The 50 Most Exciting TV Auteurs Working Today

35. Amy Sherman-Palladino
Major Shows: “Gilmore Girls,” “Bunheads,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”
When you’re largely associated with one title, it can feel a bit premature to use the term “auteur.” But not if that show is the beloved “Gilmore Girls,” which ran for seven seasons powered almost exclusively by the idiosyncratic, lickety-split writing from Sherman-Palladino (notwithstanding the disappointing final season, done without her). ABC‘s “Bunheads,” about a small-town ballet school, was cancelled after one season, but after the return of Lorelei & co. in “Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life,” this year, Sherman-Palladino’s Amazon pilot “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” was picked up by the streaming giant for an “unprecedented” two-season order. It will follow a 1950s housewife (Rachel Brosnahan) who embarks on a career in stand-up, and it sounds right up her wisecracking, smart-alecky street.

34. Issa Rae
Major Shows: “Awkward Black Girl” (web series), “Insecure”
Issa Rae’s trajectory, from the rough-and-readiness of her web series with its lo-fi production values and bite-sized episodes, to her own HBO comedy, which she co-created with Larry Willmore (of “The Daily Show,” “The Nightly Show With Larry Willmore” and “Black-ish” fame), has been meteoric, but is definitely one of the good-news stories of recent TV history. Her fresh, engaging persona on “Insecure,” which is essentially an evolution of the socially awkward, passive-aggressive character from “Awkward Black Girl,” is a bouncily enjoyable, polished comic creation that foregrounds a female African-American experience and therefore is perfectly poised to comment incisively on racism and sexism without ever getting preachy.

33. Mike Judge
Major Shows: “Beavis And Butt-Head,” “The Goode Family,” “Silicon Valley”
For a while there, after the cancellation of animation “The Goode Family” and the underperformance of his film “Extract,” it seemed like Mike Judge was in a bit of a slump, and his TV legacy was going to be forever dominated by the snuffling, chortling, insufferable perma-teens “Beavis And Butt-Head” and their era-defining juvenilia. But “Silicon Valley,” which Judge co-created with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, has changed all that: the hit HBO comedy, of which Judge directs several episodes per season, has shown how his off-kilter skewering of young male pretension can fuse beautifully with the workplace comedy of his beloved cult title “Office Space” to yield a comedy creation that’s topical and (surprisingly for Judge) even affectionate.

32. Beau Willimon
Major Shows: “House Of Cards,” “The First”
A week is a long time not just in politics but in TV, so four years of a political TV drama roughly equates to a century. And yet it’s been four years since Beau Willimon’s “House Of Cards” started, and it’s still going strong: season 5 comes to Netflix on May 30th. It will be the first season without Willimon as showrunner, but even skeptics like us who may have initially tuned in because of David Fincher‘s involvement as the pilot’s director, have to admit that it is absolutely Willimon’s show (though Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright can also take a bow, and it was based on a British TV show that it has seriously eclipsed since). The truly remarkable thing is that Willimon and “House Of Cards” didn’t just slot right into the new era of prestige television, but quietly redefined it as Netflix’s first Original hit, and now all Willimon has to do is weather the change in the political landscape that has seen Frank Underwood go from the dystopian nightmare candidate of last year to “hey, you know what, he doesn’t seem so bad…” since November 2016. The writer’s next moving into sci-fi territory with space drama “The First” for Hulu.

31. Lena Dunham
Major Shows: “Girls”
We’re not sure which we enjoy more: Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking, epochal and just recently finished show “Girls,” or the instant irrationally vitriolic reaction that the very mention of her name can inspire in some quarters. Well, that’s not true — we enjoyed “Girls” more, patchy though it could be, and it was especially heartening to see it go out on such a high note, with Season 6 featuring some of the show’s best-ever episodes. But the foamy-mouthed haterz ran it a close second, while the show picked up plaudit after plaudit, including netting Dunham, who wrote or co-wrote the vast majority of the episodes as well as starring, the first ever DGA Comedy Series Directing Award to go to a woman. (Which, good on her, but seriously, the first?) With a little down time in the aftermath of her show ending, we’re not too sure what Dunham’s next move will be (aside from posting naked pre-Met Ball selfies), but whatever it is, were willing to bet it will be interesting, controversial, and completely hers, and that a load of people will be immediately queuing up to discuss why it’s the work of the feminist antichrist.

