Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later - Part 2

My talk with Dan Jurgens about SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3 and ARMAGEDDON 2001 continues. For Part 1, go here.

The inciting incident of the story is that Superman has taken American lives for the first time when he sinks an American nuclear sub and eight of the crew don't get out in time. We're shown that's an inadvertent act on his part, almost an accident. 

Later when he is responsible for Martian Manhunter's death, that's also unintentional. But at the same time, you have Lana Lang clearly feeling like Clark is not well and Batman's arc is also about getting him to the point where he's ready to take lethal action against Superman.

I feel like it would have been easy to write a version of the story where Superman just writes off any collateral damage as unavoidable and feels justified in taking out any powerful heroes determined to stop him. So, to ask the question in a way where I don't feel like I'm putting some of the answer in your mouth, why take the path where he's culpable for, but perhaps not intentional in committing his worst acts?

If Clark was still an aspect of Superman, he couldn’t possibly be involved with intentionally taking a life. Not in any way. Any loss of life had to be incidental and impossible to foresee. That’s what makes Superman so different from most other heroes.

To spoil a 35 year-old comic for those who haven't read it, this future timeline ends with Batman killing Superman. Typically Batman has had a no-kill rule. You make sure we see how conflicted he is over this, even as he does it. The exchange where Robin says "You did the right thing, Bruce" and Batman responds, "No. This can never be called 'right'" has stuck with me so much I wouldn't have even had to reread the book to remember it. 

But at the end of the day, it's always controversial to depict Batman taking a life. How did you navigate for yourself keeping Bruce in character as he did what had to be done?

So, in a hypothetical future story, the guard rails aren’t as restrictive. A writer can go down unlikely corridors of story that they couldn’t otherwise use. That issue’s conclusion is a prime example of that.

But, at the same time, in order to make it work you have to keep the characters consistent with any understanding we have of them. So, yes, Batman needs to have that rule and live by it, at which point he has to acknowledge that he stepped over that line. Batman may not be outwardly emotional, but he still has to show remorse and regret.

You're not the first person to kill off Lois Lane in an alternate future. You're not even the only one who did it in an ARMAGEDDON 2001 annual, and there are multiple prominent examples in the years that follow, so this isn't aimed at any specific instance. I've only seen an issue made of this in recent years, but there are fans who feel that it's somehow disrespectful to Lois Lane as a character to kill her off even in an alternate future. Sometimes this rises to the assumption that Lois was killed because the creator hates Lois.

Do you have any reaction to that point of view? Speaking as a creator, what goes into a decision like killing Lois, or giving any character a "bad end" in an alternate future?

I’d like to think that the bulk of my writing work with Lois Lane would make it quite clear that I don’t hate her as a character.

As much as anything, doing a story where she dies in a speculative future goes back to a couple of comics I had as a kid. 

Both are Imaginary Stories, which were the Silver Age’s version of alternative future or “What If?” stories. Lois’ death was the subject of both of these and for that time conveyed great emotional impact for Superman. If you’re dealing with the matter of Lois’ importance to Superman, her death shouldn’t suggest the writer hates her anymore than doing the “Death of Superman” would imply that the writer hates Superman himself. 

I’ve also gotten criticized for reducing Lois to nothing more than Superman’s “vessel” because she bore his child. 

In short, no matter what you do, someone will find a reason to dislike it.

As for the issues in question, notice how these are basically the exact same cover idea. “Superman, with a child, mourning Lois.” One might see any number of ways they foreshadowed my work, years later.

Shifting to the conclusion of the ARMAGEDDON 2001 event, how last minute was the decision to change Monarch's identity from Captain Atom to Hawk? Had you drawn the complete issue of the "Cap is Monarch" version by the time this happened?

I recall it as being very last minute, for those times. (These days, we can make changes to a book when it’s at the printers. Back then, before email, scanners and digital lettering, it was very different.)

My memory could be a bit spotty here but I know that I had broken down the entire issue with Monarch being Captain Atom. Those are rough sketch thumbnails that I always do printed size, before blowing up into final pencils.

I had drawn most, if not all, of the issue as well. 

At the time, there was a 1-900 telephone service that fans could call into and get, “Insider Comic Scoops,” for a fee. Maybe a buck? I’m not sure as I never made the call.

In any case, that phone service revealed that Monarch would be revealed as Captain Atom. If you look a the basic plots of the annuals, they were to set up the notion that Monarch could be most any DC hero and the revelation would be a surprise.

Once that secret as revealed on the insider hotline, DC decided to shift gears as the idea of a surprise was still something worth shooting for. With that in mind, they made the change from Captain Atom to Hawk.

I recall discussing this on a conference call with Archie and Denny. I don’t believe either of them were 100% convinced it was the right way to go. Nor do I remember either of them were totally against it. It was more of a, “This is probably for the best,” type of feeling we shared, though i was probably more inclined to keep it as Captain Atom. 

But we went through the script and identified the necessary changes that would have to be made. Denny wrote it up, I drew it and we went from there.

A couple years back, DC decided to print the "Robin lives" version of BATMAN 428, the issue where a fan vote ultimately decided that Robin would die. In that case, the difference between the two amounted to about five pages fully or partially altered. In the case of ARMAGEDDON 2001 #2, it would be significantly more unseen pages. At least in terms of the art that exists, would it be possible for DC to complete an alternate version of the issue - either as its own thing or as part of a long-overdue collection?

In this age of Omnibus Editions, Absolute Editions, Facsimile Editions and just plain cool collections, it certainly seems to me that there should be some type of collection for ARMAGEDDON 2001, books 1 and 2 as well as the connected annuals. 

Since I still get a lot of questions about this at Cons, I also think there’d be enough interest in the original ending, which means we should do something to present it as it was meant to be.

The reality, however, is that there is almost no one left on staff at DC who was there when we did the book. Denny [O'Neil] and Archie [Goodwin] passed away and [DC Publisher and Chief Creative Officer] Jim [Lee] and [Editor-in-Chief] Marie [Javins] have greater familiarity with Marvel’s efforts during those years. With that being the case, I doubt anything will ever be done with A:2001, but we can always hope.

Finally, I don't know how many people remember this, but the crossover was followed almost immediately by a miniseries called ARMAGEDDON: THE ALIEN AGENDA, centered on Monarch and Captain Atom battling through time. You drew the first issue and so I wanted to ask, was there some alternate version of this project that was supposed to focus on the Captain Atom Monarch before the change? Or was the entire existence of this mini a result of the change to Hawk?

As I recall, that miniseries came up very late in the game. Since I wasn’t involved in the earliest conversations, I can’t say for sure, but I think it was planned as something that could capitalize on the popularity of the series and was always planned to feature Captain Atom. I really don’t think it was a reaction to having Hawk as Monarch, though that certainly influenced where the series was going to go. 

The fact that the four issues were drawn by four different artists shows how sudden it was. The idea was to get the scripts done as soon as possible and get all four pencillers working at the same time. The first issue’s pencil deadline was a real rush— that much I definitely remember!

Thanks to Dan Jurgens for his time and a great interview!

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later

In comic book circles, Dan Jurgens needs no introduction. It's inevitable the first line of his obituary will be "the man who killed Superman," as he was the writer/artist of the famous SUPERMAN #75. His association with Superman as a regular writer/artist began in 1989, and as it stands, he's almost certainly written more Superman stories than any other creator. While the Superman artist with the most stories to their name is Curt Swan, Dan's body of work pretty handily should put him in 2nd or 3rd place there.

