Posted on 01/10/2005 4:18:55 PM PST by SJackson
''Seinfeld'' scribe reports on pilot season -- Peter Mehlman writes about the annual ritual in which writers pitch shows to network execs -- and pray by Peter Mehlman
TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2003
Spent afternoon lolling around the DreamWorks animation campus in Glendale, Calif. The place is like Berkeley, warm and full-blooded with youth and grass and dreamy.
''Mehlman!''
Wheel around: It's Jonathan Berry, junior member of the three heads of DreamWorks Television.
''Peter, I was going to call you. It's almost pilot season.''
Ignore the rumors. L.A. does have four seasons: earthquake season, fire season, riot season, and the most ravaging — pilot season. Network TV keeps groping to win over an America it despises — a viewing public it sees as a blurry, fat, brainless blob of uninsured, Hemi-powered, God-fearing Wal-Mart clerks. I'm paid to entertain them.
''When should I come by your office?''
''Two-thirty.''
Jonathan races off. I turn, walk, and bump into Jonathan's bosses, Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey. Both are mid-30s, sharp, and smart. Makes you wonder why they chose not to contribute to society. I wonder that about myself. But that's our America: Harvard grads once wrote speeches for Jack Kennedy. Now they write dialogue for Jim Belushi.
We chat about ratings, producers, agents, and a guy who fell victim to identity theft. I say, ''No one has to steal my identity. They can have it.'' Darryl laughs: ''You gotta put that in a script!''
Sure. A funny line that doesn't end up in a sitcom. What good does that do anyone?
Justin says it's time for me to think up a new sitcom idea. Since the sitcom is like a terminally ill patient hanging on for no apparent reason, I want to say I'd rather be a travel agent on the Gaza Strip, but Justin gets a cell call.
I get an idea for a sitcom: 77 Gaza Strip.
Two-thirty. Jonathan's office. ''Oh, Mehlman, you didn't have to come over. Darryl and Justin told me they saw you. That's all I wanted to talk to you about.''
''Okay.''
''I'm sending you the Network Landscape.''
''Landscape?''
''The listing of what kind of new shows the networks are looking for. I send it to you every year.''
''Do I ever read it?''
''No.''
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27
Today starts out as the kind of day I love. No plans. No meetings. Nothing. Still, I feel hemmed in, like the world will pop in at any moment. I have no wife, no kids, no responsibilities, and yet 40 times a day I mutter to myself, ''Christ, it never ends.''
Outside a Starbucks in Santa Monica with my dog, Izzy, a mutt with so many warring instincts ping-ponging through her head she never knows whether to beg for treats or sniff suitcases for anthrax. At the next table are a man and four women.
Idea for sitcom: A woman gets divorced from a polygamist and collects alimony from one man and three women.
Turn the other way. A young girl is reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Idea for sitcom: The Autobiography of Malcolm in the Middle.
God. Can't believe my mind works like this. Seinfeld turned my life into a research project, something to watch as opposed to live. After a grueling 1993-94 Seinfeld season, I went to a spa in Tucson, Ariz. It was Mother's Day weekend, and the spa was overrun with mothers and daughters splurging on massages, wraps, and all-over tans. Wound up hanging out with a daughter. On our last day, we started feverishly making out on a tiny bridge over a dry streambed. In the heat of the action, I thought to myself: It's amazing how every girl has her own kissing system. Right hand here, left hand there, top lip doing this, bottom lip that. No two the same.
How's that for being a spectator in your own life?
Go home and shower. Wonder if you can learn French purely from shampoo bottles. The DreamWorks guys call to set a meeting at 6 p.m. tomorrow. Ten minutes later, my assistant, Chi, calls to tell me I have a meeting with ''the boys'' at 6 p.m. tomorrow. An hour later, the boys call to move the meeting up to 3. Chi calls: The meeting is moved to 3. The boys call to push the meeting back to 5:15. Chi calls: ''5:15.'' Another call. ''Make it 2:45.'' Chi: ''2:45.''
Finally, it's decided the meeting can be a conference call. Showing up is an idea whose day has come and gone.
Should have asked what they want to talk about during the conference call.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 28
Starbucks. At the next table, a father and daughter. ''Daddy, you can lead an active life. Look at Dick Cheney. He's vice president, and he's had God knows how many 'heart episodes.'''
Good point. Cheney has had enough heart episodes to go into syndication.
Back home for the conference call. Justin says, ''So, what's your idea for your next pilot?''
Oh. So that's what this call is about. My idea for a pilot. Already? Wow. I have nothing. This is bad. Really bad.
