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.

Juliana James and I talk about our time on SUPERMAN & LOIS on the Missing Frames podcast

With the new SUPERMAN movie coming out this summer, there's a lot of hype in the air for the Man of Steel. I've already done a few podcast interviews focused on my time on SUPERMAN & LOIS and I'm always leery of doing too many podcasts. I'm not Kevin Smith - I don't have enough stories to fill multiple 90-minute slots without repeating myself.

But when Shawn Eastridge reached out to me about appearing on Missing Frames as part of his "Celebrating Superman" series, he mentioned some of the other Superman figures who were participating. I decided I couldn't be the guy to tell him "no" when so many other people I'd grown up idolizing were saying "yes."

To keep things interesting for people who may have heard me already on The Superman & Lois Tapes and All-Star Superfan Podcast, I invited my friend and fellow S&L writer Juliana James along, thereby insuring that at least 50% of the conversation would be unique for listeners.

The result was a fun conversation that we enjoyed so much it seemed to fly by. 

If the embed above doesn't work, you can listen to it here and on Apple Podcasts here.

Also, I made an appearance last month on "It All Comes Back To Superman," talking with Michael Bailey about three unmade Superman projects: Superman Reborn, the infamous Kevin Smith/Tim Burton project Superman Lives, and J.J. Abrams's Superman Flyby.

You can listen to that episode here and on Apple Podcasts here.

I'm the featured guest this week on HOMICIDE: LIFE ON REPEAT with Reed Diamond and Kyle Secor!

HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET wasn't quite my first taste of what we later came to call "Prestige TV" but it might have been the first show I loved that passionately. I wasn't there from the start - though the show debuted in January 1993, it wasn't until almost exactly three years later that I became a serious viewer of the series. By that point, I was already a regular viewer of ER and THE X-FILES, both of which were redefining how network TV looked and felt. I also was an occasional, if not regular viewer, of LAW & ORDER.

Nothing makes me feel older than having to explain that this was a time when network TV drama felt truly groundbreaking and cinematic to a degree that it hadn't before. This was pre-SOPRANOS, before HBO launched what generally gets credited as the start of Prestige TV. It's not hard to see why that's where most tellings of TV history start there. HBO's pedigree for writer-driven, cinematic, elevated television is probably unmatched. There's also a certain romance to framing the most remarkable TV as being the product of premium cable - as opposed to broadcast television, where the major networks were free to all the unwashed masses.

You're paying a premium for cable TV, so you need to believe that HBO is giving you a superior kind of product, right? As much truth as there is to that, at least two of those HBO shows - THE WIRE and OZ -  have a direct lineage to HOMICIDE.

The things that made HOMICIDE so innovated on network TV in the 90s have all long since been absorbed by premium cable series, prestige streaming series and even current network television. Handheld camerawork, morally ambiguous heroes, downer endings, and controversial storytelling now practically form the Peak TV Starter Pack. Maybe the only technique that still feels truly unique to HOMICIDE is the editing - specifically the jump cuts and the triple takes. In just about every other way, HOMICIDE feels like a show that could have premiered today.

And to the younger generation, HOMICIDE might as well have just debuted. Though the series got a DVD release, it's barely been syndicated in the last 20 years and it had long been absent from streaming. This year, that was finally redressed, as an HD remastered release came to Peacock. Converted to widescreen and HD, the show doesn't look EXACTLY how it appeared in the 90s, but it holds up well, even though a concession to get the show out there resulted in almost all of the iconic music cues being replaced by material cheaper to license.

As a concession to get the show to a new audience, I'll accept it. This was one of the shows that made me want to be a TV writer. It's the show I found myself emulating often in my early writing. Though it often gets lumped in with other cop procedurals, it's much more character-driven than any other procedural. The emphasis is on the characters more than the cases they work. A case is frequently merely a catalyst to force a character to deal with a personal challenge or to provoke a different side of their personality.

A hallmark of the show was the intense interrogation scenes, with the most powerful of those going to Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton. He'd get inside a suspect's head, break them down psychologically and more often than not, get a confession out of them. It was riveting character drama that just as often would be balanced by quirky humor and idiosyncratic characters like Richard Belzer's Detective Munch. It did things I didn't know could happen on TV - the heroes didn't get their man everytime. Some cases never got closed, the dead going unavenged.