This week is the 35th anniversary of a DC crossover event called ARMAGEDDON 2001. Dan provided the art for the two bookend issues, the first of which established the premise: Ten years in the future - in 2001 - one hero would betray and kill all the others. The identity of that hero was never known, as they then assumed the name Monarch and became an authoritarian leader. By the year 2030, Matthew Ryder has had enough of raising his family in Monarch's joyless dystopia and manages to become a test subject in a time travel experiment that transforms him into the time traveling Waverider.

Determined to stop Monarch before he comes to power, Waverider travels back to 1991 and uses his powers to read the possible futures of the major DC heroes, each encounter being depicted in one of that summer's Annuals. Of course, this is ultimately a device for the creators to explore a bunch of "What If" stories with their characters.

Dan's contribution as a writer was with the very first issue after the bookend - SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3. With pencils by Dusty Abel and inks by Terry Austin, John Beatty, Dick Giordano, and Dennis Janke, Dan brings us a story about a 2001 where Superman has lost almost everyone who mattered to him - including Lois Lane and his coworkers at the Daily Planet - when Intergang nuked Metropolis. He's been on an obsessive anti-nuke crusade ever since, and he crosses a line that results in the loss of innocent lives. Thus, the President drafts the one man who might be able to take Superman down - Batman.

To mark this memorable story's 35th anniversary, I reached out to Dan Jurgens for a chat about crafting alternate futures, killing characters, Evil Superman stories, and writing one of the most memorable Superman vs Batman fights.

Armageddon 2001 was the first - but not the last - time you did the pencils for a major DC event. Did it feel like a big deal joining a relatively small club that counted George Perez and John Byrne as two of its very few members? How did you end up landing the assignment?

By that point, I had, of course, been working on ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN as writer/artist and drawing GREEN ARROW. 

I left GA in mid-1990 and was fielding offers. Right around that time Dick Giordano called me up and said they were planning an event that they were hoping I’d be able to draw. He said, “Don’t book anything else!” Before long, I was on the phone with Mike Carlin, Archie Goodwin and Denny O’Neil talking about the story. I was a bit hesitant to take something on that I wasn’t going to write, as well as draw, but when it became clear that Archie would write Book One and Denny would write Book Two, I simply had to do it. One of the great things about working in comics is getting the chance to work with people whose work you enjoy and respect. Archie and Denny were at the top of the list for that.

So, yes, I was definitely on board from the start. And, once Archie’s script came in, I was really thrilled. It was a great story and from a technical standpoint, no one wrote an easier to interpret and clean, visual script than Archie.

I love Monarch's armor. Did you get to design him and Waverider? If so what kind of parameters were you given to work with?

Yes, I designed Monarch’s armor as well.

Archie had asked for something dour in terms of color as well as making sure that it would cover his entire body. That, of course, was to keep his identity secret.

As for Waverider, Archie, Mike, Denny and I had a conversation where we came to the general idea of him being a time traveling Silver Surfer type. Since the Monarch was going to have a larger, heavier appearance, we wanted someone lithe. The timestream trailing color effect was my own idea, kind of based on Star Trek’s Enterprise when it would go to warp. At the time, I thought, “People will realize this signifier will indicate time travel.” I like to think that it worked.

Did you have any involvement in the plotting or the scripting of the ARMAGEDDON bookend issues?

Not with Book One and only a bit with Book Two. By the time that rolled around we had enough conversations that there was a small bit of input. As much as anything, it also came up when it was decided to change the ending. By then we were into the question of how to do it and do it easily, since I was already well into drawing the story.

At the time, what did you think of the plan to turn "a major DC hero" into a major villain?

I totally supported the idea. We have to be able to surprise readers from time to time and something like that works. Frankly, I think it would have worked better with Captain Atom because he had the power level to fit the idea of it all. On top of that, it would have been easier to keep him as a villain over the long haul because he didn’t have the connections to other characters, like Hawk did with Dove, for example.

And that always falls into the category of whether or not later writers will stick with it. Too often, someone else will come along with the sole desire of changing the last thing in print because Hawk, Captain Atom, Popsicle Man or whomever, has been their favorite since age seven and, “How DARE those creators mess with that?!” 

I love that this was a crossover that justified a lot of "What if"  stories. Once you knew what the crossover premise was, were you determined to write one of the Superman Annuals?

If you go back to the first question where I talked about wanting to write most of what I drew at that point, I was told right from the start that I’d be able to write one of the Annuals. So that made it a bit more enticing to get on board.

And I had hoped to draw it as well, but there was only so much time in the day. And as it was, that’s when I was working crazy hours anyway!

One thing that puts ARMAGEDDON 2001 near the top of my list of crossover events is that its structure doesn't force the tie-ins to be held hostage by certain plot points. Like ZERO HOUR, the event mostly acts as a cool writing prompt for the participating teams to run with. So with the marching orders being "show us where your character is 10 years from now," where did your brainstorming process start?

So, stepping back on this a bit, the first big decision was to set this up in such a way that it didn’t follow the pattern of a monthly book with a lot of different monthlies crossing into it. There was a very deliberate move to step outside all of that on behalf of both retailers and readers, who were a bit tapped out by that process. 

It also made the project more enticing to writers of the connected books and stories because it didn’t interrupt the flow of where they were in their own arcs.

In terms of the creative process, it was really the thought of saying, “Show us the future with something fun.” In other words, it as part of the exercise to step outside of where the character might logically go. So, a story idea or whacky new costume might be more likely to get approved than if it were part of the, “This WILL be THE FUTURE!” type of approach.

Did you give any consideration to telling the most plausible version of Superman's future, since at that point in comics, the character's existed in a perpetual present, where it seemed unlikely the storytelling would ever advance to their middle aged years? Or was your interest always in telling a future that you'd never want to experience with Superman? Were there any alternate pitches you toyed with before arriving where you did?

The ideas I had really swept into the one that saw print quite fast. I didn’t pitch anything radically different. It was more along the lines of a dialogue with Mike Carlin where we bounced various aspects of the overall concept back and forth. 

And we did want to step outside the continuity of the ongoing books at the time— to give it a bit of a different flavor.

Initially I wanted to talk to you about this because I remembered this as one of the first "Evil Superman" stories before that trope started being beaten to death over the last 10-15 years. And the unexpected thing to me when I reread it was that... I saw a lot more of "real Clark" in this authoritarian-leaning Superman than we've seen in stories like INJUSTICE. 

Can you talk about how you approached keeping some familiar aspects of the character even as he's taking actions that make the federal government and even Batman feel like he's stepped over the line? Were there any ideas you considered and then discarded because it would have made him TOO evil?

The balance was to keep Superman “in character” will also putting him on edge. 

Evil Superman for the sake of being evil doesn’t interest me because it’s too much of a detour. But keeping Clark more grounded and real makes it more of a logical— and not so distant— jump. 

At what point in the development process did you realize that Batman had to be the one to take on Superman in this story?

Batman was involved with the story idea right from the start. Some of the elements and ideas actually came to me while doing the DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS story a few years earlier. 

That often happens to me while drawing a story. Basic ideas can perk around in my head while I’m drawing a story, well after I’ve written it. I’ll be drawing page 10 (or whatever) and cooking on the next chapter, which I would have had no idea of beforehand.

