--- name: "John Schulian" canonical: "https://film.one/person/john-schulian" roles: ["Creator","Writer"] born: "31 January 1945" reviewed_on_fi1m: 2 average_fi1m_score: 78 updated: "2026-09-16T23:18:10.120828+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # John Schulian Creator and writer. Born 31 January 1945 in Los Angeles. ## Details - **Work:** Creator, Writer - **Born:** 31 January 1945, Los Angeles - **Active:** 1984–1995 - **Works often with:** Douglas Ibold, Mario DiLeo ## Fi1m on John Schulian > A sportswriter turned television writer whose one lasting creation, Xena, is a warlord trying to be good. He wrote people with a past for shows that mostly wanted fights, and the shows were better for it. Xena arrives in *Hercules: The Legendary Journeys* (1995) as the enemy, and three episodes later she has her own series. That was John Schulian's idea, and it is the one idea of his that most people watching have any reason to know about. He and Robert Tapert built the spin-off around a warlord trying to be good and a village girl who would not leave her alone, Sam Raimi produced, and *Xena: Warrior Princess* ran from 4 September 1995 for six seasons and 134 episodes. When we reviewed it we were surprised by how much of it was two people talking round a campfire rather than fighting. The campfire is where the writing shows. Schulian came to television late and sideways. He spent the 1970s as a newspaper sports columnist, at the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Daily News among others, and in 1985 he sent a bundle of scripts to Steven Bochco, got an episode of *L.A. Law* out of it and a job on the *Miami Vice* staff. He wrote teleplays there, including 'Down for the Count', a title a sportswriter would reach for. We rate *Miami Vice* (1984) highly for the sadness under the pastel, and we will not pretend to know how much of that sadness was his; the show does not carry his name the way *Xena* does. From there he went through *Midnight Caller*, *Wiseguy*, *Hercules*, *JAG* and *Tremors*: two decades of staff work on other people's programmes, with one show that was his own. What he brought from the press box is a liking for people after they have lost. A boxer is more interesting on the way down than on the way up, and Xena is written as somebody paying off a debt one village at a time, which gives Lucy Lawless something to play under the chest plate that the genre did not usually offer. We expected the campfire scenes to be padding between stunts and found ourselves minding far more about whether the two women would still be speaking than about whoever was in the horned helmet that week. The limits are partly the format's and partly his. A redemption told in 44-minute chunks that reset each week can only go so far, and the show's tone swings from grief to slapstick in a way the writing does not always control. He also struggled for years to get original pilots made, so the character he is remembered for arrived not as a pilot but as three episodes of somebody else's show. He named her, he has said, by noodling with names until one stuck, on the principle that 'X is cool'. It is a sportswriter's explanation, short and unembarrassed, and it fits a career that never pretended to be more than good work done to order. He left television in the 2000s and published a first novel, *A Better Goodbye*, in 2015. Start with *Xena* if you want to see what he did; there is little point looking for his name on anything else, because television did not put it there. ## Biography John Schulian is an American television writer and producer. He began his career as a sports journalist and nationally syndicated columnist, notably at the Chicago Sun-Times, before moving into screenwriting in the mid-1980s. Schulian wrote episodes of *Miami Vice* (including teleplays in 1987–1988) and contributed to series such as *L.A. Law*, *Midnight Caller*, *Hercules: The Legendary Journeys*, *JAG* and *The Outer Limits*. He is credited as creator of *Xena: Warrior Princess* (1995), on which he also wrote episodes. After a period in television, Schulian returned to prose writing. His first novel, *A Better Goodbye*, was published in 2015, and he received the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing in 2016. *Sources: imdb.com, miamivice.fandom.com, hercules-xena.fandom.com, medill.northwestern.edu, amazon.com.* ## On Fi1m (2) - *Xena: Warrior Princess* (1995), Fi1m 74, Creator — [page](https://film.one/tv/xena-warrior-princess.md) - *Miami Vice* (1984), Fi1m 81, Teleplay, Writer — [page](https://film.one/tv/miami-vice.md) ## Also known for - *Hercules: The Legendary Journeys* (1995), Writer, Story, Teleplay - *JAG* (1995), Writer - *The Outer Limits* (1995), Writer - *L.A. Law* (1986), Writer - *Tremors* (2003), Writer, Teleplay, Story --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/john-schulian