June, 1998

This is a story about Dead Russell. Dead Russell was a failed stand-up comic turned shitty comedy writer. We did not, of course, call him Dead Russell at the time; we just called him Russell. This is my way of subtly suggesting that you may not want to get too emotionally attached to Dead Russell.

So. After two seasons on Love & Trust, Tom and I respectfully declined the studio's offer to have us back for a third. Our reasoning was that we had worked on fifty episodes, ten of which we had written ourselves, and we felt that everything we had set out to prove, we'd proven. Also, we had learned that the new show runner was going to make the next season about prostate cancer and we didn't think that was necessarily fodder for comedy.

CHARLIE: Dad, there's a fly in my soup.

FRANKLIN: Yeah, well, there's blood in my semen.

(LAUGHTER)

Instead, after a bidding war — well, that's perhaps overstating it; it was more of a bidding skirmish — we were hired on a new series called Ditz. At the time it was, believe it or not, presumed to be the next breakout comedy. It starred an outrageous personality from MTV who became nationally famous for being naked in a magazine and is now known for dispensing medical advice that gets children killed.

Ditz was a nightmare. The show runners were indecisive and duplicitous, the working hours were horrendous (even by sitcom standards) and the final product... well, I assume it was terrible. I couldn't bring myself to watch it. And as this Trail of Tears of a season ground mirthlessly on, I felt like I owed prostate cancer an apology.

Even now, I count the day production on that show was shut down as one of the happiest of my life, ranking just below the birth of my first child and just above the birth of my second. (Sorry, Jana. You know that I adore you, but honestly your arrival was a little bit been there, done that.)

Tom and I were immediately snapped up by Cool, Man! an edgy buddy comedy about the adventures of a hapless nerd and his impossibly suave mentor. The show runner was Sharon, a flamboyantly dressed Texan who was never without a cigarette or a nicotine patch or, if she was having a particularly stressful day, both. She was known industry-wide as a brilliant, crazy hardass. "We'll do it my fucking way!" was her infamous catch phrase.

Eventually, I'd discover that while she was indeed brilliant and crazy, the hardass part was mostly a put on. At that point in time, show running was almost entirely a boys club and in order to be taken seriously she had made the strategic choice to rule by fear. It worked so well that by the time Tom and I showed up, she rarely felt the need to scream and threaten. The power of her reputation was enough.

It was in The Room of Cool, Man! that we met Dead Russell. He was wearing a faded Mötley Crüe concert T-shirt and brand new Michael Jordan high tops, unlaced for some reason. He was roughly my height and his head was completely shaved, a preemptive strike against his receding hairline.

You can't quit! You're fired!

Dead Russell presented himself as an experienced, self-assured, battle-hardened comedy professional. It was, it turned out, a facade and I have never in my life seen one crumble faster.

Let's time it. Ready? Click.

Dead Russell: I am always the funniest man in the room.

Me: In an AIDS ward, maybe.

Dead Russell: Yeah, well... AIDS, shmaids.

Click. What was that? Nine seconds, maybe?

I don't know what Dead Russell was expecting. He had announced in a roomful of comedy writers that he was funnier than we were. Did he really not think he'd get some pushback? Hell, in the Love & Trust Room, I once got brutally mocked for half an hour — my manhood assaulted, my wife portrayed as an unfaithful syphilitic whore — all because I had offhandedly mentioned that my second wedding anniversary was coming up on Tuesday.

It was hilarious.

But Dead Russell had never actually been in a Writers Room. This was his first writing gig. He had worked for Sharon for several years, but in an unofficial assistant capacity — house-sitting, plant-watering, running errands, that kind of thing — to supplement his marginal stand-up career. Why Sharon thought it was a good idea  to bring him on staff was never clear. The most plausible theory was that Sharon wanted someone to smoke with. Regardless, Dead Russell was clearly over his head and it would only get worse.

For a while, Sharon provided Dead Russell with some cover. It was not enough to stop us from mocking him, especially since she was mocking him, too. He had this irritating habit of trying to micromanage every sentence in every script which drove her absolutely batshit. It eventually got to the point where, before he pitched something, Sharon would say, "Before you say anything, Dead Russell, ask yourself: Will this make a real difference to the script? Or is it just pointless nit-picking that wastes everyone's time?"

Nine times out of ten, it was the latter.

Dead Russell would frequently show up late. And not the normal fifteen minutes that comedy writers were expected to be late, but hours. Some days he wouldn't show up at all. When he did drag his ass in to The Room, he would become increasingly bedraggled and grouchy.

And always with some fucking excuse. This one is my favorite:

One day, Dead Russell called the production office in the early afternoon. He was sent to voicemail where left a frantic message. "Sorry I'm late," he said. "But Hobbes" — his cat — "was hit by a car and I'm at the vet with him. I'll be in as soon as I can."