The best example of this is Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman,  who I always so as a one-shot character. That changed once I started drawing that exact same story. 

Of course, with DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS, you're referencing Superman giving Batman the kryptonite ring and telling him that if he ever goes bad, he wants the means to stop him in the hands of a man he'd trust with his life. I can see how once that Chekov's Gun exists, you'd find it an irresistible hook to play out somehow.

Was the idea to homage the Batman/Superman battle from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS simultaneous with that? It certainly was the most famous fight between those two.

Yes, definitely. I’d also add that a lot of creators within the Superman team had conflicting feelings about that fight because Superman was made to look like a government stooge of Ronald Reagan’s. 

We didn’t see him that way at all. He and Batman could disagree and be in conflict… and we recognized that Batman was supposed to be the coolest character in that particular story… but Superman coming off as a stooge might have been the wrong way to go.

But… that having been said… once the Kryptonite ring of Luthor’s fell into Batman’s possession, it was too cool NOT to use.

I remember reading this issue at 11 years old and noting the contrast with SUPERMAN IV. In that movie, Superman addresses the United Nations, tells the world he's taking away their nukes, and everyone cheers. Here, you've got a Superman on an extreme anti-nuke crusade and while it seems he still has a lot of public support, we see that the President considers him a threat to national security, which is something we didn't see happen in SUPERMAN IV. Was that movie on your mind at all as you wrote the issue?

Yes, it was. 

While I admired aspects of the movie and didn’t care for others, I don’t think we should be naive about what would happen if anyone ever showed up and said, “I’m taking away the world’s weapons. Especially those of the most powerful.”

I don’t believe the current president would react well to such a move, do you?

Certainly not him or ANY other prior U.S President, that’s for sure!

For the conclusion of my chat with Dan Jurgens, go here. 

If you want an overview of Dan Jurgens's Superman career, take a look at the tribute I wrote for the publication of ACTION COMICS 1000.

I started writing about BUFFY's "The Body" on the 25th anniversary and it spiraled into a personal story about other episodes that mattered to me

Yesterday was the first anniversary of Michelle Trachtenberg's passing and it got me thinking about how it probably was the anniversary of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode, "The Body." For those not immediately understanding the connection - Michelle played Dawn Summers, Buffy's sister, on that show, and "The Body" is a touchstone episode of TV centered on the death of Buffy's mother.

As it turns out, a day separates the two anniversaries, but it is the 25th anniversary of that powerful episode. As someone who had their budding TV writer mind blown by it when I saw it in my dorm room back in 2001, I kinda reel at the fact it's been that long and modern TV still lives in the shadow of this show's influence and its contemporaries. In 2001, 1976 would have seemed like ancient history in TV terms. Yet, just looking at the words "The Body," takes me back to experiencing the show all over again.

I did a two-part examination of this episode sixteen years ago (I've been really doing this for that long? Oy) and so I'm not going to rehash or recap much of the episode. If you want to see what I said back in 2010, go here and here.

I wrote those pieces while under the shield of anonymity, so there were a couple personal details I didn't bother going into at that point. For me, there are certain shows and episodes that are indelibly linked with what was going on in my personal and professional lives at the same time. This particular season of BUFFY was airing concurrently with me running my campus TV drama. It was my Fantasy Showrunner period while I was writing and directing episodes with friends that would later air on our campus's closed circuit cable channel.

(This too I have talked about in greater length, here and here.)

We'd been shooting the show for about six weeks. At this point, we didn't even have a completed cut of an episode. But everyone involved was having so much fun that the actors had already be asking me "Do you think you'll do this again next year?" My answer was always, "Let's survive this season first!" But in truth, the wheels had already been turning in my head.

The first season was being written in "Exquisite Corpse" style. I wrote the pilot, introduced the characters, set up a lot of conflicts and stories, and ended it on a cliffhanger. I hand the script to the next writer/director and they go wherever they want, setting up the third writer and then the fourth. As showrunner, I set up a rule that in the first round, you couldn't kill off any characters.

But being the first writer in the second round, I had first shot at killing someone, and so I did. The boyfriend, Josh, to our female lead, Katherine, just wasn't coming across on screen the way we wanted. So, first chance I got, he was dead. For fun I'd suggested that when each of us wrote our cliffhangers, we should write down where we'd take the storylines after that if we were in charge. Then at the end of the season, we'd see how close we were.

It forced me to give a lot of thought to the consequences of killing Josh. And in my wannabe showrunner-trained-by-the-WB brain, it didn't take too long to decide that a REAL writer wouldn't just let Josh's murder be a cheap stunt. It should be a character defining story for Katherine and that the next season she should be sliding further and further into depression. It would lead to some powerful, emotional character work akin to what I found in my favorite shows. I even envisioned the climax of this story being her friends staging an intervention as her depression progressed to full on suicidal.

My film professor had warned me years earlier that every student film was about alcohol and suicide. I failed to heed this.

I remember we shot the murder scene outside in the cold on Saturday, February 10th. That was when I tipped off my lead actress to my thoughts and subsequently told one of my other writers. He seemed utterly perplexed that I would want to tell that story on the show. So I explained to him the three episodes of TV that were huge influences on me.

The first was an episode of THE WONDER YEARS called "The Accident." Kevin and Winnie see each other for the first time a couple months after they broke up. Kevin is concerned that she's hanging out with some older boys and isn't acting like herself. She pushes him away, tells him she just wants to forget everything that happened the last three years (i.e. since her brother died in Vietnam). Kevin isn't sure what's going on with her, but it's not good. In the end, she's in a car accident and gets a broken leg for her trouble, which seems to be a wakeup call. If you remember anything about the episode, it's probably the final scene, where Kevin climbs up to her window as the anachronistic music cue of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" plays and Kevin and Winnie say "I love you" to each other.

The second one was "Crosetti," an episode of HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET that deals with the suicide of one of the squad's own, Detective Crosetti. When his body is pulled out of the harbor, Detectives Munch and Bolander immediately assume suicide, but out of sensitivity, Bolander is ordered to investigate it as wrongful death. Half the episode is the squad dealing with how shocking it all seems and the other half is about how Lewis, Crosetti's partner, is in denial that it's suicide and actively tries to mess with witnesses who'd speak to Crosetti's depression.

Most people remember that episode for the final scene where Andre Braugher's Pembleton defies a "no honor guard" order and salutes the funeral procession in dress blues. I remember it for the previous act break. The autopsy report comes in and the tox screen leaves no doubt that Crosetti intentionally overdosed. In an incredible performance from Clark Johnson, we see Lewis's denial collapse like a house of cards. His voice breaks and in sobs that make no effort to put on a brave or masculine front, he cries, "He killed himself!" as Bolander immediately drops any antagonism to Lewis and pulls him in a bear hug.

This history informs my third episode of choice, a later episode of HOMICIDE called "Have a Conscience" that climaxed a long-running story where Detective Mike Kellerman, played by Reed Diamond, had been accused of taking bribes and spent weeks being portrayed in the media as a dirty cop. Even though he's exonerated, it wounded him deeply that his coworkers thought he was crooked and the combination of that with a brutal case and a guy on the street recognizing him as that dirty cop sends him over the edge. His partner, Lewis stops by his houseboat that evening and immediately intuits that something is seriously wrong with Mike. 

