August, 2002

Dean the Limo Driver was, it turned out, clairvoyant. Not clairvoyant enough to see the tech crash coming, unfortunately, but enough to predict the dismal critical reaction to our show.

In the sweltering smoggy heat of summer, the mostly male, overweight, middle-age and dour members of The TV Critics Association converged on the swanky Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, where they would screen the fall shows and ask questions to the show runners, producers and cast. Plus, there was free food.

TV critics wielded a lot more power back then they do now, having not yet been largely drowned out by social media. Facebook was still two years away, YouTube three years and and Twitter four. Opinions, as the saying goes, are like assholes; everyone has one. In 2002, these were the assholes that mattered most.

For our King of the Jungle panel the studio added some cheesy rainforest accoutrements to the stage. Fake trees and snakes and toucans and monkeys. A stuffed lion wearing a crown. (Get it? It's symbolism!)

The critics had already seen our pilot, but they'd also seen dozens of others so the studio helpfully played a minute-long trailer to jog their memory. From backstage we could hear the recorded laughter of the studio audience, but from the critics themselves, nothing. Not even a few courtesy claps when it was over. I looked at Tom, wide-eyed. He mouthed the words, "Oh, shit!"

We had been cautioned by Jasper and Holly, the incredibly upbeat Media Relations people, that our pilot "wasn't a favorite." We tried to pin Jasper down on what that meant, exactly, but he was evasive.

"On a scale of one to Hitler, how much do they hate our show?" I asked.

"Umm... Pinochet?" Holly said. Which, by murderous dictator standards, didn't sound so bad to me. "I was a Political Science major," she added brightly.

Jasper laughed, but when he made eye contact with Holly, it was clear she was going to get yelled at later on.

"You might get a few tough questions," he explained reassuringly, his smile broad and sincere. "But believe me" — he threw another angry glance Holly's way — "nobody hates your show."

Walking out onto the stage, it was clear that everyone hated our show: I could actually feel the heat of their enmity, waves of scorching hostility emanating from the scowling reviewers, their folded arms resting disapprovingly on their bulging bellies. And soon we discovered that their odium wasn't just targeted at our show, but at us personally, as if we had intentionally created a shitty show out of sheer spite.

When the critics asked questions of our star, Danny Weaver, they acted like Tom and I had abducted him at gun point and hauled him to the lot bound and gagged in the trunk of my car. (We couldn't possibly have used Tom's car because his trunk was full with an unbelievable amount of crap.)

"How on earth were you roped into this?" one critic asked Danny, to much snickering among the couch potato commentariat. Danny's face briefly registered surprise — unlike us, he had not been warned that we were the Augusto Pinochet of sitcoms — but he quickly regained his composure. He said that he loved the script and, in fact, had passed up three other shows to do this one. The critics shook their balding heads at what they believed to be a politic lie, but wasn't.

"And we were absolutely thrilled that we could land a such a huge talent like Danny," I said, which was a politic lie.

"It's great to have a bona fide comedy icon on our show," Tom enthused.

With the classic comic timing that had made her famous, Lydia conspicuously cleared her throat. "You mean two comedy icons." And that garnered a nice laugh from our bellicose audience.

"Three," Danny said, "including my hair piece."

That got a nice laugh, too, and for a moment it felt like the mood was lightening, but then Tom and I got a stunningly bizarre question: "Have you given any thought to whether this show is even appropriate in the wake of 9/11?" Tom and I were stymied.

"I... don't see the connection," Tom said.

The critic explained that the hostility in the show might be upsetting to people so soon after our national trauma. Tom said that he believed that funny was funny, even after 9/11. The critics glared at Tom like he had caused 9/11.

"That said," I interjected, "we have made some tweaks to Danny's character." I explained that instead of being so caustic and negative, like he was in the pilot, he was now more of a lovable schemer.

There was a lot of eye-rolling about the new schemer thing. I didn't disagree with them, honestly. It wasn't our idea; rather, this change came directly from the president of the network. "Rex is a schemer now," he informed us.

"Why?" Tom asked.

The network president glared at him through his reading glasses. "Because," he said impatiently, "everyone loves a schemer." And that was the end of that discussion.

