For the past 30 years or so, Bruce Eric Kaplan has toiled away as a staff writer on some of the best television series ever produced, including , , and . But as he writes in his new book —and discusses in this bonus episode of —Kaplan has never managed to get his own show past the pilot stage. And it’s not for lack of trying.
Kaplan has written more unproduced pilots than anyone else he knows, and tells the story of how the Hollywood system has slowly beaten him down in hilarious fashion in the new book. He also reveals some details about his new gig as co-showrunner for Season 2 of the , shares what it was like to join in its final season, and so much more. Kaplan’s plight as a TV writer trying to get several different projects off the ground is perhaps best summed up by a quote he includes in the book from his teenage son.
After Kaplan casually remarks that a meeting he just had went well, his son Henry replies, “It always goes well, then nothing ever happens.” , which chronicles about six months in Kaplan’s life as he tries to schedule Zoom meetings with potential collaborators like and (who both agreed to star in his pilot as lovers) ends up taking on a esque energy as each project fails to move forward. “I wanted [readers] to understand that this was my life,” he tells me, “that the meetings were my life, the scheduling of the meetings were my life.
” The question he kept asking himself was, “How can I be at peace and enjoy my life, which, at this .