One hour kicks off with the discovery of Detective Crosetti's body, forcing the unit to confront the likelihood he killed himself. Everyone deals with it differently - his partner Lewis insists it couldn't have been suicide and goes as far as trying to interfere in Detective Bolander's investigation into Crosetti's death. Frank and Tim are sent to plan the memorial service, allowing for some dark humor about the cost of cookies. Lt. Giardello is stuck with department politics over how bad it looks to have another suicide. 

All of this leads to a moment I've discussed before - Lewis and Bolander coming to a head over their conflict, only to have the moment interrupted by the autopsy report. The official finding: suicide. Watching Lewis spiral as his denial finally runs out and then fully break down as Bolander pulls him into a bear hug is one of those TV moments that has stayed with me ever since.

Years later I was running a TV drama series for my college campus TV network and I attempted to do a storyline with similar emotional impact. This being 2001, when I shared the script with everyone, they all assumed I was inspired by the equally gut-punching BUFFY episode "The Body." The truth was I'd had the intent for this episode before "The Body" even aired and my direct inspiration was "Crosetti."

Another trope that turned up in a lot of my early work were interrogation scenes. At least three times while in college, I found an excuse to work an interrogation into something I filmed, and it came up in more than one script. The perfect culmination to all of this nearly happened when one of my SUPERMAN & LOIS episodes would have called for what was essentially an interrogation between Lois Lane and an antagonist. Alas, a rebreak of the story ended up denying me the moment that seemingly my entire career was building towards.

As is evident, HOMICIDE made a meaningful impact on me as a creator and an audience member. Over the years, I've paid tribute to it before, broken down the pilot, and reexamined one of the show's most controversial moments - the Luther Mahoney shooting. Thanks to a Twitter conversation, I even connected with and later went out to drinks with Reed Diamond, who played Detective Kellerman. We sorta became whatever you call an internet friendship these days. (Pen-pals? Digital friends?) Which brings me to the real point of this post...

At almost the same time HOMICIDE launched on Peacock, Reed and one of his surviving co-stars, Kyle Secor (Detective Tim Bayliss), launched their rewatch podcast HOMICIDE: LIFE ON REPEAT. Every week, Reed and Kyle recap another HOMICIDE episode, delving into their recollections of making it and sharing their perspectives on the series with three decades of hindsight.

They also usually welcome a guest, typically a writer, director or fellow cast member, but on occasion the guest is someone with no professional connection to the series. If you somehow missed the post title, by now you've probably intuited the reason for this long preamble is because *I* am this week's guest.

I can't tell you what a thrill it was to be "in the Box" with "Kellerman & Bayliss" for a little over an hour. The topic of the show was Season 1, episode 8, "And The Rocket's Dead Glare," but we veer into other topics. I haven't heard the edited episode yet, but I talk about what scenes in David Simon's HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS directly inspired a subplot in this episode, and we even got into a brief discussion of copaganda.

I've done more than a few podcasts and this was easily the most fun I've ever had on a show. Reed and Kyle were great and I just loved the energy I was feeling while we recorded it. Hopefully some of that joy comes across in this week's installment.

The direct YouTube link to this week's episode is here.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts here.

You can find the main site for the podcast here.

All episodes are uploaded - with video - to YouTube here.

And if you're interested in the New York Magazine that discusses the misconduct that many of the Baltimore cops who inspired the show are accused of, you can find it here: David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.

SUPER/MAN is a tribute to not just Christopher Reeve, but his entire family

Early on in the Christopher Reeve documentary SUPER/MAN, we hear Reeve's own voice in an archival interview, discussing how he took extra care during "the Superman years." He dreaded doing something that would lead to a New York Post headline like "Superman hit by bus." The observation reinforces how aware he was that his image and his on-screen alter ego would always be entwined.

