Peter Lenkov on The Hollywood Reporter’s Top 50 List of Power Showrunners

Hawaii Five-0′s Peter Lenkov made The Hollywood Reporter’s fourth annual list of the “50 most influential — and valuable — creative chiefs writing, producing and redefining television”!

THR’s criteria for this year’s selection of power showrunners are:

1. Direct responsibility for the day-to-day creative output of a scripted TV show that has aired for at least one full season (unless he or she also had another show on the air).
2. How prolific the showrunner is: Those with more shows on the air were more likely to be included.
3. Nielsen ratings, especially relative to other shows on the same network.
4. Emmy attention and critical praise.
5. Professionalism and reputation among studio and network executives.

Peter Lenkov

Hawaii Five-0 (CBS)

Winter lasted eight long months in the small town outside Montreal where the TV-obsessed Lenkov spent his youth. But the Emmy-nominated writer would still make the trek home from school at lunch just to watch The Flintstones — and then, after school, catch a marathon of episodes of his favorite dramas Magnum, P.I. and Hawaii Five-0. In fact, it was the episode in which Magnum confronted and killed the person who’d held him as a POW that inspired Lenkov to start writing.

“I’d never seen an episode like that,” says Lenkov, 45. “I realized it was possible to take someone on an emotional journey in a short period of time.”

Limited writing opportunities in Montreal, where he studied political science at McGill and later at Concordia, led Lenkov to a screenwriting course at UCLA. That spawned a career as a film producer and comic-book writer — his R.I.P.D. is being adapted for the big screen with Ryan Reynolds — and, in a full-circle twist of fate, as the force behind CBS’ Five-0 reboot, which in its second season is averaging nearly 12 million viewers.

“My dad watched for 12 years straight,” says Lenkov, whose other credits include CSI: NY and USA’s La Femme Nikita. “Doing the new Hawaii was so striking emotionally because it’d been so important to him.”

Congratulations Peter and thank you for all that you do to make Hawaii Five-0 the awesome show it is!