30. Ryan Murphy
Major Shows: “Popular,” “Nip/Tuck,” “Glee,” “American Horror Story,” “Feud”
Whether you love his iconoclasm and exuberance or dislike his self-consciously campy style, there’s no doubt that Ryan Murphy is one of the most successful and inventive rainmakers that Peak TV has yet seen. While he’d created successful multi-season shows before, it was probably the runaway success of musical high-school show “Glee” that really made him a household name, and following that up with another formally challenging experiment with “American Horror Story,” which pioneered the now on-trend anthology-show phenomenon, pretty much guaranteed him an ongoing spot in the TV firmament. His feature-film forays, like “Running With Scissors” and “Eat Pray Love,” have not enjoyed the same critical acclaim as his TV shows, but with this year’s likely Emmy-magnet “Feud: Bette And Joan” consolidating his domination of the TV world, that probably hardly matters to him.

29. Aziz Ansari
Major Shows: “Master Of None”
By rights we should include Ansari’s “Master of None” co-creator Alan Yang as “co-auteur,” since Ansari’s sole creator credit so far has come for his HBO show, all of which he co-wrote with Yang, an alum of the “Parks And Recreation” writing room. But, partly because it also stars Ansari, and is so personal, and partly because it was his profile (as a key cast member on ‘Parks’) that helped the show get picked up, it does feel like it’s more Ansari’s show — for better and, if not for worse, then certainly for weirder. What’s so appealing about “Master Of None” is not simply that it deals directly in highly topical and relevant issues around diversity and the challenges and charms of second-generation American life (the U.S.-born children of immigrants), it’s that it does it with such an idiosyncratic sense of humor and heart. It makes the show uneven and at times unpolished, but also more spontaneous and modern (even occasionally po-mo) than other comedies which might try to tone down the oddness and the autobiography in order to broaden its appeal, making it closer in spirit to “Louie” than to “Fresh Off The Boat.”

28. Dan Harmon
Major Shows: “The Sarah Silverman Program,” “Community,” “Rick And Morty,” “Great Minds With Dan Harmon”
With a creative TV career that started with the brilliant oddity of “Heat Vision And Jack,” a show that never got beyond pilot stage and starred Jack Black and Owen Wilson (as the voice of a talking motorcycle), you might think it should have been difficult for Harmon to maintain that level of cult appreciation as he became more famous. And yet his notorious volatility, often captured in Twitter rants and the like, and the fact that he was fired from his career-making comedy “Community” in season 4, prior to being rehired for season 5 after the show faltered with fans as a result, have conspired to keep him seeming like a rebellious outsider to the comedy establishment. His charmingly geeky podcast “Harmontown,” the often gross and always hilariously surreal “Rick And Morty,” and even his apparently mellower time-traveling History show “Great Minds With Dan Harmon,” have consolidated his rep as one of modern TV comedy’s most eccentric talents.

27. Charlie Brooker
Major Shows: “Screenwipe,” “Dead Set,” “Black Mirror”
Long before he made a transatlantic splash with techno-horror-sci-fi-satire anthology show “Black Mirror,” Charlie Brooker was a familiar face on British TV, having graduated from print journalism to a show called “Screenwipe” in which he sat in an armchair and offered caustic critiques of TV shows playing in clip form. The often savage pessimism of his comedic point-of-view, plus his pop-culture preoccupation, were then pursued to their logical end with “Dead Set,” a five-part “event” show that aired on consecutive nights and detailed a zombie invasion from which the residents and producers of reality show “Big Brother” must take refuge. But “Black Mirror” is the show that has most fully allowed him to explore the scary-funny-creepy possibilities of melding science-fiction, wariness of technology and socio-political satire, and now that it has “broken America,” who’s to say his next project won’t be even bigger?

26. Ilana Glazer & Abbi Jacobson
Major Shows: “Broad City”
Perhaps the standard-bearer for the dream held by many Youtube web series creators that with a bit of luck (and the intervention of Amy Poehler), their online show might be picked up to series by Comedy Central, Glazer & Jacobson’s brilliant “Broad City” is simply one of the best things to happen to TV comedy in ages. Unabashedly feminist, punkishly energetic and very funny in its unmerciful investigations into the mortifications of millennial New York life, the only real issue is that while we’d love to see what the pair can do outside the show that’s made them (either separately or together), we really don’t want Abby & Ilana, and their absurdly aspirational take on female friendship, ever to go away.