Showrunner Sessions is our ongoing event series where we go one-on-one with a showrunner (or showrunning team) to find out, “What exactly does a showrunner do?” Find out what they look for in a writing staff, the lessons they’ve learned on the job, and their approaches to running the writers’ room.
For this session, we learn from Sera Gamble, the Creator, Executive Producer and Showrunner of Netflix drama series You. Hear how she approaches adapting books to screen, how she runs her writers’ room, and how she’s navigated the industry writing across various genres.
Moderated by Gloria Calderón Kellett (With Love, One Day At a Time).
Panel starts at 5:00pm Pacific time.
After signing up, you’ll receive information on how to access the Zoom panel.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at events@wgfoundation.org.
about the panelist
Sera Gamble is the Creator and Executive Producer, with Greg Berlanti, of YOU (Netflix), based on Caroline Kepnes’s acclaimed novel of the same name. The series, which just premiered its fourth season, stars Penn Badgley. It is one of Netflix’s most watched series and one of the most critically acclaimed.
Gamble is developing an adaptation of the beloved Francesca Lia Block book, Weetzie Bat, for Peacock. In addition, she and Berlanti are reuniting with Kepnes to adapt her novel, Providence, which Gamble will write and executive produce.
Gamble is also the writer and executive producer of The Magicians (Syfy), a series she co-created with John McNamara, based on Lev Grossman’s bestselling novels, as well as an Executive Producer of the Apple series Physical starring Rose Byrne which was just picked up for a second season.
Previously, Gamble served as writer and executive producer of the NBC series Aquarius, starring David Duchovny. She wrote and produced the cult CW series Supernatural for its first seven seasons, also running the show in seasons six and seven.
Gamble is a first-generation American, for which she credits her work ethic. Born in New York City, she spent her childhood in Cincinnati before moving to Redlands, California. At age seven she was given her first book of fairy tales, which made her promptly decide she wanted Hans Christian Andersen’s job. To that end, she attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
Her Hollywood career began when she was a finalist on the second season of Project Greenlight in 2003. Her script Cheeks – a comedic homage to Dog Day Afternoon set in a strip club – got her agent. (In a surreal moment during the shooting of the show Matt Damon turned to her and said, “So I hear you guys signed with UTA.”)
Gamble’s family are Holocaust survivors; members of her family fled to Russia and Siberia during the Nazi occupation. Her parents were raised in post-war Poland. Both left while young students, during an anti-Semitic purge. They met in a refugee camp in Sweden, where her father volunteered to cover her mother’s dishwashing duties. It worked; they fell in love. Gamble’s father emigrated to New York City; her mother followed years later when they married and bore a proud first-generation American.
Gamble’s lineage includes scientists and artists. Both her parents are physicians; her father also spent decades as a medical professor and research scientist investigating diseases and disorders of the brain. Her mother obtained both a college and medical degree while Gamble was growing up; the kitchen table was usually cluttered with biopsy slides, plastic anatomy models and, for one memorable semester, an actual human skull. Family friends assumed that this early exposure would inspire Gamble to pursue a career in medicine; instead, she became a horror writer.
Her great-uncle Aleksander Ford was a well-known director and, together with her grandfather, a founding professor of the Polish National Film School in Lodz who taught several of Poland’s best-known filmmakers. Her grandmother was a translator of plays and fiction.
Gamble also writes essays, poetry and fiction. Within the last year her poems have been published in Sky Island Journal, Tinderbox and Nine Mile Magazine. Her stories have previously appeared in the Best American Erotica series and in journals such as Washington Square and Nerve. She lives in Los Angeles, and, most importantly she is a dog person.