The findings are presented in three content areas. The first two preliminary sections explain the premise that television production is a collaborative process, and show the main contributions about film authorship made by French critics and North American theorists. The third part analyses and studies the application of the auteur theory to television media, highlighting the authorship dynamics assigned to the executive producer as the head of the fiction TV series.

3. Results

3.1. Television production as a collaborative process

Audiovisual production involves a collaborative process where different professionals, together with the equipment and the financial support act. It is collective creativity, which implies the interaction between various members of a team to achieve a single audiovisual work (Scott 1975). Following this statement, Santos-Fontenla (1974: 11) points out that ‘for a long time the possibility of the filmmaker to be considered as the “author” of their works has been denied because cinema is teamwork.’3 In other words, Sanderson (2005) notes that, notwithstanding film directors’ responsibility, the participation of a group of people prevents the allocation of film authorship to just one person.

With regards to television media specifically, the implication of different persons is even more marked in the fiction series production process. It makes the task of identifying its authorship difficult (Newcomb and Alley, 1983; Mittell, 2015; Jensen, 2017). Campbell and Reeves (1990: 8) express that ‘it’s a mistake to think of television authorship solely regarding the expression of an individual’s artistic vision.’ Likewise, Benshoff (2016) observes the complexity of distinguishing the author in these audiovisual projects, which are written by a group of screenwriters and directed by various directors, including TV channel managers, who are also influenced by the channel’s brand itself.

However, despite the criticism of individual authorship, this perspective does not impede the allocation of an authorial voice to an individual or a creative team, where the executive producer is included (Mann, 2009; Tous-Rovirosa, 2009; Blakey, 2017). In the cinematographic context, ‘it may be the case that in a film the producer has the right to be considered as much an author of the resulting work as the director or the screenwriter. However, it is understandable only if we consider the cinema as a creative and collective work, a collaborative art’4 (Pardo, 2000: 247). As for the television industry, Guerrero (2013) expresses that ‘the audiovisual production is considered fundamentally a teamwork where the executive producer takes the lead’5 (48); and Newman and Levine (2012: 38) append that ‘television shows […] are authored by the people who create them, whether these authors are understood to function as autonomous individuals or as a team of collaborators working together.’