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EXCLUSIVE: Nkechi Okoro Carroll rests her All American high tops on the conference table, sipping a cherry Coke Zero as she settles into the writers room to hear a pitch.
It’s September, and her writers-assistant-turned-staff-writer is spearheading his first episode since he joined full time. Just a few moments ago, Okoro Carroll was stomping her feet on the ground along with the rest of her writers to send him some positive energy before his pitch. The room, which she doesn’t get to visit as much as she’d like to anymore, can be a bit “unhinged,” she’d warned.
This early in Season 7, the foundations were still being laid for a new generation of characters to take over, after much of the principal cast exited the series at the end of Season 6, including star Daniel Ezra.
On the wall, next to an outline of the season, there’s a list of words to encapsulate those first four episodes: “the new chapter,” “expectations,” “recognition” and “legacy.” These were themes to guide the characters’ journeys, surely, but they also represented the task of the entire seventh season amid such a volatile television landscape.
All American was the only scripted series to survive after Nexstar’s acquisition of the CW, and it is one of few scripted series left at all on the network as sports now makes up 40% of its total programming.
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“The truth is, we have very little control over everything. I would argue, now more than ever, because now the people at the wheel aren’t necessarily even creatives,” Okoro Carroll tells Deadline during a later interview.
Likening herself to a horse in a race, she added: “All I can do is put my blinders on and create TV shows that I, as a TV lover, want to watch and throw my shoe at and that will make me stay up even though it’s 2:30 a.m. just to watch one more episode. All I could do is make that and trust that somewhere there will be a home for it.”
If it wasn’t obvious from that description of the television viewing experience, Okoro Carroll says she was raised on shows like Dawson’s Creek. The break-your-heart-and-put-it-back-together-again type of network dramas that have resonated with multi-generational audiences for decades.
Since she became showrunner of All American, she also created and ran three seasons of All American: Homecoming and is in the middle of the second season of her NBC missing persons series Found.
At a certain point last year, before Homecoming was cancelled in June, Okoro Carroll was running all three shows for Warner Bros. Television. Keeping three shows afloat in the same season is quite the task, and it requires a strict schedule. Most importantly, she makes sure she’s present in each writers’ room on at least a weekly basis. When she’s not there, her writers rely on what she calls the “North Star.”
“I, in a very detailed way, break down every character’s arc thematically, the journey I want to take them on this season,” she explains. “So on days where I can’t be in the room, and if they’re struggling on if something’s the right direction, they reference it…is it in service of the North Star?”
She leads her Found writers much in the same way as All American, with a positive and laid back energy radiating from the room. When Okoro Carroll is there, she brings the same vitality, encouraging even the newest writers to settle their nerves and trust their ideas.
“This is not a presentation…it’s a writer conversation,” she says to the Found script coordinator one September afternoon, as he stands before her, ready to present his pitch for the penultimate episode, which he is freelance co-writing.
He gets through the pitch seamlessly and, when Okoro Carroll approves after a few notes, executive producer Sonay Hoffman smiles and motions as if she’s wiping sweat off her brow. Phew.
Hoffman is only joking, of course. By this point, Okoro Carroll has already rendezvoused with her script coordinator at least once to toss around ideas. She calls these her “mini rooms,” which is just her way of setting aside time to mentor and guide the story toward that North Star, even on days she won’t make it to the writers room. Also, staying immersed in her stories keeps her sane.
“I have to touch writing and story creation in some way, shape or form every day,” she says. “I’m no use if I don’t find a way to write every day, because it is the thing that brings me the most joy. Then I would actually be miserable in the job, and then I’m no good to anybody.”
If it were up to her, Okoro Carroll would spend much more time writing. But, since writing and production run concurrently on network television, her time is divided, especially when managing multiple shows. In a given week, she’s also in editing and sound mixing sessions, meetings with department heads, set visits (for Found, which films in Atlanta, Okoro Carroll often visits virtually in between in-person trips), the list goes on.
A few days before hearing pitch the for All American Episode 704, she was with her editor to get Episode 215 of Found to broadcast length. She sits on a plush blue couch, sipping her soy latte (she’s down to two a day now, she says) and perusing the legal pad filled with her thoughts.