A good chunk of the episode is Mike holding his gun during a breakdown, clearly on the verge of ending it all. Lewis, who probably wouldn't usually be the guy you count on to diffuse that situation, is desperately trying to get through to Mike, to reach him on some level. The emotional stakes couldn't be higher - he lost one partner to suicide. He can't lose another. It's absolutely intense, and I'd never seen ANYTHING like that on TV. Apparently the whole suicide plotline freaked out NBC so it's a minor miracle the episode was even made.

You've probably forgotten how I got here, but all of that was what I was trying to unpack to my skeptical friend who wasn't understanding why I'd send the show down that path. And then a couple weeks later, we were there, watching "The Body" together, both of us determined not to ugly cry in front of the other. The next time the subject came up, I remember eventually he said something like, "No, I get you. For every 'Something Blue,' you're gonna have a 'The Body.'"

Of course, by the time the scripts for season 2 were written and given to the cast, "The Body" was several months old. A very large number of people who worked on my show were BUFFY fans, so more than one person's reaction was, "You're trying to do something like 'The Body,' right?" A couple times I tried to explain, no, I really wanted to do something dark before I even saw that episode, but ultimately it was just easier to say "Yes."

My depression and suicide storyline taught me an extremely important lesson. I knew it was a big tonal departure and ultimately the intervention episode was Episode 5, which meant for four episodes, Katherine's plot was going to be about steadily ratcheting up her depression. Four full episodes where the main character has some heavy stuff to deal with. I wasn't experienced enough to understand how much gravity the main character pulls, even when you try to balance an episode with lighter, wackier humor. Your lead character is like a gravity well, pulling the tone of every other storyline into it.

Basically, in my bid to be dramatic and meaningful, I killed the fun train. I haven't watched it in 24 years, but even at the time, it didn't take me long to realize my error. There were some effective moments, surely... but it was also often too indulgent, too melodramatic and too "Look at me! I'm directing." My dialogue was too on the nose in places and there was too much of it.

In other words, the mistakes everyone makes on their first couple scripts. I'm not kidding when I say I learned more doing this TV show I never got any kind of school credit for than I did from anything else in college. When you're churning out that much output, spotting your weaknesses happens much more quickly and you can start growing past them sooner. The lessons of that season are ones I carry into my work to this very day.

If you've done the math, you might have realized that this second season of our show was being produced while Season Six of BUFFY was airing. That season is built around Buffy suffering intense depression following her resurrection and her friends' discovery they tore her back not from Hell, but Heaven. It's dark but not in the cool, compelling way BUFFY always had been. This season was straight up depressing. Buffy's come back to life and life SUCKS. Season Six piles on the misery and there's a point where it feels like every episode is crafted to add to Buffy's misery.

This was a 22 episode season and to really twist the knife, the emotional low of the season spanned seven or so episodes that took something like four months to play out on screen thanks to long hiatues. Somewhere in the midst of that, I said to myself, "What the hell were these writers thinking? Why would they let this depressing storyline take over the show for so long? No one wants to see our lead just beaten down week-after-week... OH SHIT. I did the same thing!"

There was a bit of a relief in knowing that your idols jumped headfirst into LITERALLY the same mistake you made. And there's also some dark humor in venting and ranting about a creative decision you see as an unforgivable mistake, only to realize you could be talking about yourself. I was so concerned with making something "important" and "meaningful" that I failed to consider how much that storyline ran counter to everything else I enjoyed about the show... and certainly what other people enjoyed in the show.

I don't believe a creator should consider the audience as their first priority. You tell stories you want to tell, something that matters to you, and you hope the right people get it. But sometimes it's possible to lose sight of why you want to tell that story, and you end up making something that you yourself wouldn't even enjoy.

Hard lesson to learn, but I'm glad I learned it early.

An additional grace note to this story is that about two years later, EVERWOOD did a season long arc of Amy Abbott falling into depression after her boyfriend's death... and they fucking nailed it. After like two years of beating myself up for getting it wrong, it was so instructive to see how Greg Berlanti, Rina Mimoun and the rest of the writers crafted a story that took Amy to some dark and unlikable places without it all swallowing the show whole. I spent that whole season going, "This is what I was TRYING to do!"

This was yet another reason why it felt like such a full circle moment when I actually got to write an episode with Rina on SUPERMAN & LOIS. Every now and then, life comes together so neatly that you'd swear someone was writing it.

As for "The Body" itself, it's a powerful episode of TV. I still see it used as a touchstone for when a show does a super-serious episode. At the time, I remember being pissed that the Emmys utterly ignored this in every category. Ignoring Sarah Michelle Gellar's intense performance felt especially criminal. And this is one area where my feelings have evolved in 25 years.

SMG was great in this episode, but you know what? She slayed (ha, ha) every episode. BUFFY was a hard enough tone to hit in the writing, but even when the writing is there, an actor who doesn't know how to play those tonal mixes and shifts can bring everything down. And it's even more clear to me in hindsight that there is far too little respect paid to genre that kicks ass at being genre. 

Fans spent years saying "The Body" was Emmy-worthy and it was a snub to show it no respect. And then one day it hit me - one of the defining features of "The Body" is that it has virtually zero supernatural elements. Joyce Summers dies of an aneurysm - nothing supernatural, nothing the result of a villain trying to hurt Buffy. It's so mundane and human. Spike isn't even in the episode and when a vampire does show up in the final moments, it's mostly there just to remind us that Buffy's day job doesn't stop even on the worst day of her life.

And it goes without saying that BUFFY's traditional humor is all but absent.

Are you following where I'm going with this? We bought into the idea that in order for BUFFY to be taken seriously by its peers, it had to strip itself of so many of the defining things that made it "BUFFY." It's like saying that if you want a genre show to be honored, the first thing you do is erase everything that makes it genre and just do what a normal drama would.

Fuck. That.

I'm not saying creators shouldn't do that if they want. But when you step back, there is something deeply elitist about the attitude that "oh, now that you're only playing the piano keys that all the normal shows play, we can take you seriously." It's like saying, "BUFFY's so unique and specific... have you tried just being PARTY OF FIVE for an episode?"

There's a lot in "The Body" that's relatable, emotionally powerful even. For some, it might be cathartic to see their heroes experiencing normal grief that they can relate to. I'm not taking shots at any of that.

But is it superior to letting BUFFY just be BUFFY? Maybe the better question is: of all the stories that could be rewarded, is this one head and shoulders above the rest?

I say no. Give me the Musical Episode, the Graduation Episode, the Angelus-kills-Jenny Episode. Give me the ones that embrace genre, not tamps it down so the normies don't get scared off. When you ask me, "What BUFFYs should have gotten Emmys?" I don't know if I'll be so quick to go to "The Body" as an injustice.

Which is not to say that it isn't still deeply powerful and heart-wrenching. And I'm sure I wasn't the only writer to fall on my face trying to do something like it. The good part is once you make those mistakes, if you're smart you won't make them again. 

And sometimes you have the relief of seeing the pros you look up to fall into the same trap, even if they started from much stronger footing than you. 

Today is the 5th anniversary of SUPERMAN & LOIS!

The pandemic absolutely destroyed any sense I had about the passage of time. How else to explain that today marks five years since the premiere of SUPERMAN & LOIS?

As a lifelong Superman fan, this series was a big deal for me on a lot of fronts. It was my first writing credit, my first staff job, and the first time I went to set to produce an episode.

