Emily Nussbaum: Sundance: The New Yorker Since its early days, television has been considered a writer's medium, not a director's. Much of this comes down to structural limits: a writers" room can grind out twenty-two scripts for a season of network TV, or half as many for a cable show, but that workload is not as feasible for a director. It's also pricey to make a mini-movie, every week, for years. As a result, television genres have relied on simple, replicable vocabularies - closeups for soaps, chase scenes for cop shows, and the stagey bluntness of the multi-cam sitcom style. On network TV, with few exceptions, directors are guns for hire instead of creative forces; it's the inverse of Hollywood filmmaking, where directors dominate and writers submit. In 1990, David Lynch made a splash with "Twin Peaks," but nothing so visually daring emerged again until the late nineties, when HBO became a Medici-like patron to TV's Golden Age. Even then, it was the writer-showrunners who got the credit. Does anyone remember the names of directors on "The Sopranos"? In recent years, however, this hierarchy has begun to erode, with movie directors moving to cable, including writer-directors like Lena Dunham and Mike White, as well as more purely visual directors, like Martin Scorsese, on "Boardwalk Empire," Michael Mann, on "Luck," and David Fincher, on "House of Cards." Prominent indie directors also show up frequently, placing their visual stamp on the most ambitious shows, including Nicole Holofcener, Jonathan Demme, and Todd Haynes on "Enlightened"; Claudia Weill (the director of the groundbreaking seventies movie "Girlfriends") on "Girls"; and Rian Johnson on "Breaking Bad." . . .