Showrunner Transcript: Carter Bays & Craig Thomas (“How I Met Your Mother”)

In conjunction with the annual broadcast network upfronts, New York magazine is running a series called “Showrunner Transcripts.” We will feature one each day for the next two weeks on GITS. What’s a showrunner? For a primer, you can go here to Wikipedia. The short answer: “The person who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of a television series.” It’s more than just managing a series. Someone has to guarantee to a network they can deliver 12, 22, or however many episodes for which the series is contracted. That’s the bottom line of a showrunner’s reality.

Today: Carter Bays and Craig Thomas (“How I Met Your Mother”)

What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned, and from who?

Bays: Craig and I were hired three months out of college to write for The Late Show With David Letterman, which turned out to be a four-and-a-half-year graduate degree in comedy writing. When one of David Letterman’s writers pitches a joke he doesn’t like, he has this great way of saying no: He says “No.” It’s kind of awesome. There’s no hard feelings behind it — there’s just a subjectivity you have to embrace when it’s your job to shape the tone of the show. Learning to say “no” politely but decisively is a crucial part of that.

Craig Thomas: Delegate. Don’t do every little thing yourself. Carter and I learned that valuable lesson from these total dumbasses named “First Season Us.”

Do you have a showrunner philosophy?

Thomas: Care deeply about your characters, so deeply that you almost delude yourself into thinking that they’re real human beings and quite possibly your best friends in the world. If you don’t care about the characters that much, how can you expect an audience to? You can be the funniest show of all time, but it’s hard to last years on TV without your audience really caring about these people.

Bays: Yes. It’s “Don’t be an asshole.” In fact, that’s maybe setting the bar too low. When I think of how our director, Pam Fryman, runs her set, I would amend “Don’t be an asshole” to be “Don’t be anything less than delightful.” If you can’t live up to that even in the face of all the stress this job throws at you, you need to quit and let someone else do it.

For more of the article, go here.