Disney+ Once Avoided Traditional Showrunners — Hiring ‘Lost’ Vet Carlton Cuse for a New ‘Star Wars’ Show Just Ended That Era

When Disney+ launched, Disney made almost a point that its shows were not traditional TV series — they certainly weren't steered by veteran showrunners.

One bit of hiring for Disney+ seems to all but signal the end of the platform’s initial ethos when it came to staffing its shows.

Longtime TV veteran Carlton Cuse, best known for his years showrunning “Lost” alongside Damon Lindelof, will be showrunning a new “Star Wars” series alongside his son Nick Cuse, according to The InSneider. The elder Cuse has been creating shows since “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.” in 1993, going on to create “Nash Bridges,” “Martial Law,” and “Bates Motel” in addition to his acclaimed work on “Lost.”

Disney+ has not returned IndieWire’s request for comment.

It seems likely that this new “Star Wars” series, like every “Star Wars” series to date, would stream on Disney+. At its launch in 2019, and for several years thereafter there seemed to be a desire to avoid traditional TV showrunners at the streamer.

“The Mandalorian,” the platform’s launch series, was showrun by Jon Favreau, who had never had experience showrunning a series at all (though he had had significant experience as a TV director). Same for the first Marvel Disney+ series, “WandaVision” showrun by Jac Schaeffer, who had never even written for television before. Those two case studies worked out well, and seemed to fit a very Bob Chapek-era way of Disney doing business: It didn’t matter whether these were movies or TV shows — they were content that could be packaged up and distributed on a particular platform per the directive of Chapek’s distribution group. If anything, hiring showrunners with more movie experience than TV experience meant that even these episodic series should be considered on the same level as movies, despite having lower budgets and being told in weekly installments. These shows were premium events that should be considered on the same level as anything else in the “Star Wars” franchise or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Except was Schaeffer ever actually called “showrunner” even if she functionally held that role on the production? Instead, as Variety noted at the time, “head writer” was the preferred parlance. It’s been believed at times that the word “showrunner” has been all but banned for Disney+’s MCU shows, either to suggest that these series are interchangeable with the movies (or perhaps as an inadvertent acknowledgment that the movies have all been episodes in on big TV show themselves). Regardless of the term “showrunner” being used or not, much of the top talent for these shows had little TV background. It worked for “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision,” and paid even more dividends with “Andor,” where mastermind Tony Gilroy had only previously served as a consulting producer on “House of Cards.”

But for some other Disney+ shows along the way, the results were less successful. By July 2021, IndieWire openly asked “What does the MCU have against showrunners?” As time went on, lumping the MCU TV and movies into the same pipeline continued to show more strain — and may have led to the departure of longtime MCU production executive Victoria Alonso.

For some time it’s seemed like Disney+ has been heading toward a more traditional showrunner model. The increasing role of Dave Filoni with the “Star Wars” TV shows indicated as much — he’d been a traditional showrunner for the franchise since the launch of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” in 2008. So did “Russian Doll” creator Leslye Headland being hired to steer “The Acolyte.” The MCU side has been heading in that direction as well, with “12 Monkeys” and longtime “Star Trek” producer Terry Matalas coming onboard as showrunner of “Vision Quest” following was widely hailed work showrunning the final season of “Star Trek: Picard.”

Cuse is the biggest sign yet that Disney+ executives are really looking at established TV vets to steer their shows, not trying to blend movies and TV. Episodic series deserves specialists in that format, and it seems Disney now understands that.