“I cannot watch this scene without bawling my eyes out,” she laments at one point while discussing a moment toward the end of the episode, to which her editor replies: “That’s good. That’s what we want.”
On playback, she wipes her tears as she mumbles “every time.”
She’s confident as she instructs her editor to cut a few seconds here or an entire scene elsewhere. There’s not much time to wring her hands over the decisions, since she needs to have a studio cut ready by the end of the session, which she doesn’t want to be more than a minute over its final time (on broadcast, an episode is limited to about 42 minutes and some change).
However, she does admit that she’s often a little nervous to remove anything featuring Saved by the Bell alum Mark-Paul Gosselaar. Once, after cutting one of his scenes, she woke up “in a cold sweat” later that night, wondering whether she’d made the right decision. She had, she thinks later.
Okoro Carroll’s first day as a showrunner came as a surprise. In 2018, she was a co-executive producer on the first season of All American when she received a call from Greg Berlanti.
“He called and was like, ‘If I needed you to take over as showrunner, what would you say?’” she remembered.
The next day, she took the reins.
“In hindsight, it was probably the best way for me to become a showrunner, because there was no time to second guess anything,” she said. “I just had to dive in and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve got the Titanic. There’s the iceberg, there’s New York. We got to skip that iceberg to New York.’ And we did, and 107 episodes later in seven seasons, we’re still cruising along, still doing it.”
She says it very nonchalantly, but it raises a question about how she might’ve felt in the decades prior, when she was working for the Federal Reserve, if someone would have told her where she’d be in that moment. Okoro Carroll, who has a masters degree in international economics, spent much of the beginning of her career squeezing in writing wherever she could, producing community theater in New York City by night. She used her PTO to get experience working on film sets.
RELATED: ‘All American’ Showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll Remembers Kamar De Los Reyes: “He Truly Was A Gift”
When she moved to Los Angeles, she continued to work at the Federal Reserve, using any free time she had for writing sessions, acting classes, and background gigs. On the weekends, she’d be shooting short films with her friends.
“Truthfully, it’s the reason why I’m able to run multiple shows at a time,” she says. “When people ask me, ‘I want to be a showrunner. What would your advice be?’ I’m always like, take a business class…you essentially become the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation overnight, when you were just used to chilling in the writer’s room and writing your scripts in your office and living your best life.”
These days, she’s still squeezing writing and creation in wherever she can, though her career looks a little different than it used to. In the fall, she was a tad less busy, running just two shows instead of three, which she says freed her up creatively to work on some new projects.
Okoro Carroll recently signed a new multi-year overall deal with Warner Bros. Television.
“There’s a couple projects that I’m taking out,” Okoro Carroll tells Deadline. “One with Daniel [Ezra]. One with another writer I’ve worked with for a good portion of my career, where I’m more overseeing, and I’m the EP on it, but I didn’t create it. I just sort of held their hand through development and crafted stories with them, which is a very different lane for me.”
How she’ll fit either or both of those into her schedule is likely to be determined by renewal news for All American and Found, neither of which have received another season yet.
Both have been performing quite well recently. Across all platforms in 35 days of viewing, Found is attracting about 6.2M viewers per episode, up 184% from its live + same-day audience. In the 18-49 demo, episodes are growing 417%. The pilot episode remains NBC’s strongest launch ever on Peacock.
As for All American, the series remains the No. 1 show on the CW app. It’s seen 21% growth week-over-week as Season 7 finds its footing following its February premiere.
Renewals for both would be the best case scenario, especially in the current TV landscape where it feels like shows can barely survive past a few seasons, but Okoro Carroll has learned not to dwell on “the sh*t I can’t control.”
Instead, she relies on advice that she received from Gina Prince-Bythewood back when she was staffing her very first show.
“Everything in this industry is so bananas, and it’s very unstable,” she said. “But what I can do, even as a showrunner, is show up and give 150% and treat everyone who works with me with love, kindness and respect, and pour every ounce of passion I have into every project, and trust that that’ll be enough.”