However, it was not my first job in TV. Before that I had been a Writers' PA on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS and a Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE - both CBS shows, by coincidence. There was still a bit of an awe to working on a network show back then. I remember almost exactly ten years ago, around mid-April 2016, I found myself alone in the writers' room on NCIS: NOLA. The finale was just about to start shooting so most of the writers had finished their work for the season and had started hiatus. Our upper-levels were mostly working from home and since the production draft of the finale was distributed, I'd been given the go-ahead to finally clear the board of that episode's storybreak.

As I cleaned the cards, I specifically remember thinking that in a month, some 14 million people were going to be in front of their TVs, watching scenes that started right there in the room a couple weeks ago as just a few words on a dry-erase card. 14 MILLION PEOPLE were going to be entertained by the results of ten people debating in this shitty room in Santa Clarita.

I had to consciously remind myself of that because from my perspective, I never felt any audience reaction to the show. My parents and another family from back home watched the show, but beyond that I didn't know anyone in the real world who even seemed aware of it. And this was not a show with a passionate online following, or at least not one in the internet corners where I went. At the start of the season, then-showrunner Jeff Lieber had introduced my public (i.e. non-Bitter) Twitter handle to his followers as the new assistant on the show. I gained about 50 NCIS-related followers from that... but a significant number of those handles were variations on "Mrs. Scott Bakula." It was a reminder where the truly passionate appeal of the show laid.

Thus, as far as feeling the audience's presence... I really didn't. And certainly, had no place where I felt any appreciation of the work that was being done in the writers room. BLOOD & TREASURE had a smaller audience - it premiered at 5.62 million viewers and finished the season at less than half of that - and it still had more linear viewing eyeballs than our highest rated episode of S&L.

But the difference with S&L was that that audience was very much in evidence. They were impossible not find online. The show was regularly discussed on the geek sites I visited often and in comic stores and at conventions, people were familiar with the show and had a deep awareness of the stories.

When you work on a character like Superman, you're very aware there really aren't any Superman shows or movies that become obscure. (The 1988-92 SUPERBOY TV series is an exception, and only because that show was completely pulled from any kind of distribution for decades.) Whatever you make with that character is going to live forever - for good or for ill. I don't know if there will be any 20 year oral histories of BLOOD & TREASURE, but I'm certain that SUPERMAN & LOIS will get some kind of retrospective whenever a big anniversary rolls around.

I'm proud of our contribution to the Superman mythos. I think we honored the characters and who they were supposed to be while also telling our story in a period of Clark and Lois's life that hadn't been covered on-screen before (and was barely touched in the comics too.) I think it was very important that we didn't just retread the Reeve films, or any of the TV shows. The show had its own voice AND a large number of fans watched because they felt it was doing Superman and Lois Lane "right." That kind of result is never effortless.

It was also a show whose creation was defined by the pandemic to some extent. We were ordered to series in January 2020 and the writers' mini-room assembled a month later, in mid-February. At that point, the plan was that the room would work for six weeks mapping out the start of the series. We were figuring out the characters, the long arcs, even sketching in the first six or seven eps conceptually. Then we take a break at the end of March to shoot and edit the pilot, at which point we'd see how all of that played on screen, which in turn would guide the writing and the shooting of subsequent episodes.

As it turned out, all hell broke loose with COVID in mid-March and so we not only started working via Zoom, but the pilot production was pushed. And then it kept getting pushed further and further. As the lockdowns stretched on, there were definitely days where I worried that the show would just be cancelled outright.

By the time we started shooting the pilot in late October, we'd broken 11 or 12 episodes, and had full scripts for most of the episodes before that. It was probably inevitable that many of them would be adjusted as we saw how the actors and storylines were coming across on-screen. And yes, pretty much every episode got rewritten, many of them significantly. It was an enormous amount of work for our upper level writers, but I'll always remember that since we'd spent nearly a year learning more and more about our characters, those rewrites were what really elevated the show to what the audience experienced. Creatively, it was a better show for the extra time we were forced to take making it. Though I did occasionally threaten to have T-shirts made for everyone that said "The Season So Nice, We Wrote It Twice."

Every now and then I'll see one of our detractors snark about "CW writers." The disrespect irked me, even though I should have just taken it as evidence of the speakers complete ignorance and dismissed their statement altogether. Every writer on S&L who wasn't on their first job had credits on premium cable TV shows, network shows, or both. That's a fact that generally holds true across most of the CW shows. I obviously can't speak about shows I didn't work on, but I know that our team worked as hard as any pay-cable staff and took their work equally seriously.

As I've said before - working on this show was a great gift. During the pandemic, particularly during the part of it when my father died, nothing helped preserve my sanity more than being able to go into a room and spend the better part of the day talking about the Superman mythos. I'll also never forget the thrill that came one day in fall when we saw the first costume fitting photos of Tyler in the new suit. I remember thinking it was one of the best on-screen Superman costumes and it was a privilege to be the first to see it. During a dark time, those wins meant everything. The show became my refuge from the pandemic and everything bad associated with it. When it finally premiered, I recall seeing several viewers talk about what it meant to them to have a positive and uplifting show to invest in while they were emotionally processing the horrible year that had just passed.

For a great many reasons, this show will always be inseparable from the pandemic for me. It hung over the entire production, but particularly the first two years. COVID complicated production in so many ways - and certainly this wasn't unique to our show. Our first season was so delayed in starting filming that our final episodes ended up airing deep into summer. The staff had assembled to begin planning Season 2 before the first season had finished airing, and that was so close to the end of shooting that people like our showrunner Todd Helbing had essentially no break between season 1 and season 2. And that's not even getting into how Season 2's airing schedule ended up with some long breaks between episodes because COVID shutdowns slowed production. It made hard jobs even harder.

In spite of all of that, one aspect of SUPERMAN & LOIS I'm most proud of is that if you just take in the episodes themselves, it doesn't feel like a show that was made during COVID. The many compromises don't show up on the screen and I feel pretty confident that the new audiences that discover the show over the next 20 or so years aren't going to have confusion or questions that end up being explained with "We did it that way because of COVID."

As I said, if there's one thing you know about working on these shows it's that some fans will still be talking about it and debating it years later. We already gain new viewers all the time. I pretty regularly see people posing things on social media to the effect of "I just started binging SUPERMAN & LOIS and it's already one of my favorite shows! How did I never hear about this?"

Back in the late 90s, when I was still in school and could only dream of being a TV writer, two of my favorite shows were STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. Both shows dealt with complex characters who often had to reckon with thorny moral issues and situations that challenged their belief. Another thing they had in common was that despite critical acclaim, neither one ever had a large audience. Even among their peers, they earned fewer eyeballs than some of their more mainstream cousins.

For me, this also meant that stumbling across someone who was as passionate as I was about those shows was a rare occurrence. It wasn't like finding someone who liked SEINFELD, or FRIENDS, or ER. Those were the most popular shows on TV - of course you'd find people who loved them. But a fellow DS9-er?  It also was like a secret handshake that revealed "This person is in the club. This one is a cool guy." In college, there was a guy on the fringes of my friend group who I didn't click with the first time we met. We were definitely oil and water... until the day when we discovered we were both HOMICIDE fans. Almost immediately, we reevaluated each other and our connection through the show turned us into great friends.

And so, on those nights when I'd dream of writing for a show like the ones I'd watch, I often thought about how it probably be more rewarding to write for a DS9. It might not be loved by every Star Trek fan, but the fans you HAD were the kind that would hang on every episode. If you hit that kind of audience, you knew that what you wrote would mean a LOT to a small amount of people. 

