The Nicest Email I Ever Received
What are we doing here?
When I started The Writers Panel podcast, we were in the beginning of what would become known as television's “Golden Age,” though no one was yet calling it that. As someone who’d loved TV since childhood, and like many fans who are also creative people, the process that went into crafting a thing I love is as interesting to me as the thing itself. The early episodes are populated by people who made the shows most important to me from the previous decade and the best shows of the time: Buffy, Lost, Friends, The Shield, Community, New Girl, Justified, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Parks and Recreation.
This was in early 2011. My writing partner, Ben Acker, and I weren’t staffed at the time, and I knew there was foundational, generational knowledge—about writing, production, the industry—that could be learned from those who had come before me.
Of course, I had it in the back of my head that meeting all of these showrunners would lead to Acker and me getting hired on one of their shows. After spending a fun 90 minutes talking about themselves, these showrunners were sure to associate me with a good time, see that I’m a thoughtful person, and think of me as someone they wanted to spend ten hours a day with in a writers’ room.
Did it work?
Not at all!
What did happen is that I ended up meeting thousands of writers, many of whom became good friends. I love hosting dinner at my house, and The Writers Panel is an extension of that: I wanted my guests to feel like they were at a cocktail party with like-minded strangers, peers with whom they could share their stories, who wanted them to get into the weeds about their writing process and their Hollywood horror stories. As the host, my job was to make everyone look good, to help them come off as funny and smart and charming as they were in the writers’ room. People talk about networking in Hollywood (and I’ll talk about it later, too), but what I rarely hear about is how much fun it can be when you are making genuine connections with people who are in the trenches with you. Through the podcast, I found myself in the center of our writing community. I felt at home.
One of the kindest emails I’ve received is from Josh Friedman, a frequent and fan-favorite podcast guest especially in the early years. Josh is the creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Foundation TV shows as well as a writer on the Avatar sequels. He sent me this message in 2015:
Thank you for the Writers Panel podcast. I really think you’ve created an amazing body of work. We all want to tell stories—when we’re lucky we do that on TV for an audience. But equally important are the stories of us. Three hundred times you’ve gathered us around your firelight and helped us tell our stories. You are a writer and an anthropologist of writers. Your generosity and your curiosity blow me away. You are our Alan Lomax. We have an institutional memory now. We are stories passed down and shared now.
With this newsletter, I’m hoping to bring some of that institutional knowledge to you. The how’s and why’s of writing, the business and process, advice passed to me, to us, from two thousand writers who’ve done it well.
It’s going to work best if you’re an active member. The best way to be an active member is to become a paid subscriber. I promise I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll talk later about why I’m using a paid-subscriber model (in short: time is worth something, and I want to finance a short film!), but the best thing you’ll get out of it is the opportunity to ask your questions directly to pro writers in our monthly Q&A Zoom chats. I’ll announce our first guest next week. You won’t want to miss this chance to chat with him. But it’s only open to paid subscribers:
I can’t hear the phrase “What are we doing here?” without thinking of this song:
Now I hope it’ll play in your head too.
Thanks for reading. More next week! Meantime, please help spread the word by sharing this post!