Stalling, I yell, ''Izzy, stop it!'' even though she's sleeping two feet away from me with her favorite toy, a purple rubber squeaky shoe.
Izzy. Shoe . . . reminds me of something that happened just before lunch today.
I start talking: ''Okay, uh, I guess I should start by telling you the genesis of my idea for my next pilot. I was walking on Montana Avenue after lunch a few, um, weeks ago — many weeks ago — when my dog poked her head in a women's shoe store. Inside, I saw this clearly gay man selling shoes to a woman who was listening intently to everything he said. So I thought to myself, 'Wouldn't it be funny if that guy weren't gay? That he was just putting on an act because women trust gay salesmen?'''
Justin: ''That's hysterical!''
Darryl: ''So funny!''
Huh.
Me: ''So, um, what I was thinking was, well, doing a show about this character — a young kid, handsome, maybe 22 — who will do anything to make it. Anything. He'll scam, act, lie, wear disguises — nothing illegal, of course — but he will do anything just to, you know, get ahead. Just to make it. To make it in America.''
Justin: ''That's a great character.''
Jonathan: ''Yeah, totally different.''
Darryl: ''Is there a female character?''
Me: ''Oh, of course there's, um, a female character. She's, uh — sorry, I can't read my own notes. Oh, right: She's the woman he was selling the shoes to! An older woman. Not old, but older. Like, oh . . . Heather Locklear! Well, anyway, she's also got this drive to 'make it,' only she's getting a late start because she was married for 12 years and just got divorced from her rich husband who had a low sperm count and wound up cheating with their female fertility doctor because, you know how women will do anything not to have to use birth control? Anyway, Heather Locklear finds out the kid isn't gay and gets him fired. But then she feels guilty. Blah, blah, blah, they wind up going into business together. The scamming kid, the older — but really hot! — woman. And there's sexual tension there! Like that whole Ashton Kutcher-Demi Moore pandemic! But, but, but, but that's only a side aspect of the show. The main theme is making it in America. It's a classic American story, but we haven't seen anything like it on TV — not that there's anything on TV that resembles American life but — still, that's the show. The show is that. It's, it's, it's, it's . . .
''. . . It's a modern-day version of The Great Gatsby!''
The DW boys flip out.
Darryl: ''The kid is such a great character, any actor would kill for the part.''
Justin: ''Mehlman, I can't believe you already put so much thought into this!''
Jonathan: ''We were betting that you wouldn't have anything.''
Justin: ''Take the rest of the week off.''
End of conference call.
Okay. So I can make a sitcom out of thin air. Yippee. Actually, I've had other, richer sitcom-provoking moments lately. Just yesterday, I saw two black men talking in Century City. They both wore suits, so naturally I assumed they were from the Nation of Islam. I walked over to them and said, ''Hi. Salaam alaikum. I was just wondering — I know as Muslims you don't eat pork, but, out of curiosity, does it anger you that pork is now referred to as 'the other white meat'?''
Okay, so I didn't say that. But I thought it. And that would make a funny sitcom: The Accidental Racist. No, too specific. How about Faux Pas? Better yet: Gaffe. The networks think one-word titles make for the best sitcoms. With all their research and focus groups, that's what they've concluded. One-word titles are good. Gives one the sense that network TV's main dilemma is ''How can we get around this quality problem?''
I call my new pilot Dash.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
Walked Izzy late last night. This morning, on my kitchen counter, was a New York Times bag filled with dog s---. The point is, my mind wanders.
Drove a friend to LAX. Happy clots of postcollegiate radio/TV/film majors stream out of terminals, pumped and dreamy. The show-business in-box is always flooded.
At Seinfeld, we got crateloads of spec-script submissions. The show's situations were so real, people felt their lives were episodes. So they wrote scripts, mailed them in, and waited for fat checks and thin Guild cards. After a few lawsuits charging we stole ideas we didn't steal, Castle Rock — the show's production company — made us return all specs unread. To acknowledge the work and dreams invested in these scripts, I wrote a thoughtful, apologetic boilerplate rejection letter. One season, Idaho was the only state that didn't have a resident submit a Seinfeldscript. Michigan alone was responsible for over 70. Eight from Oklahoma, two from North Dakota, and more than 30 Missourians sat in their homes writing about four New Yorkers who had no clue about what it was like to live in America.
Once, when people felt the urge to write, they wrote books or stories or plays. TV was a high-paying reward you fell into after years of high-quality, low-paying writing coupled with the backlogging of life experiences not juicy enough for a novel but fine for television — like beef going to the Alpo warehouse instead of The Palm. Now it's a beeline from college to laugh-sweetened dialogue. And not witty, 1590-on-my-SATs dialogue. See, networks aren't solely responsible for horrid sitcoms. Writers are unindicted coconspirators.
