During their first year working together on Nip/Tuck, Ryan Murphy and the cable network’s president, John Landgraf, used to get into fights—“knock-down, drag-out” brawls about the early network hit, according to the show-runner. The clashes were so unrelentingly “brutal,” Murphy says, that he and Landgraf actually stopped speaking to each other.

It’s hard to imagine Landgraf—a TV executive now so famously supportive of his talent that The Americans show-runners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields told Vanity Fair via e-mail they’d jump off a bridge for him—was ever capable of having such an explosive relationship. Fast-forward just over a decade, though, and Landgraf has built what many TV connoisseurs consider to be the best network on television—and Murphy, who went from silence to speaking with Landgraf every single day, is FX’s most loyal and reliable hitmaker.

At next Sunday’s Emmy Awards, FX will walk into the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles with 56 nominations, a record number for basic cable—and that re-patched and repaired relationship with Murphy goes a long way toward explaining how one man (and his crack team) turned a cable channel mostly known for X-Files reruns into the reigning champ of a clogged and crowded landscape. That his network is shining amid such a glut may give Landgraf a certain pleasure; he became a figure of fascination for TV nerds and critics for his oracle-like proclamation on “Peak TV” during a 2015 Television Critic’s Association presentation. His declaration—that we were drowning in too much TV—was all anyone in the business could think about. And unlike most industry-specific speeches, that bit of jargon spilled out into the larger cultural conversation.

When re-visiting that speech, as he did recently for Vanity Fair, Landgraf is as engaging as Margot Robbie explaining mortgage-backed securities from her Big Short bubble bath. “Just like the housing market represented a poor matching between the actual value of housing and the price of houses, the current TV market represents a poor matching between the value of television and a number of TV shows,” he says. “I’m the equivalent of someone who's raising his hand before the housing crisis and saying, ‘Hey, we've got an impending housing crisis.’”

But unlike the various Cassandras of The Big Short, Landgraf is neither an inward-looking obsessive type nor a fast-talking opportunist. On the surface, he looks no different from most TV executives in Hollywood—a 54-year-old white guy often dressed in the entertainment C.E.O. uniform of a suit, crisp button-down shirt, open collar, and no tie. But Landgraf is armed with a particularly persuasive demeanor he may have learned shortly after birth as the son of a preacher. Soft-spoken and almost professorial in one-on-one conversation, he is a casual deployer of active listening techniques. (Pamela Adlon, creator of the new FX series Better Things, told Vanity Fair her hour-long pitch meeting with him was “one of the most incredible phone conversations of my life.”) But beyond his engaging manner, there are practical reasons why a Landgraf presentation is so compelling.

Most network executives prefer to speak enthusiastically—but vaguely—about their programming slate, but Landgraf usually comes armed with facts and figures to bolster his broader philosophical claims. It’s also hard to deny the wisdom of a man who presides over one of the most critically acclaimed, watched, and awards-friendly networks on television. And unlike HBO and AMC—whose supremacy hinges, at this point, mostly on their big tentpole hits Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead—FX has built its record on a diversified portfolio that includes Fargo, The Americans, and American Crime Story, among others. During Landgraf’s era, FX has launched the melancholic, auteur-driven comedy revolution with Louie and kickstarted the limited-series trend with Murphy’s American Horror Story. Next year Tom Hardy, Ewan McGregor, and Susan Sarandon will all make their prestige-cable homes there. It’s a starry lineup, the sort that, once upon a time, viewers would have only seen on HBO. The question now: With prestige, star power, and nominations in hand, how can FX avoid the market correction its president has predicted?