And that certainly was prescient. For nearly a decade after the riding accident that left him a quadriplegic, it seemed no reporter could cover Chistopher Reeve without using some version of "He played Superman and now he IS a super-man." (Heck, I even noted that in my own tribute to Reeve in a piece I wrote commemorating the fifth anniversary of his death. Reading it now, it's exactly the kind of tribute this documentary avoids being, to its benefit) 

Certainly even in death, the advocacy he strove for in life has cast a long shadow. Reeve says himself in an archival interview that "People want to believe in a hero." And so, through a combination of his iconic role, some truly bad luck, and his bravery in putting his recovery process on the public stage, Reeve morphed from being the custodian of an inspirational figure, to a source of inspiration himself.

Hope can be a powerful thing. At one point in the documentary, we're told that when faced with a critic who accused Reeve of peddling "false hope," Christopher shot back, "There is no false hope. There is only hope."

No one can decide to be an inspirational figure, as inspiration is ultimately about what people take from you. It's a power that resides with the audience, though it's also dependent on what that figure is willing to give of themselves. For me, that's what a great deal of this documentary is about, how Christopher put aside his ego and allowed the world to see him as disabled during a time when people like him were treated as invisible. A lesser film would have succumbed to a trite and obvious way of telling this story, giving only empty "inspiration porn" to assure us that heroes of untold virtue are among us. 

But what I saw in this film is that the hope that Christopher Reeve represented could not have existed without his family around him. And so this loss of privacy and inviting the public into a private tragedy is not just Christopher's, but a toll paid by everyone in his circle. While the movie never gets as far as explicitly stating that, that feeling runs through much of the narrative.

As obvious as it is that the Christopher Reeve documentary is called SUPER/MAN, by the time it was done, I felt like it could have just as accurately been called SUPER/MAN & SUPER/WOMAN, in tribute to Dana Reeve. Dana's presence permeates this entire story, even though she tragically is no longer with us to tell her part of it. She is a constant presence in all the post-accident footage, including many private home movies shared by the Reeve family.

In archival recordings, Christopher credits Dana with saving his life twice, the second being in the immediate aftermath of the accident that left him paralyzed. He was facing the reality of never moving his arms and legs for the rest of his life, pondering that it might be best for everyone if he just died. Dana looked at him and said with conviction, "You're still you, and I love you." 

That completely changed how he looked at the new life that lay ahead of him. The movie doesn't sugarcoat what she lost alongside Christopher that tragic day, and throughout the narrative we understand the emotional toll she felt mostly in private. That she died less than two years after Christopher is an incredibly unfair loss. Were this a fictional narrative, it would have felt like screenwriter hackery, designed to manipulate more tears out of an already exhausted audience. Here, it's just a reminder that life is under no obligation to give happy endings to those who would have seemed to earn them many times over.

This film also easily could have justified the title SUPER/FAMILY, for while Christopher Reeve's story is the spine of the movie, the picture of Chris that emerges would not be complete without the voices of his children and many family friends. This especially is where the more complete picture of Chris emerges, thanks to their willingness to be frank and open about some of their most private moments. It's easy to take that for granted as an audience member, but throughout my viewing it became the lens through which I took in everything. Unpacking this will require you to indulge me for a brief tangent.

I think you understand grief in a different way after you've lost a parent. There's a different burden that comes with losing someone that close to you as opposed to an uncle, a friend, a grandparent. In those cases, you generally get to deal with that loss on your own terms. But when it's a parent, a spouse, a child... that relationship means that you become everyone else's vessel for closure with the departed.

And - whether or not this is the intention of the other mourners - the effect is such that you end up taking on their grief. Though they come to console you, the strange nature of this interaction means that you find yourself consoling them, that in this exchange they get closure. Sometimes it means that they feel useful in passing on, "your father was so proud of you. He talked about you all the time." In other instances it's simply a matter of them intending to help with your grief but well before they have managed their own. 

You end up hearing a lot of people talk about how much your father meant to them. Which is nice, until you find yourself enduring it ten times in a row - while you're getting a handle on your own feelings. While realizing the obligation of this encounter means the other party must walk away assured they have done A Good Thing. I mean no disrespect to any close family and friends when I say that some of the best conversations I had about losing my father were with people who never knew him and were able to be there just for me.

For most of us dealing with loss, this is something that persists across weeks, perhaps months. When your father was someone like Christopher Reeve, I don't know if that ever ends.

I thought of that often as the film frequently returned to Reeve's children as its narrators. Matthew and Alexandra are from Christopher's relationship with British model Gae Exton, while the younger Will (now a correspondent with ABC News) is Christopher and Dana's child. Among the many voices that contribute to the documentary, their perspective is the most potent.