You'd think people who want to write would aspire to their own level of greatness. But sitcom writers don't want to write, they want to be in show business. Luckily, most never have to write. Life is spent in a room all night barking out jokes. If one of the jokes sticks to that day's draft of the script, you proudly get to call yourself a writer, just like Philip Roth or Joan Didion. Your name gets on scripts that you were in the vicinity of, like Derek Jeter getting the call despite never touching the bag when turning the double play. Of course, Derek Jeter could touch the bag if he needed to. Most sitcom writers couldn't knock together a suicide note without help from a roomful of 22-minute personalities.
''Guys, can you punch up my suicide note? It's just . . . lying there.''
Before the '90s went out of business, being on a hit show was hitting the lottery. Pre-Seinfeld, I'd barely written any dialogue in my life. Just as I was clueing in to foreign concepts like ''dramatic structure,'' production companies swarmed to sign me to multimillion-dollar contracts. A first-year MBA student would have vomited at the lack of research behind the offers. People threw money at me to create a hit show for them without ever asking ''Do you have any ideas?'' It was lovely, but I vaguely wanted to justify it, to state my case, to say that Seinfeld was the only show in which you came up with your own story lines or you were gone. There was no ''writers' room.'' You wrote and rewrote your own scripts before kissing them off to Larry David and Jerry so they could dose it with magic. I was ready to say I did bad work on ''The Visa,'' better on ''The Sponge,'' really good on ''The Implant.'' I was ready to argue that my episodes showed signs of a sensibility: A bunch dealt with radically changing one's appearance; a clump with contraception; a batch had people trying to be someone else; almost all had friends drastically at cross-purposes. My story lines were truly ''about nothing.'' (Except when they weren't: It took me weeks to realize that my friend's experience with a valet parker's BO would make a funny episode. Too broad of an idea for me to see.)
Only DreamWorks did their homework. They knew the episodes I'd written. They quoted lines. Sometimes I'd say, ''Oh, that was actually Larry David's line'' and they'd laugh it off as adorable modesty. The first time I met Jeffrey Katzenberg, I sat on a patio chair when Jeffrey came rushing out. As we were about to shake hands, he bonked his forehead into a metal lamp and gushed blood. ''This is not good,'' I thought, ''not good at all.'' Jeffrey calmly excused himself, then returned holding a white towel to his head. As I watched the towel steadily redden, Jeffrey said, ''That Chinese Woman episode you wrote was brilliant. Donna Changstein changing her name to Chang to pass herself off as Chinese? Unbelievable! I'm going to the hospital now.'' Jeffrey got double-digit stitches, my agents bought him a football helmet, and we met again. He urged me to sign with DreamWorks, adding ''I bled for you.'' He didn't have to. He was so honest, so above the crap, I loved him.
After two more years at Seinfeld, I left and created It's like, you know . . . for ABC.Our first day was the morning after Seinfeld shot its finale in April 1998. I stayed on the Seinfeld set until 1:30 a.m. before telling Jerry and Larry I had my own show to do. Jerry said, ''Here's the baton, run with it.'' Larry said, ''God, I feel like I'm sending my kid off to college.'' Great moments that made producing a show after Seinfeld feel like dating again after your wife died.
I wasn't up on the dating rules. When ABC execs gave me their first note on the script — a small plot change — I pondered it and said, ''No, I think it's good the way it is. What else you got?'' The ABC brass looked at me as if I'd announced I was pro-pedophilia. My first experience with network interference. Seinfeld had no network interference because it was a show that fell through the cracks. In television, a great show that's canceled hasn't fallen through the cracks. A great show that thrives has fallen through the cracks.
It's like, you know . . . shot 26 episodes before ABC canceled it to clear more time slots for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I mentioned that I wouldn't do another show for ABC if the future of Israel depended on it, and things got a little messy for me for a while, but everyone cooled down and I realized I should've been shocked the show lasted as long as it did. It got great reviews — a bad thing. One network head stated on the record that well-reviewed shows are ratings losers and vice versa. The press bought into that. Twice a year, TV critics from all over the country come to L.A. to meet with TV producers — a chance for the lowest form of journalism to hobnob with the lowest form of art. During ILYK...critics kept asking if I worried about the show being ''too smart.'' When the show was canceled, TV Guide asked me the same question in the past tense. I felt such rage . . .
