Press "Enter" to skip to content

Awesome: 5 Critically Adored TV Showrunners Describe Their Ideal Viewer

Every perfect show deserves a perfect viewer.

1. Vince Gilligan – Breaking Bad

“My ideal viewer is any man or woman who puts the program on mute and adds clever dialogue of their own. All of the actual dialogue we writers come up with is just filler. It’s the audience’s job to flesh out the plotlines.”

2. Barbara Hall – Madam Secretary

“It’s very simple, and yet no one does it. When the show says ‘Stay tuned’ before commercials, the viewer says ‘You as well.’ That’s all I want, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

3. John Riggi – The Larry Sanders Show

“I always said that the perfect Larry Sanders viewer didn’t need to be someone with an extremely firm grasp on pop culture or show business. They just needed to afford the monthly payments for HBO. That was really my only requirement.”

4. Hart Hanson – Bones

“Tall enough to see over the coffee table, but not so tall that they have to crawl on all fours just to get through the door. That’s just too tall in my book.”

5. Jill Soloway – Transparent

“My ideal viewer? It changes every day. Today, it’s a person who was born by C-section; tomorrow, it might be a very flat man who looks like he got smushed by a cement roller. I never know, and that’s what keeps making television so fresh and interesting to me.”

Brought to you by Totino’s