It was impossible not to think about how over the last nearly 30 years since Chris's accident, these three have had to play the role of giving closure to those who admired and were inspired by their parents. Matthew Reeve and I are less than a month apart in age, a connection that makes it impossible for me not to think about what it would have been like for me to deal with this burden at the age I was at the time of Chris's accident and later his death. 

I vividly remember reading the news of Chris's accident the same weekend that I was at a cousin's wedding. It was just before of the end of my 9th grade year, during a summer where I was working as a swim lesson aide and spending many, many days at the local pool. The contrast between my summer and what that summer must have looked like for the Reeve family is rather stark. I can't imagine dealing with a tragedy that enormous, let alone doing it so publicly.

We eventually learn that following Chris and Dana's deaths, Matthew stepped up at the age of 26 to fill in as a surrogate parent to his younger brother Will. Matthew was dealing with that obligation thrust upon him when I was somewhere between writing coverage for agents and sharing an apartment with two roommates.

You don't always get to chose the moments and experiences that define your life for you. Sometimes those come from moments that belong to other people. From what we see here, the Reeve siblings have an incredible amount of grace in accepting what their lives became and how they chose to share some of that with us.

I lost my own father four years ago, an experience I commemorated in this post that I've never quite been able to revisit in full. In that case, the public display of mourning helped, though I'm still not sure I fully grasp that other people have actually read it. Not long after that, I paid him tribute in a story I wrote for the SUPERMAN & LOIS comic. It was another public display, but one where I felt in control of how I presented my feelings, and thus, and experience I was comfortable with. 

But not every instance in which I've been asked to tap into those feelings of loss has been cathartic. I've not always had the opportunity to revisit those feelings on my own terms, and sometimes that's resulted in less pleasant experiences. Throughout Matthew, Alexandra and Will's interviews, I couldn't help but think about how much this documentary appeared on their terms, and if the necessity of promoting it via weeks of media interviews was at all more of a burden to endure.

I wondered if this documentary in some ways was how their whole family reclaims the narrative of Christopher Reeve from the "he played Superman, then he became a super-man" distillation. The movie doesn't hold back from pointing out less admirable moments in Reeve's life. It also takes time to explain how he clashed with some in the disabled community. It rarely dwells long on these particulars (we're kept at a respectful distance from some of the inner-family conflicts while still told enough to infer what need not be made explicit), but they're given enough spotlight to keep the film clear of any charges of hagiography

It's to the film's credit that it's able to tell Christopher Reeve's story in ways that feel fresh even to the Superman fan who's seen every special feature pertaining to the movies. His work as Superman gets about as much focus as necessary, but through perspectives not usually employed. The story of how he was cast usually falls to director Richard Donner or casting director Lynn Stalmaster. Both men passed in 2021, before this project was shot (though a few archival interviews with Donner are briefly integrated.) Instead, it's Jeff Daniels, who was in a play with Chris when he went to screen-test for the part, who tells us about those days in Reeve's life. 

Some interviews with Reeve also augment that portion. There were moments where I found myself mentally adding what would have been Margot Kidder's stories about working with Reeve, but in general, it's wise that the voice of the film comes from people who knew Reeve as a person before they ever knew him as Superman.

In showing us Reeve's faults and lesser moments alongside his successes, the film somehow becomes more inspirational than it might have otherwise been. A person doesn't have to be defined by their relationship with their distant domineering father, any more than not having a great example of a marriage precludes them from eventually discovering the kind of love that changes your perspective on romance.

We think we need Christopher Reeve to be Superman, but in exposing his human frailties, it highlights that any one of us has the power to be an inspiration to someone. Without Dana Reeve, Christopher might not have seen the final nine years of his life. Certainly it's hard to imagine Christopher being a public face for paralysis without the love and support of his wife. Could he have had so many positive days without his children rallying around him? You need people there to give you the kind of life you want to live for.

This is as much the story of what Christopher Reeve achieved as it is the story about the love around him that made that possible. In opening themselves up to tell that story, I hope the Reeve family has found peace. May they receive at least as much grace and love that they have put out into the world.