Another critic chimed in, his nose wrinkled like he was smelling week-old fish: "And the network went along with that?"

Christ on a crutch.

OK, here's the thing: Generally speaking TV critics have no idea how TV shows are actually made. Which, by the way, is fine; you don't have to be an Italian chef to appreciate a nice tagliatelle. But you also shouldn't pretend you know what happened in the kitchen, because you fucking don't.

A TV critic's talent lay in their ability to (a) watch television shows and (b) have opinions about them. It was not a particularly rare talent — it was more or less on par with the ability to swallow and recognize basic shapes — but we all have to play the hand we were dealt.

(Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

The next day, the reviews of King of the Jungle began to trickle in.

Thoroughly dreadful.

A smörgåsbord of witlessness.

Makes Dumb & Dumber look like Smart & Smarter.

An epic disaster. The Hindenburg meets the Titanic, but even less funny.

The only laugh this "comedy" will ever get is when it's canceled.

The worst show of the season. Maybe ever.

It was rough stuff. But I vowed that I would not stress out over their asinine, uninformed opinions. In defiance, I thumbtacked every single bad review we received to the cork board in my office. And when I ran out of both cork space and thumb tacks I defiantly ordered another, even bigger cork board, and another box of thumb tacks, to accommodate the rest.

This, it turned out, was an unbelievably stupid idea, because every time I went into my office — which I did with great frequency — I was berated anew by malevolent newsprint, reminding me that there was a phalanx of flaccid fat guys not only predicting our failure, but actively rooting for it.

I had always believed that I had the ego strength to shrug off this kind of thing, but I didn't, and it kept eating at me until I couldn't take it any more. And it really bothered me that it really bothered me. I thought I was stronger than that.

(Tom suggested that maybe it would be a good idea if I stopped looking at the reviews at all. Ha. Right. As if that was really an option.)

Eventually, I tore down all those horrendous reviews and replaced them with the positive ones, of which there were exactly two: One from an obscure Canadian newspaper that had nice things to say about our writing, referring to it as "a work of sly genius" and one from a men's magazine that had nice things to say about one of our teenage leads, Lisa Lang, referring to her as "totally bone-able" which was all kinds of creepy (starting with the fact that she was only sixteen) but it was still technically positive, so I counted it.

There was always a lot of worry in the early phases of a new show. A lot of careers and millions of dollars were at stake. Once the show aired there would be concrete statistics in the form of Nielson ratings to tell the network how well the show was doing with the almighty viewers ages 18-39. But until that happened the data vacuum was filled with fear and fixes for problems that may or may not have existed.

The same thing happened in the early days of Cool, Man! We were always hearing about the new characters the network wanted us, for no discernible reason, to add: A "Ross" character (from Friends) or a black guy or a friendly homeless woman or an adorable dog. (An ugly dog was also pitched. "You can do jokes about how ugly the dog is!" the executive explained. This elicited a withering stare from Sharon. "Don't tell me," she said, her voice quiet and menacing, like a serial killer's, "what jokes I can do.")

As a veteran show runner with a string of hits to her name, Sharon had the confidence and cache to tell them to ignore their panicky suggestions. Tom and I had neither of those things. But we did have shitty reviews. Everyone swore that they didn't pay attention to them, but like me, they were lying to themselves.

Initially, the network had decided that Danny was the show, so the early notes — after the whole schemer thing — were all about giving Danny more to do. We'd see it again and again in the script notes.

MD (More Danny)

Then they started seeing the cuts of the episodes and suddenly LD (Less Danny) became the new mantra. It wasn't that Danny was bad, but there was a reason he played second banana his entire career: His range was extremely limited. We hoped that Danny would not notice the shift in the winds, but he could count lines as well as anybody and realized what was happening. He panicked, pushing his performance to almost cartoonish levels, desperate to be the center of attention again.

After that, the network's attentions lurched from actor to actor. If Lydia had a particularly good show, they wanted more of her. But if one of the kids managed to score they became convinced they were the next breakout star. As it turned out one of them, the "bone-able" Lisa Lang, did become a breakout star. Just not on our show.

And this is going to sound weird after all of my endless complaining, but most of the time working on King Of The Jungle was a true delight.