Until I felt such relief. A dirty secret: When a show is canceled, the show runner is always partly relieved. The work is brutal and gets more brutal as the season wears on. You're on the set so much, you have no life to write about. And if an idea does pop into your leaden head, there's hardly time to execute it. Once, needing to write an entire ILYK... episode in a few hours, I heard a deejay say that Paul McCartney took 67 takes to record the song ''I Will.'' A beautiful ditty barely two minutes long, 67 takes. I got a few hours to muscle out 22 minutes of comedy.
Still, after ILYK... I was hot to do another show, so I wrote a pilot without telling anyone about it: The White Album, a dark, comic, serialized murder mystery. When people read it, they kept saying ''It's sitcom noir — a whole new genre!''
The script went to networks. They loved it. They all rejected it. The reason, according to inside sources, was that the networks didn't have ''creative ownership'' over it. In less breathtakingly incoherent terms: Writing the show before telling them about it made them feel jilted. It's been said that in the history of the world, no one ever washed a rented car. In TV, rented cars are totaled.
So next time, I played ball. I pitched a show about a gorgeous 15-year-old girl in middle America who knows for a fact that, in a previous life, she was Sigmund Freud. She just wants to be a happy kid but can't fight her destiny. She constantly analyzes and helps people. She finally shares her secret with the only adolescent psychologist in town. He realizes she really was Freud and they have this father-daughter-mentor-student-idol-fan relationship. Then I packaged the show in terms a network could understand: ''It's like My Favorite Martian with a sexy girl instead of Ray Walston and a legendary genius instead of a Martian.''
The networks loved it. Then rejected it. Why? Are you sitting? No, you must sit. Okay:
They rejected it because they did not feel their audience would know who Freud was.
Yes, I'm serious. No! YOU get out. They . . . rejected . . . it . . . because . . . they . . . did . . . not . . . feel . . . their . . . audience . . . would . . . know . . . who . . . Freud . . . was.
Maybe I should have reincarnated Kurt Cobain. Or maybe I should pitch my next show to al-Jazeera. But no! America knows Freud! And even if they don't, a Seinfeld episode dealt with John Cheever and people didn't tune out!
Then again, if your ratings are high enough, you can do a whole season about Noam Chomsky.
Odd: When I started pitching shows after Seinfeld, a stunning fact emerged: The networks hated Seinfeld. They liked it as fans, but professionally, they resented it. It broke all their rules about likable characters, setup/punchline dialogue, everything. It didn't fall into one of their comfort zones, like ''A classic fish-out-of-water story!'' (FYI: Fish, when out of water, die.) And the fact that Seinfeld never had touching moments made the networks apoplectic.
Hey, you know when Friends finally won an Emmy for best comedy? When NBC promoted each episode with emotional moments drenched in mournful music by Enya. ''Who can say where the road goes . . . ?'' That is when Friends won an Emmy for best comedy. And really, writing moments that make viewers cry is so easy. Ninety percent of the world is on the verge of tears at any given moment anyway, how hard is it to push them over?
Well, Dash won't have heartwarming moments. Possibly because I won't allow it. Probably because no network will ever air it.
EPILOGUE
On a Thursday, I verbally pitched the sitcom Dash to NBC executives. The following Tuesday, I called Justin to ask if he'd heard NBC's verdict. Silence. Then: ''Mehlman! What world are you in? NBC bought the show in the room — right in front of you!''
Oh. Guess I missed that part. I remember, during the meeting, I drifted off a while thinking that if I were president, I'd insist that all cars have the gas tank on the same side. That's probably when NBC said they'd buy the show.
I really enjoyed writing the pilot. It's important to enjoy the writing because once you hand in your script, your linkage to joy loosens in the way a car devalues when you drive it off the lot.
E-mailed the script to DreamWorks. Bye.
Justin called from Glendale. Loved the script. Darryl called from Utah. Loved the script. Katzenberg called from his car. Loved the script. NBC called from Ratingsville. Rejected the script. With that call Dash died, and my DreamWorks deal ran out the following June.
Why did NBC reject Dash? This time, I didn't investigate why. A theory: When you pitch a show as ''a modern-day Great Gatsby,'' network people are embarrassed to reject both you and F. Scott Fitzgerald outright. So they buy it, you write it, then they can reject it, secure in the (false) impression they truly considered a high-minded situation comedy.
There: a theory, a postmortem, a rationalization — all mine — for why Dashdied. A good assessment of why? A bad assessment of why? Not important. When you write sitcoms for a living, you treat yourself to whys you can live with.
The Autobiography of Malcolm in the Middle
Funny.
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