How ‘All American’ & ‘Found’ Showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll Navigates An Uncertain Network TV Landscape

deadline.com:

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.