He was lying, of course. Hobbes was fine. And he might have gotten away with the lie except for this: Hobbes was originally Sharon's cat. She had given it to Dead Russell when her son developed allergies, so when she heard that Hobbes had been run over she was heartbroken. She called Dead Russell because she wanted to see Hobbes, at which point Dead Russell had no choice but to fess up.

But the punchline was this: He didn't need to make any excuse at all. Why? Because it was Saturday. And we didn't work on Saturdays. The fact that this crucial detail had somehow eluded him was one reason that we suspected that Dead Russell was on drugs, a suspicion that was confirmed a few months later, when he approached Tom in yet another panic.

"Have you heard?" asked a wild-eyed Dead Russell. "We're all going to be drug-tested!"

"I had not heard that," Tom deadpanned. "And I don't think that's true."

"It's really shitty timing, too," Dead Russell went on. "See, I don't do drugs anymore, but a friend of mine left some cocaine on the back of my toilet."

"Uh-huh..."

"And I couldn't let it go to waste, right?"

"I'm not really an expert on the etiquette of toilet-cocaine, but..."

"I am so fucked!"

There was, of course, no drug testing. As near as we could tell, Dead Russell overheard two writers talking about The Big Lebowski and his coke-addled brain made a series of logical leaps. But that's just a guess.

Dead Russell was clearly spiraling out of control and all of us, at various points, tried to help him. It wasn't easy. He was an infuriating combination of hubris and self-loathing and when we weren't trying to convince him that he wasn't the biggest piece of shit who ever lived, we were trying to convince him that he wasn't the greatest comic voice in the history of the world.

We did this out of genuine concern, but also self-interest. Dead Russell was emotionally draining and a huge time-suck. We were always talking him down, or up, or marveling to each other about his obtuseness and trying to figure out how on Earth he still had a job. As the season wore on, it became increasingly tedious. We all just wanted to finish our work and go home — or, for Tom and myself, moonlight on our feature film projects for a few hour and then go home — and we resented how much of our free time he wasted.

But the people who had the hardest time dealing with Dead Russell were the Writers Assistants. Two of them, Patrick and Reed, reminded Tom and me a lot of ourselves, ten years earlier. We called them The Boys, because that's what people used to call us before we were upgraded to The Guys. Like us, Patrick and Reed were roommates, longtime friends, and aspiring writers. We had a lot of affinity for them and we took it upon ourselves to act as their mentors, favoring them with our hard-earned wisdom.

For some reason, it didn't dawn on either of us that they were a gay couple. Too blinded by the similarities, I guess, to notice the differences. It wouldn't have changed anything had we known, except we probably wouldn't have given them quite so much advice about women.

It was only after we had been working with them for a couple of years that I figured it out, when Samantha and I ran into Patrick and Reed at — ironically enough — a yard sale. I slapped myself on the forehead. D'oh!

Anyway, Dead Russell was really hard on them. He insisted on writing his scripts in illegible longhand, sometimes on legal pads, sometimes on scraps of paper. Somehow, The Boys deciphered his cuneiform, typed it up so it looked like a professional script and then rewrote whole sections of it so it read like one, too. More or less. Thinking about it, they were probably the reason that Dead Russell kept his job for as long as he did.

Dead Russell was not particularly grateful. And whenever either of The Boys complained about the impenetrability of his writing, he would walk to the door and point at the bronze plaque. "What does it say right there? Writers. Assistant!"

And there was Lillian. Or, as Tom and I privately referred to her "The Future Mrs. Rubicon or Gilmore Depending On Which One Of Us Gets Divorced First." She was terrific. Smart, funny, genuine and pretty in a small town, ponytail-sticking-out-of-the-back-of-her-baseball-cap kind of way. Plus, my kids loved her — she babysat for them with some regularity — so if Samantha and I ever split, Lillian would be able to avoid the usual resentment children have to a new stepmother. I'm not saying I wanted that to happen, but it's always good to have a Plan B.

Dead Russell was nice to Lillian in that way of creepy misogynists everywhere. Sleazy compliments, sexual comments, inappropriate touching. I had at one point asked her if she wanted me to report him, but she insisted that it was no big deal. I suspected that she was being stoic. She, too, wanted to be a writer and was smart enough to know that accusing someone of sexual harassment wouldn't necessarily be the best career move. But it wasn't my place to second-guess her. Still, it was infuriating, seeing her laugh at his crass jokes, and playfully smack his hand when it lingered on her shoulder too long.

Of all the things that bothered me about Dead Russell, this was by far the worst. And I took tremendous solace in the knowledge that the problem would soon solve itself, because there was was no way in hell that Sharon would pick up Dead Russell's option for season two.

But she did.

(Continued...)