executive producer and writer Kondo had been tasked with an epic series, working alongside Marks. “I had everything to learn because I had never done anything like this before.”

Kondo and Marks spent five years bringing the 10-part series to life, shifting production from Japan to British Columbia. Coming from the world of fiction, Kondo explained how she was used to working alone, “Shogun” was a collaborative effort and working with a team. “I was almost buzzing. It was so exciting to make something that I could never make on my own ever.” She added, “It reflects this collective effort. Going into it the second time around, I am inviting the chaos and excited for it.”

Marks added that they were back in the writer’s room for season two filled with the knowledge they gained from working on the first season. “It’s actually quite freeing when you come back to it again because you’ve made all the mistakes and now you can make new mistakes, but you don’t have to make those old mistakes again. We’re finding that there’s something quite liberating, too, about getting into the same characters again, the same worlds.”

Wagner is still in the very early stages of the second season prep but explained a lot of it was about having trust in department heads and creating the world of “Fallout” to spotlight their work. He said, “We start a writer’s room often like a band, but the whole production is an orchestra, and we’re actually finding ourselves writing for moments to feature Ramin Djwadi, our amazing composer, and creating space for those department heads to shine.”

Woo revealed he was working on seasons 2 and 3 of “3 Body Problem” simultaneously. “We’re having to envision the entire rest of the series all at once. So that is a significant challenge. We now have the luxury of knowing who our core cast is, what their strengths are, and how we can play to those strengths; that is a huge luxury.”

Woo added, “In terms of the dialogue and the story, that stuff I think we feel pretty comfortable about.”

His challenge is working with a show that was hundreds and thousands of years into the future and envisioning “what that’s going to look like in a way that’s not going to be silly.”

Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” is based on a novel by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin. Woo enjoyed the process of adapting it for audiences. “If you’re going to take on something, it has to be something you want to devote a long, long time to, and a lot of work, sweat and tears to.” He continued, “Something that presents itself as a challenge and presents itself as something that potentially you’ve never faced before is really appealing.”

The appeal of adapting Prime Video’s “Fallout” was simple. He said, “If it’s not fun for me, it might not be fun for anybody else.”

Watch the video above.