Tom and I loved our people. Our Writers Room was second to none. With actors, we hired based on talent and hoped they were not assholes, but with writers we hired based on talent and made goddam sure they weren't assholes. Even during the show's darkest times, The Room was an oasis, where we all laughed, gave each other good-natured shit and said things so disturbingly wrong that we were confident we'd all be sharing a room in Hell. Which was fine by me.

As an added bonus, we had the opportunity to give Patrick and Reed (The Boys) and Lillian (The Future Mrs. Gilmore or Rubicon) their first staff writing jobs. There was something extremely gratifying about giving these talented young writers the same break that Doug and Gabe had given us.

And through dumb luck our cast was mostly very pleasant. True, Danny started becoming morose and belligerent as his importance waned, and one of our fifteen year-old actors showed troubling signs of alcoholism, but generally they were enjoyable to work with, keeping temper tantrums to a minimum. Even Lydia, who we had originally diagnosed as batshit crazy turned out to be a sweetheart. Still batshit crazy, but adorable.

And we loved our crew. Tom and I were very big believers in all ideas welcome and they were empowered to make creative decisions. Decisions that we might overrule, of course, but whatever they wanted to try, we wanted to see. They felt heard and they felt invested and the show was much better for it.

Far less altruistically, I loved being in charge. Well, technically co-in charge. However, when things got busy there was so much to do that Tom and I were rarely in the same place. Tom would be in The Room and I'd be in editing. Or I'd be on the stage and Tom would be on a notes call. Or whatever. And this was where all the time Tom and I had spent together, day after day for years, really paid off, because we had an efficient shorthand and nearly identical sensibilities. Of course, we had disagreements, but they were mostly at the margins, and we had a tremendous amount of trust in each other.

Everywhere we went, we had a mission, a sense of purpose. For both of us, I think, the endless decisions that initially terrified us now energized us. We didn't mind that people kept looking to us for answers. We had answers. We knew our shit. We were great at this.

And yet...

The biting reviews and the network's palpable unease hung over everything we did, like the specter of death. To comfort ourselves, we clung to two things. First, there was the fact that in its early days, Seinfeld had terrible reviews.

The logic went like this:

Seinfeld had bad reviews.

We had bad reviews.

Therefore, we were the next Seinfeld.

QED

It was a deeply flawed argument. And, also, I'm not sure that Seinfeld really did have bad reviews when they first aired. But it felt true and there was nothing to be gained by fact-checking. (See also: Trump, Donald. Yeah, I went there.)

Second, and a little less Stockholm Syndrome-y, was the fact that we were still killing it on show night. And there was nothing that bolstered a comedy writer's confidence than the raucous laughter of a live audience. Every Friday I would emerge from the stage in a fabulous mood, drunk on a heady cocktail of adulation and vodka, which I had — despite my earlier reservations — taken to carrying around in a hip flask. Turns out, it's super-convenient.

But here's the thing: What played in front of a live audience did not necessarily play on TV. There were a lot of reasons for this, but the biggest one was that watching a TV show in the privacy of your own home was nothing like watching it live. For starters, comedy worked best in large groups. There are a hundred and fifty to three hundred people in a studio audience. I doubt your couch could seat half that many. Plus, there was a concerted effort to keep the audience pumped up and engaged. There was a warm-up person, a stand-up comedian who entertained the audience with jokes and behind-the-scenes trivia. (Do you have a warm-up person at your house? No, you do not.) There were contests with show swag as prizes. And music. Lots of music. Plus, the talent would often spend some time engaging the audience directly. There was the fun of seeing an episode unfold live and especially watching the actors mess up their lines. And if an actor swore? Hilarious!

On an intellectual level, I knew better than to be seduced by audience reactions, but on a visceral level it felt so good that it was impossible to dismiss. And really, was the audience's reaction any less valid than the opinions of some porcine pundits pounding their opinions into their keyboards with their greasy sausage fingers?

Ultimately, we did the only thing we could do. We forged ahead, making the best show knew how, with some of the best people we'd ever meet, and waited for the day that the American public would render the final judgment. And on that day, we couldn't help but believe, we would be vindicated.