A Superman show that aired on the least-viewed major network and that probably found most of its audience on streaming probably isn't too far off from the kind of reception I imagined getting all those years ago. As time has gone on, DS9 has become so popular in TREK circles, so often cited as "the best" of all the shows that it has become hard to remember just how mixed a reception it got in its original run. I wonder if I might someday look back at this post on a subsequent anniversary and remark that SUPERMAN & LOIS's audience has bloomed similarly?

But even if it doesn't, it was an honor to be a part of this show, no matter how big the audience was.

Five years ago, I had an amazing creative experience with the live-read of CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS

I'm right in the middle of a seven-day period bracketed by unpleasant anniversaries. And yet, right in between those is the oasis that is the five-year anniversary of the Zoom live read of my script CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS. CRISIS might be the personal project I'm most proud of, and definitely was my favorite experience in terms of seeing an audience react to my work.

It was an idea that first arose out of the boredom of the pandemic. It's strange how that period of time feels so fresh and so distant at the same time. We were just a few months in, positive COVID cases were rising, and no end was in sight. Freezer trucks were outside of hospitals because it was the only way to deal with all the bodies and a good portion of the country was trapped at home. The lucky ones were able to work via Zoom. The unlucky ones saw their savings dwindle.

I can't say it's a time most of us care to revisit. And even then, a lot of us were getting through it by binging old TV shows. I was no exception, and on a day in May, my recent binge led me to a stray quips about two characters who shared the same name. I joked on Twitter that there needed to be a CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS in order to iron out some connections between those shows. I should have expected, but didn't, this would provoke people to tweet at me, "you should write it!"

I wasn't serious about it, but I figured I could write a page or two, just to continue the joke.

An hour later, I'd written the first four pages, just as an exercise. At that link, you can see where I've collected some of the Twitter responses to that first blast. It was the pandemic and dopamine was in low supply so I chased that rush again the following night with four more pages. These pages - involving the GILMORE GIRLS - got an even BETTER response.

Truth be told, I don't know if I ever have gotten such immediate positive reinforcement. And so I dropped another four pages the next night, and six more the night after that. Somewhere in there I got a message from Ben Blacker, who said that whenever this was done, he had a platform for doing Zoom live reads and he'd love to host CRISIS.

I was like, "Ben, this was just a fun exercise. I don't have a complete script, or even know what the full story would be!" 

"Then write it," was Ben's simple response. As if it was that easy.

There are a lot of reasons a script comes into being. The best and most noble is when the writer has a story they're burning to tell and it's the right story for that moment.

But a close second is when you have an audience that is telling you they WANT more of what you're doing. When that sincerity is backed up by them telling other people they should read what you're putting out there... it gets a lot easier to face the blank page. 

Suffice to say, about a week later, I finished my full draft. There was some turmoil in the world at that exact moment, so I held onto it for an extra week or so before unleashing it publicly. And that started the process of casting this live read. I knew that if possible, I wanted to get as many teen drama actors reprising their roles as I could... and the start of making that happen was with reaching out to my boss on SUPERMAN & LOIS, Greg Berlanti.

Greg had been a showrunner or an executive producer on a few shows depicted in my script, DAWSON'S CREEK, RIVERDALE and KATY KEENE. The better argument for bringing him into the loop was that the show that was his baby, EVERWOOD, was pretty pivotal to the story and those were the returning actors I wanted to get the most. I have a whole post devoted to Greg's involvement, so I'll merely direct you there and sum up that he got me my white whales of Gregory Smith reprising Ephram Brown and Emily VanCamp returning as Amy Abbott.

I'm not sure what was a bigger boost to my ego - the first conversation where Greg Smith told me that he thought I nailed Ephram's voice, or several weeks later when we were recording it. I was watching Greg and Emily become those roles again and got lost in how seamlessly they fell back into character. It felt like a real episode of EVERWOOD - so much so that for a moment, I kinda forgot I had written those words! And then when that was done hitting me, I remember allowing myself to accept that "Wow, it really works. You totally imitated the voice of the show and of those characters." 

That was a feeling I got several times during the live-read recording. We ended up with an amazing cast. The very first actor to speak was my friend Mark Gagliardi, who was playing the adult Kevin from THE WONDER YEARS. I'd written a narration that felt very in the style of that show, but as we were slotting in actors, we let them know they had the freedom to interpret the parts however they wanted. They didn't have to feel like they were locked into imitating the actual actors. It gave this wonderful suspense to the recording because - yes, we did in fact get EVERYONE on the same Zoom and record them together - whenever a new character popped up, you were eager to see how they'd be played.

Anyway, Mark came right out of the gate with a pitch-perfect Daniel Stern imitation, right down to the cadence he used. I was staring at something like 15 or 20 people in Zoom boxes with expressions of amazement and delight. They all kinda went, "Holy shit! So that's how it's gonna be!" The 90 minutes or so that followed was some of the most pure joy I've ever experienced in a creative setting. I can't speak for anyone else who was a part of it, but for me it was one of those experiences that reminded me why I wanted to be a writer.

I was not prepared for Melissa Fumero to absolutely own the role of Lorelei Gilmore. I was a massive fan of BROOKLYN NINE-NINE, so just getting her was a coup, but to actually HEAR Lauren Graham in her voice was astounding. On the other end of the spectrum, I wasn't all that familiar with Isabella Gomez but I became a fan for life with how she brought Rory Gilmore to life. And then we had people like Jamie Moyer as Sue Sylvester and Matt Lauria as Dawson Leery, two people who I wasn't terribly familiar with and who played their parts WAY outside the original interpretations.... and still killed it!

My friend Nick Wechlser did double-duty as Archie Andrews and Lucas Scott, going his own way on both and just meshed so well with the hilarious Vella Lovell as Veronica Lodge. Vella really threw herself into the musical number, as did Emmy Raver-Lampman, Lindsay Blackwell, and Carloine Ward.

Did I bury the lede? Yes, Paul and Storm put together a Zoom musical number using the GLEE arrangement of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." When I wrote it, I knew it was the most audacious thing I could put in a live read. I doubted we could pull it off, so that's why it was so gratifying to see the tweet reactions roll in, "Holy shit! They did a MUSICAL NUMBER!"

I saved every one of those reactions, by the way. They all got linked in the reaction post here, and the nice thing about embedding tweets is that even when the original account gets deleted, you can still see the text of what was said. I can't tell you how much I needed those positive vibes that week.

Well, I guess I should. I don't like that it's part of this story, but fate had other plans.

See, just a couple days before this live read dropped, my dad was put on a ventilator. He'd been hospitalized for about two weeks with COVID and that was when he took a heavy turn for the worse. In a segment following the show, I dedicated the production to him, saying that "He'll see it when he wakes up."

He never did. The show premiered on Friday night and he died in the early hours of Monday morning. 

The joy of seeing everyone react to CRISIS and telling me what it meant to them was a necessary interruption of the stress and sorrow of that week. I needed this show to be an intrusion on that horror, but that also meant that any time in the last five years this came to mind, the grief would intrude on the accomplishment. It really sucks to have this particular moment of victory forever tied to one of the worst things in my life. And I think that's all the acknowledgment I want to give that.

