Directory Profile

Emmy award winner Jeff Melvoin has been a writer-producer on over a dozen dramatic series, serving as showrunner on eight of them. In all, he’s helped produce over 470 hours of primetime television, most recently as an Executive Producer on season three of the BBC America series, Killing Eve. Other Exec Producer credits include Designated Survivor, Army Wives, Alias, Early Edition, and Picket Fences. He was Supervising Producer of the CBS series Northern Exposure, for which he won an Emmy and two Golden Globe Awards. Other writer-producer credits include the NBC series Hill Street Blues and Remington Steele.

Melvoin is also founder and chair of the Writers Guild of America’s celebrated Showrunner Training Program, now entering its twentieth year. In February, 2015, he received the Morgan Cox Award, the WGA’s highest recognition for Guild service. In making the announcement, Guild President Chris Keyser said, “If this is a Golden Age of television, the program Jeff so lovingly shepherds deserves its fair share of credit. Thanks to him, as an art form and as a business, we are better at what we do.”

Melvoin has taught at USC School of Cinematic Arts, UCLA, Harvard, and the Sundance Institute, and is a frequent guest instructor and speaker on college campuses and at media conferences around the world. He has led seminars for the Writers Guild of Great Britain, the Australian Writers Guild, Screen Ireland, Boulevard des Séries (for French and Quebecois writers), and the European Showrunning Program, run by the International Film School of Cologne.

His book, Running the Show: Television from the Inside, was published by Applause Books in September, 2023, and was an Amazon bestseller in the “TV Direction and Production” category.

He is a past board member of the Mystery Writers of America (Southern California Chapter) and the Writers Guild of America, West. Before entering television, Melvoin was a Time magazine correspondent in the New York, Boston, and Los Angeles bureaus