The masterminds behind TV’s biggest hits of the season revealed their secrets to beating the sophomore slump and blending genres as they convened at TheWrap’s Showrunners and Creators of Emmy Season Breakfast 2026. Oh, and AI? It can’t hold a candle to what writers do every day.
The Los Angeles event kicked off with an introduction from Kathy Bates, who shouted out showrunners for carrying their vision “with them in their bones” and applauded “Matlock” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman, recognized at the annual event for the second consecutive year, for creating “an environment where you feel supported, so you can dig deep to discover the characters she’s dreamed up.”
Snyder Urman took the stage alongside creators from new series including “Widow’s Bay,” “The Testaments” and “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” for a candid panel conversation — moderated by TheWrap’s Executive Awards Editor Steve Poind — about the unique challenges that come with being the brains behind the whole operation.
While the sophomore slump is sometimes inevitable, “The Paper” showrunner Michael Koman revealed that he’s found the upcoming second season “most enjoyable, because the track has been laid and we’ve done [the] groundwork, so all of a sudden you can just explore jokes and individual stories.”
Eric Ledgin, who wrapped up “St. Denis Medical” in Season 2 this spring, shared Koman’s sentiment of having already established the show’s tone, but noted the daunting task of landing the plane you asked to fly. Referencing Bates’ “Misery,” Ledgin joked, “I wrote something out of a place of joy, and as a result, I feel like I am being held captive and tortured.”
As “Matlock” approches Season 3, however, Snyder Urman feels ready to start anew as she crafts a new central mystery for when the CBS drama returns in 2027. That meant splitting her attention both on landing the plane to close out Season 2 — “we blew up the law firm [and] we arrest everyone,” she joked — while giving enough breadcrumbs “so that we could redefine and get new energy and get a brand new start in the third season.”
The effort to keep things fresh extends to “Abbott Elementary” co-showrunners Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, who despite expanding the show’s scope every year, said they felt “really ambitious” with Season 5 filming at a Phillies game, as well as crafting a three-episode arc in a “dead mall.”
“We try to give you a little more dimension every single year, so that the audience feels like the show is still growing and not getting stale. That’s a real testament to what Quinta has built with that show, that there are characters she’s built that can do that,” Halpern said.
While long-running network series clearly define themselves into the comedy or drama buckets, there’s a crop of streaming shows that blend genres, like horror-comedy “Widow’s Bay,” mystery-comedies “The ‘Burbs” and “Ponies” and even dramedy “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.” With “Ponies,” creator Susanna Fogel recalled comparing the tone in a meeting to explaining why a joke is funny — “it’s impossible to do it well” — the key comes in allowing for those moments of discovery on set.
“We were able to have a dynamic process of letting it evolve while we’re still there shooting it,” Fogel said, with series showrunner David Iserson adding, “Our job is that you know what [the tone] is, and you know what feels right … and it’s impossible to explain. We just have to see it.”
“Widow’s Bay” creator Katie Dippold — whose series garnered much praise from her fellow honorees and other attendees at the event Thursday — described the Apple TV show’s strict tonal line as “the total tightrope between the horror and comedy.”
“It felt like if you had one false moment, or if you undercut the horror, the show would just feel dead,” she said. “It just felt very easy to fall off the rails completely.”
It’s a lofty task for first-time showrunners like Dippold or Celeste Hughey, who underscored the importance of trusting herself as she helmed the Keke Palmer-led “The ‘Burbs.”
“As everyone is learning to trust you, finding that trust in myself was the most important thing — that I knew the voice and the tone and the show, and what story I wanted to tell,” she said.
While Hughey applauded the original 1989 film for giving her Peacock series a foundation, she noted she wanted to draw from her own childhood and refresh the story as she depicted an outsider “coming into a predominantly white world and finding out what that feels like.”
Today’s changing world and political climate also served as a foundation for “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” which co-showrunner Eva Anderson said leaned on the expertise of sex workers and actress Lindsey Normington to construct their depiction of OnlyFans, as well as, of course, “The Handmaid’s Tale” spinoff “The Testaments.”
“Margaret Atwood wrote a book that’s always prescient,” “Testaments” showrunner Bruce Miller said, noting he first read “The Handmaid’s Tale” in college in the ’80s, but “now this is exactly the time that this book is the most prescient.”
“You’re supposed to be relevant … We’re all shooting for people to have a conversation that they’re tying to the world now,” he said.
That world now includes AI, which has been increasingly depicted on screen in “Abbott Elementary,” “Matlock” and other series — but that doesn’t mean TV writers are warming to it anytime soon.
“If it can solve global warming, it could have my job,” Miller joked. “I mean, it seems like the last thing we should be talking about [is] the arts with AI.”
Dippold agreed, saying, “It’s so funny how the topic of AI is so closely tied to being screenwriters … Please solve cancer, please do that.”
“Even if AI is able to write as well as some people, we shouldn’t let it … We should legally prevent it from doing that,” “The Paper” co-creator Greg Daniels said. “AI might be able to do our first jobs better than we did it, but … you don’t eventually get to a place where you develop a voice and develop the skills to do this at a level higher than AI if you never had the opportunity to start and learn from all the crew and the other people that you work with in this very collaborative business.”
Most showrunners don’t even think AI could find the unique perspective that their peers have when it comes to their projects, with Halpern noting, “There have been shows about teachers, but they didn’t have the POV that Quinta Brunson had for the show, and you’re watching that show because of that POV.”
“AI hasn’t had their heart broken, hasn’t lost a father, hasn’t sat awkwardly in silence,” Hughey added. “So I have to believe as well that we’ll have the jobs, because we have those ideas.”
Sponsors of TheWrap’s Showrunners and Creators of Emmy Season Breakfast 2026 include Warner Bros. Television Group, Threads, the event’s official social media sponsor, and Ketel One Vodka, alongside table partners Apple TV, Disney, Oklahoma Department of Commerce, Universal Studio Group and WME.
