That’s all by way of saying that I haven’t watched enough reality TV to consider myself any sort of expert. I watched the first season of The Apprentice – when there was actually a lot less product placement than in the subsequent versions – but it was still bad enough to give me TMJ Syndrome.
As research, I did a number of interviews with lower-level reality producers, and the best story I heard involved a Survivor-type show in the Australian Outback, where the contestants supposedly had to hunt for food and water. But because one of the sponsors was a brand of depilatory cream, the hottest female contestants took time out from fighting for their lives to don their bikinis, hike to a nearby hot springs, and shave each other’s legs. Would I call such a program worthless? Hell no!
Ironically, I was sent books by both you and Tom Straw to read and review. Straw and you have crossed paths before such as on the show Night Court, right? Why don’t you explain how you two know each other? Is it coincidence you both did novels related to television?
Tom and I actually didn’t work together on Night Court – he came and went before I joined the writing staff. In those days, there was so much money to be made in sitcoms, writers tended to move around like baseball players and strippers do now. Tom and I first met on Good & Evil, a really terrific show that naturally vanished before anyone had heard of it.
I liked and respected Tom from the moment we started working together, and I count the months when we were making those episodes as among my happiest in the sitcom business. (Although I remember we kept a giant, Costco-sized bottle of Tylenol in the middle of the conference table, and the first thing I did every morning was wash down four or five caplets with a cup of terrible coffee. So that should give you some idea of how much I enjoyed my other shows.)
Of course it’s not a coincidence that we both wrote novels about TV, although Tom’s book The Trigger Episode is actually set around a sitcom, a world he knows intimately, whereas I pretty much pulled Keep It Real out of my ass.
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