The short biographies you’ll read about Hitchcock, Kurosawa and Welles on any list of the greatest directors of all time are earned, but they only tell half of the story.
Directors are the No. 1 decision-maker on any film set, while screenwriters serve as supporting collaborators, shifting their dialogue to the tune of their directors’ vision. The opposite is true in television, where writers take charge and directors hand off their duties as often as every week. Those opposing dynamics make sense: As characters grow and change across seasons and years, it’s a showrunner who has the power to keep a show’s identity cohesive.
At the same time, the biggest titles in TV history, as documented in this week’s special 100 Greatest Shows of All Time issue (read the full list here and check out all our special features here), have a look and feel that matches and elevates the lines spoken, and many of those shows relied on the same directors episode after episode. These were craftspeople who could step into a production with an existing culture, chameleon to their showrunners’ needs and still manage to leave their own mark. TV directing is a different art than that of Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick. And it deserves its own hall of fame.
Thomas Schlamme
Thomas Schlamme upended the rhythm of workplace-set television for good when he developed the “walk and talk” on “The West Wing.” The fluid and dynamic technique that he refined and popularized helped to put conversations in motion. And Schlamme’s direction added the pace necessary to drive home Aaron Sorkin’s sharp dialogue, as the characters strode through the White House, studding their repartee with thoughtfully placed, perfectly timed pauses.
Paris Barclay
Paris Barclay started as a music-video director for artists ranging from Bob Dylan to LL Cool J. But his switch to TV in the ’90s saw him quickly becoming an Emmy favorite, with nominations for “NYPD Blue” (he won twice) and later “The West Wing,” “Glee” and “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Barclay has amassed a filmography of hundreds of episodes of television spanning genres, tones and visual modes, earning him fame not just for his versatility but for his ability to chameleonically take on a project’s established style while smoothing out the kinks that existed before he arrived.
Randall Einhorn
Randall Einhorn learned how to move a camera through the most outrageous of situations while coming up as a camera operator, cinematographer and director on reality-competition series like “Survivor” and “Fear Factor.” Then “The Office” had him bring that dynamic visual style to gray, fluorescent-lit Scranton, Pa., making him a key architect of 21st-century TV comedy in the process. Einhorn’s erratic handheld cinematography and swift pans to stony reaction shots became ingrained in the DNA of the mockumentaries that followed. Some, like “Parks and Recreation” and “Abbott Elementary,” have used his talents; others, like “Modern Family” and “American Vandal,” simply bear his influence.
“ER’s” revolutionary approach from the very beginning — its funneling of the pace of the emergency-hospital environment directly into America’s living rooms — was created in large part by Mimi Leder. As a director, Leder kept up almost-unbearable tension by orchestrating Steadicam shots that went on for minutes without cutting. Her approach paid off especially in “Love’s Labor Lost,” the tragic Season 1 episode about a pregnant woman’s misdiagnosed eclampsia, which launched her career and sent her and her Steadicam to acclaim on “The Leftovers,” “The Morning Show” and several movies.
Beth McCarthy-Miller
“Saturday Night Live” is famous for its organized chaos — and one of the most prolific organizers of that chaos was Beth McCarthy-Miller, who directed the show from 1995 to 2006. She updated the look and feel of “SNL” at the turn of the millennium, through some of its highest highs — the Tina Fey years, for example — and most difficult moments, like the first episode after 9/11. While she’s best known for her adept live directing, her résumé boasts more traditional comedies too, including “30 Rock,” “Modern Family” and “The Kominsky Method.”
Lesli Linka Glatter
Lesli Linka Glatter was a dancer and choreographer when she first stumbled behind a camera, studying directing solely out of desperation to tell the story of an old man she had befriended in Japan. That story became 1985’s “Tales of Meeting and Parting,” an Oscar-nominated short film, which eventually landed Glatter directing gigs on “Twin Peaks,” “Mad Men” and her best-known achievement, 25 episodes of “Homeland.” Glatter’s biggest strength is in directing action — born of the innate understanding of movement she developed in her dancing days, and the same sense of urgency that guided her to make that first short.
If Walter White (Bryan Cranston) had to be calculating in the building and maintaining of his drug empire, so too did Michelle MacLaren, “Breaking Bad’s” most prolific director. MacLaren crafted several of the show’s enduring scenes, from the meth-cooking supercut in Season 2 to the desert shootout a few episodes before the series finale, in the episode “To’hajiilee” (pictured above). She also pulled off similar highs and lows on spinoff “Better Call Saul” as well as “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead.”
James Burrows
The ’80s and ’90s were ruled by multi-camera comedies, many of which owed their success to James Burrows — not just as a figure of inspiration, but because he directed so many of them himself. Beginning his career with the likes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he established his style on “Taxi,” “Friends,” “Will & Grace” and especially “Cheers,” which he co-created. Across those titles, he became known for approaching multicams like theater pieces, often keeping his camera work simple, and instead cultivating relationships with actors to build strong physical comedy. (He became so legendary that he even played himself in an extended arc on “The Comeback.”)