In that spirit, I was blown away by how many reactions, tweets, and texts I got AS SOON as the show ended. You could watch it at any point for eight days, so I was very moved by the people who HAD to see it as soon as it was released. I could tell a lot of them were people who had grown up on these shows like I had. 

That nostalgic connection to more innocent times was something we really needed then. I think that's backed up by how many nostalgia podcasts for those shows have launched in the time since - THE OC, GOSSIP GIRL, SMALLVILLE, and ONE TREE HILL all have or had recent podcasts hosted by cast members taking a look back.

My favorite of those is the ONE TREE HILL podcast, called Drama Queens. Sadly it's on the verge of finishing its run after another couple of episodes, but it launched in Summer 2021 with Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan and Bethany Joy Lenz as hosts, giving us their perspective on the show episode-by-episode. There's a lot of backstory connected to this, as the women of OTH had come forward a few years earlier about how their showrunner was a sexually harassing, abusive, misogynistic asshole. The podcast was a way for three of the shows stars to reclaim the experience for themselves. When necessary, they cued us in to what was really going on behind the scenes at various points in the series, including how the showrunner would stoke conflict among the women to keep them fighting each other and not himself.

Hilarie left the show after season 6, when her character departed, and since then Robert Buckley has filled the third chair. No matter the configuration, I've always enjoyed hearing the actors perspectives, especially when they're so different from what a fan's viewpoint might be. It was a privilege to experience them reliving their early adulthood, and in the show's better moments, we could see the women taking something more profound from the entire experience.

There's a recent exchange between Joy and Sophia that to me sums up not only their journey with their podcast, but also the emotions we get out of reliving these touchstone shows. It happens in Episode 822, covering the finale of the penultimate season. It's a little more than 42 minutes in.

Joy: I'm so grateful for our show. I'm also you know, there are everybody has life experiences where it's packed full of things that you're so grateful for, and then you also realized you've learned so many lessons from because there were a lot of bad things in it too. But you know, overall, I'm so grateful that we got to have the experience that we did.

Sophia: ...The cool thing about the rewatch and the time we get to spend - and I don't just mean us as hosts, I mean all of us - like going to our conventions and doing this podcast together and having all the friends on it all the time... it just it gives you something back... You go through you can go through a hard thing and you kind of lose certain memories. Like when you've been through a trauma or whatever, that thing becomes the biggest thing in your rearview mirror in certain ways in your brain. 

And what I've loved about this journey is that it's kind of right size to that stuff. It's shrunken it down to only take up the amount of space, you know, the least amount of space it should... less space than it did at the time, And it feels like it's increased. It feels like it's blown up the balloons of all our good memories to be bigger. Yeah, and I don't know that we would have had that otherwise.

And so in celebrating this project of pure joy, remembering all the connection and creativity I felt during various stages of its birth, I feel like I can finally shrink down the tragedy it also connected to... the COVID shutdowns, the isolation... the death...

And I'll also remember how simple it seemed to Ben Blacker when I told him I didn't have a complete script:

"Then write it."

Kinda takes away every excuse for not going to work, doesn't it?

If you want to download the script, go here.

And if at any point, you're confused about something in the script and want to know what I'm referencing, the complete annotations are here.

Peter David and the art of the tie-in novel

Novelist and comic book writer Peter David died this past weekend. His work had been a part of my life since I was in grade school and any eulogy seems inadequate at conveying the breadth of his work and the impact it had on thousands, if not millions of fans. In seeing other tributes, I've noted that alongside some obvious overlaps, every fan of Peter seemed to have their own distinct favorites among his giant body of work.

Having already championed his brilliant work on the DC comic YOUNG JUSTICE in this Bluesky thread, I want to take a few paragraphs and talk about how he helped bring respectability to a somewhat misunderstood and maligned area of writing - the tie-in novels.

Many of the most popular film and TV franchises have a series of novels set in their respective continuities. STAR TREK and STAR WARS almost certainly account for the largest of these, but over the years, plenty of novels have been set in the worlds of ALIEN, THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, QUANTUM LEAP, UNDERWORLD, TERMINATOR, even TRANSFORMERS. For a long time these had a reputation as quickly churned out product intended to capitalize on the franchise's popularity. The impression I have is that it wasn't cool in writers' circles to say "I write BUFFY and STAR TREK novels." To a serious author, it sounded like the work of fan fiction.

Flashback to the early 90s, when the STAR TREK books were coming out at a pace of about one a month via Pocket Books and occupied multiple shelves of a bookcase at the local Waldenbooks. I had just gotten into STAR TREK and was becoming aware of these books. It was an era when the books were operating on a tighter set of guidelines from Roddenberry's office. Some of these handcuffs have passed into legend among fans, but the gist of it is, writers weren't allowed to write stories that made sweeping changes to the world or the characters.

This isn't unusual for licensed tie-ins for a simple reason - no matter how they market it, no matter what they tell you, THE BOOKS ARE NOT CANON. A novel can't reveal that Uhura is in a secret marriage because that contradicts what we know of her on-screen, and the on-screen canon viewed by millions will never be held hostage by the books that have about 1% of that audience. Strong writers can tell compelling stories within this but during a time when it was hard to get approval for anything that brushed near the lines, the books tended to stick to safe and soft premises. There were a lot of planet-of-the-week stories, middle of the road stuff that would have resembled "filler" eps of the TV show.

That changed for me when I visited the book store at some point in the Summer of 1991 to find a STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION novel called VENDETTA. Seeing Picard and Guinan flanking a Borg on the cover got my attention immediately.

A sequel to The Best of Both Worlds? This wasn't just another novel about the Enterprise running across a new alien species with strange beliefs. This was the kind of story the fans WANTED to see. And that was the kind of story Peter soon had a reputation for. In IMZADI, he told us the backstory of Riker and Troi's courtship. In Q-IN-LAW, he gave us a meeting between TNG's most popular recurring characters - the omnipotent Q and the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi. (Legend has it that Roddenberry's assistant denied approval for that novel and so Peter slipped a copy to Majel Barrett Roddenberry (i.e. both Mrs. Troi and Mrs. Roddenberry), who loved it so much she insisted it be published.

Those high concept premises led to his critics sometimes undervaluing him as a "fannish" writer. And yes, a number of the premises can sound like fan fiction to an uncharitable cynic, but Peter executed these stories at the highest level, while displaying a great love and understanding of the characters. He knew his continuity forwards and backwards too, using it to tie together unrelated pieces of the lore so deftly that it felt like those connections were always intended.

And he was funny. Few STAR TREK works have made me laugh as deeply as a Peter David work. And in his best moments, the humor all came from character, such as when an elderly Spock and McCoy are reunited in the TNG timeframe on the Enterprise-D and immediately resume their friendly bickering in THE MODALA IMPERATIVE. A more satisfying meeting of the generations than the TNG episode "Unification" (released just months later) was, Peter envisioned Spock and Data challenging each other to a chess match... with the boards existing only in their minds!

It was clear these books were never a "paycheck" job to Peter. They were a labor of love. His works were popular enough that he got to push some of the boundaries, and he had the good fortune to be a golden boy in the Trek office as many of the restrictions were relaxed and rescinded. 

