CarterMatt Awards 2016 results: Peter M. Lenkov of ‘Hawaii Five-0,’ ‘MacGyver’ wins Favorite Showrunner

We knew going into the Favorite Showrunner race for the CarterMatt Awards this year that we had a number of strong candidates, and we were very curious to see how it all was going to shake out.

Now that we have the results, it’s clear that the readers were pretty decisive in their choice: Peter M. Lenkov of “Hawaii Five-0” and “MacGyver” is your Favorite Showrunner for 2016.

Lenkov won with an impressive and commanding total — he had 65% of the total vote, while the second-place finisher, “Sherlock” co-creator Mark Gatiss, was in second place with 15%. The voting pattern was also fairly consistent throughout — Peter jumped out to an early lead, and it never got too close or competitive down the line.

It’s easy to see why Lenkov is deserving, starting with the fact that this is a man responsible for two action-heavy shows filming in opposite sides of the country. Being able to pull that off is no easy feat, given that there are so many things in the air that he and his team have to constantly juggle. These are also shows with heavy episode commitments, and yet he still finds the time to be interactive and engaged with the fan community every step of the way. This is one of the things that we especially look for in devising our Favorite Showrunner nominees.

In terms of the shows themselves, there’s also plenty of praise to go around — “MacGyver” is a show that continues to get better and better, while “Hawaii Five-0” is arguably in the midst of its best season yet both in terms of the individual cases and the larger character stories. It’s one of the reasons why the latter show’s got its first-ever nomination in our Show of the Year category, and also why its ratings are up year-to-year — something that is fairly rare for broadcast series in an era of hyper-competition.

Further congrats to Peter and everyone who works on these shows! Both “Hawaii Five-0” and “MacGyver” will be back in early January, and we’ll be around to cover both of them further.