By 1997, Pocket Books was publishing two new STAR TREK novels a month, spanning the 4 extant series. They were ready to try an experiment - a book-only STAR TREK series under the control of a single author. Naturally, they turned to one of their most popular novelists, Peter David, to conceive of this. The result was STAR TREK: NEW FRONTIER, set aboard a Federation starship assigned to a previously unrevealed region of space, with a new captain and several members of the crew who had been introduced in TNG episodes. The idea was to tell stories where everything didn't have to be reset at the end, where characters could change, die, get promoted and get replaced in ways that the other novels were prohibited from.

NEW FRONTIER ultimately accounts for the majority of Peter's TREK novels, 23 in all. It came of age as TNG, DS9, and VOYAGER were all winding down their onscreen journeys. With no new on-screen canon to restrict the authors, Pocket Books was free to commission novels set after those series and loosen most of the few remaining constraints on canon. This made NEW FRONTIER feel a little less special, but the benefit was the entire novel line felt fresh and a far cry from the "assembly line" it sometimes had been accused of being.

What I learned from Peter David's work (and the work of a number of others) is that these licensed product jobs are what you make of them. Good, even great work can be done in these universes, even with the most fanfiction-y of premises. None of these would be mistaken for the works of a hack, and they were a joy to reread many times over the years. He was an unabashed fan of the worlds he wrote in. He took them seriously and the characters equally seriously, even when plunging them into excessive flights of whimsy.

I can't believe there will never be another new Peter David Star Trek story. Farewell, Peter. You'll be missed.

Being unsure if you're a success story or a cautionary tale?

 "I'm never sure if I'm supposed to be the success story or the cautionary tale."

From time to time, I'm asked to speak to students or recent graduates from my alma mater, Denison University, and this is typically how I begin the conversation. I like to make sure everyone understand that "Yes, I'm a TV writer with four produced episode credits to his name and two seasons on staff... but it also took me 18 years to get there. Are you prepared to spend 18 years getting to where you want to be?"

I moved out to L.A. on November 1, 2002. My WGA card arrived in the mail on October 31, 2020. So when I say it was eighteen years of work to get to that moment, I mean it was 18 years exactly. I wasn't the only one of my friends to come out here soon after graduation in pursuit of similar dreams. But I can tell you this - of probably about a dozen classmates from my year or the year after, I'm the only one left. Some lasted almost 15 years, others five. There were a couple that were gone in as short as six months. The ones I'm in touch with all are happy with their lives now. They all hit a point where they decided they couldn't keep chasing that dream and get what else they wanted out of life.

To be sure, there were a great many wins along the way to that achievement - both personal and professional. My wife and I have been together 18 years and I'm certain one of the biggest reasons any career lows didn't send me either spiraling or running entirely from this business is the fact that I had her. I don't think you're built to sustain both a demoralizing work life AND a demoralizing social life. Because of this, another piece of advice I open with is to pursue fulfilment outside your career.

This has been on my mind a lot lately as I've seen the business go through one of the worst dry patches in remembered history. That's not just me saying that. I've had many a conversation with people whose professional credits go back to the 90s and they say it's never been this bad before. I again point at those 18 years and remind you it has never been easy. Is it even responsible to give any kind of hope for people who are still trying to break in at this point?

My story is just that, one story. A guy who graduated from Denison two years ahead of me, Robert Levine, ended up on the same path but got there much faster than me. Three years after he graduated, he was an office PA on JUDGING AMY. About a year later, he moved up to Showrunner's Assistant and during that season, he got his first writing credit - just in time for the show to be cancelled. But his boss, Carol Barbee, moved on to JERICHO a year later and put him on staff. He's worked pretty steadily ever since, with his credits including co-creating and co-showrunning BLACK SAILS and THE OLD MAN.

The assistant-to-staff-writer path used to be a pretty reliable path. I took a modified version of that, now for me, I didn't get that first Writer PA job until 2015. It wasn't a wasted decade-plus for me. Six months after I moved out here I was working for Lakeshore Entertainment as an Office PA and let me tell you, going to work every day on the Paramount Lot is a great way to convince yourself you're on your way to making it in LA. That pretty quickly led to me becoming a Development Assistant and in time the pivot to being a script reader for several companies.

For six years.

It wasn't a totally wasted sideline. Those years gave me the material that led to me starting this blog and my Twitter feed and you can draw a straight line from my Twitter networking to ever TV job I've ever had:

- I met Jeff Lieber in part through Twitter and two and a half years later he hired me on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS.

- I got to know Matt Federman for something like three years over Twitter before he hired me as the Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE.

- Twitter connected me with Greg Berlanti and a year after a general meeting with him, I got hired on SUPERMAN & LOIS.

When I tell this story to people who ask me how they can become a TV writer, I underline two details of that path:

1) Networking rarely shows immediate results. You've gotta be patient and that also means you can't see anyone as just a means to an end. You're building a relationship and some of those contacts aren't gonna lead anywhere. If they do, it could be years - so don't think you're one meeting away from that staff job you want.

2) You might have figured out that my specific hacks to break in - blogs, Twitter - won't work in the same way today. You've gotta figure out your own version of that. The good news? When I started trying to break in, that path didn't exist as a proven one either!

If you're a recent graduate, the specific way you will break in probably hasn't been invented yet.

Is that alone reason enough to discourage people from pursuing dreams of being a screenwriter or TV writer? No, but let's look at the numbers.

According to the most recent WGA Writer Employment Snapshot, there were 1,819 television writing jobs during the 2023-24 television season. That represented a 42% drop from the season before.

You want me to make that number scarier? In the entire NFL, there are 1,696 players. In 2023-24, it was about as hard to get a job in TV writing as it was to get into the NFL. 

Now I'm gonna make it even more bleak -- because even if you just limit your competition to people who were employed for the 2022-23 season, that means there are 1,319 writers with more experience than you ALSO fighting for those 1800+ slots next season.

There are almost as many recently experienced pros out of work as there are working. Almost TWO union TV writers for every job available!

I don't have hard data for this next claim, but plenty of anecdotal experience. There is about a decade's worth of the assistant class that have been trapped at the support staff levels much longer than they used to. Smaller rooms, shorter seasons, longer gaps between seasons and fewer shows being renewed all have conspired to make it very difficult for support staff to get their chances to move up. This is especially true with streaming shows.

I would bet there is a not-insignificant number of career support staffers who in another life would be upper level writers.

You can't underestimate the impact the loss of the CW also has on this. There were 10-12 one hour shows, most of which ran 22 eps a season. Writers stayed on through production, they got to produce their episodes and gain skills they'd need as the next generation of showrunners. Assistants got scripts, could afford to stick with the same show for enough seasons until a slot opened up to staff them. People built entire careers at the CW and the loss of that network is devastating to the future of TV writing.

So, not a great time for TV writing in general. To recap:

- This job is as rare as playing for the NFL.

- There is almost an entire NFL's worth of career writers ready to replace the employed TV writers at a moment's notice.

- You're also competing with an assistant class that hasn't gotten out of the way yet.

And you're at the very bottom of the ladder.

I again repeat -- EIGHTEEN YEARS.

If you start counting from my first job in TV in 2015 to my WGA card, that's only five years. But even putting aside how I got the job, was the guy I was in 2003 as likely to be as ready to move up as the guy in 2015 was? Probably not.

And again, this is where the decade's worth of assistant careers standing still becomes relevant.

To return to the topic of the hypothetical recent graduates, I don't know what to tell them about breaking in because right now, I can't imagine what "breaking in" looks like -- aside from a lot of sweat, a lot of waiting, a lot of career uncertainty and more than a lot of competition.