Turning his career into a comedy

ROB LONG tells the story of a friend who just returned from his third tour of duty in Iraq, armed with hair-raising tales of death and destruction. But, as Long tells it, nothing he said was scarier than the words, “Hey Rob, now that I’m back, I’m trying to get a job in the entertainment business. Can we have lunch?”

Having been a writer and producer of “Cheers” near the end of its long run on network TV, Long knows what it’s like to be riding high in the showbiz saddle. But since then, he and his writing partner, Dan Staley, have seen every sitcom they got on the air quickly canceled. In the past, writers often reacted to adversity by penning a scathing Hollywood novel. But Long has found a new way to spin slyly comic tales about the vagaries of showbiz, his vehicle being “Martini Shot,” a commentary that airs at 6:45 p.m. Wednesdays on KCRW-FM or can be heard anytime as an iTunes podcast.

“Martini Shot” reaches only a fragment of the audience that might tune in to a network TV show, but it’s a striking example of the benefits of today’s niche-oriented media universe. Freed from having to compromise to reach the biggest possible audience, Long has been allowed to reach inside himself, giving birth to a voice that is more authentic and compelling than anything you’d hear in a thousand hours of network TV. Long makes gentle fun of the insecurity and self-involvement of showbiz types, often using himself as a convenient target.

At Christmastime, he examined the true meaning of holiday swag, noting that while it’s nice to receive gifts from family and friends, they don’t tell you much about what really counts -- the status of your career. “In Hollywood,” Long explained, “the best gifts are the ones from people you don’t really know all that well ... the studio presidents or network development executives [who] felt I was important enough, in the abstract, to be worth the price of an aromatherapy candle.”

He recently did an amusing dissertation on the indispensable nature of the telephone to every career-altering moment in Hollywood, giving his comic observations a poignant touch by putting himself front and center, waiting for news about his new pilot while sitting at the veterinary hospital, where his 11-year-old dog (“my most successful, most loving, long-lasting relationship”) was undergoing chemotherapy.

The “Martini Shot” is pretty irresistible stuff, the equivalent of a weekly installment from a Hollywood novel in progress. (Long’s story about the Iraq war veteran, who acclimates himself to Hollywood by comparing talent agents and executives to Baathists and mullahs, is on iTunes, titled “I Am a Kurd.”) Long insists he is no journalist (“I have one small area of expertise -- me”), acknowledging that his vignettes are embellished whenever possible. “I’m not going to let myself flounder, like I do in real life, so I punch myself, and the stories, up a little.”

What gives his commentaries such a kick is their emotional veracity. Long captures the not-so-sweet scent of show business -- the false intimacy in a roomful of TV writers, the nagging air of unreality in a network executive suite. In one commentary, Long told of the time he was working on a sitcom when a senior writer, someone he’d barely met, returned from a visit to his therapist and immediately shared all the gory details of how he’d been molested as a young boy. Then, without missing a beat, the writer asked Long to hand over that day’s Hollywood Reporter.

One reason Long is such a shrewd observer of the eye-rolling mores of showbiz is that he has the perspective of an outsider, starting with the fact that he’s a political conservative. Of course he’s a liberal’s dream conservative -- funny, open-minded, an unapologetic do-gooder and more of a fan of Bush 41 than Bush 43.

A Yale graduate, he taught English at Andover, his old prep school, before heading west to study screenwriting at UCLA. Though he once voted for Jesse Jackson in a presidential primary, he became a “live and let live Schwarzenegger Republican” after college. “I’m a classic cautionary tale for left-wing college professors. My whole time at Andover and Yale I was told that Ronald Reagan was going to kill us all in some nuclear Armageddon -- and instead the Berlin Wall came down. After that, I started thinking, ‘Geez, if these fatuous, well-heeled intellectuals were wrong about that, what about all the other shibboleths I was taught?’ ”

Still, Long is skeptical of conservative complaints about Hollywood political blacklisting. “I’ve never in my life felt any discrimination at all,” he says. “People in Hollywood are more open-minded and willing to debate in a fair and free way than any left-wing political science professor at a major U.S. university. People can exhaust themselves claiming their script didn’t sell because they were pro-life, but face it, who wants to admit the reason their script didn’t sell was because it stunk?”

Long is as unimpressed with today’s studio executives as he was with his Yale professors, believing the steady drop in network ratings and movie box-office is linked to an executive mind-set that’s dangerously out of touch with its audience. In the heyday of Hollywood, studio moguls were untutored first-generation immigrants, comical in their shaky grasp of the vernacular. Today’s executives are just as meddlesome as the old moguls, but it’s their Ivy League degrees that give them a shaky grasp on reality.

“People who run the business today are probably too well educated,” Long says. “They all believe they have some system to fix every problem, when in fact, by trying to micro-adjust and hyper-control every little thing on a show, all they do is create what’s known in aviation as ‘pilot induced turbulence.’ ”

One of Long’s recent commentaries (“Funny But”) offers an extended riff on this theory inspired by the abrupt cancellation of “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” in which he noted that anyone can luck into having a hit show but “it takes a smart person -- a savvy operator, a clever hit maker -- to carefully assemble a good writer, a name star, a hip premise, a multimillion-dollar promotion budget and focus group and market-test himself into a big pile of the kind of thing you step in and can’t scrape off.”

As Long sees it, there are three kinds of TV -- one-hour dramas, reality TV and sitcoms. But the genre closest to flat-lining -- the sitcom -- is the genre executives meddle in the most. “They’re on you every second, from the outline stage to shooting the pilot, always saying things like, ‘Can we make [the female lead] look less angry?’ ”

The buzzword in network circles today is “balance.” “Every story line in TV goes something like, ‘She’s trying to balance her job with her personal life,’ ” Long says. “But show me one show that made money where anyone tried to balance anything. The hits are about obnoxious people yelling at each other, people doing things that are not always nice. You need conflict to make anything funny. Look at ‘Seinfeld.’ Those are extremely strong personalities who are always going at it with each other. They are not balancing anything.”

He sighs. “Most executives don’t want shows where they’re surprised or caught off guard, which is really what comedy is all about.”

In today’s culture, trends and tastes come and go at lightning speed. But studio decision-making is too slow to keep pace. Long points to Wal-Mart, which prides itself on its ability to respond within 48 hours to every shift in its customers’ needs, whereas Hollywood takes forever to react. The networks are deciding on shows now that won’t be on the air until fall, at the earliest, while studios are green-lighting movies that may not surface for a year or more.

“Ask a young man to name his favorite TV show and I guarantee they’ll need a minute to come up with anything at all,” Long says. “The least loyal TV viewer is a 22-year-old guy and when you lose them, it’s only a matter of time before you lose everyone else too. The industry feels a lot like General Motors in 1973, where they’re creating terrible products that the American people don’t want, but they aren’t even aware of it yet.”

Of course, Long is anxiously waiting for an answer on his little product -- “Shelf Life,” a comedy pilot that chronicles the clash between a young manager and his graying staff at a big-box retailer. He doesn’t appear overly optimistic. “I like the people at ABC, but it doesn’t look good,” he says. “If they love your show, you know they love it. If they like it, you know they like it. But if you don’t hear anything, well, there’s usually a reason.”

He cracks a nervous smile. “Of course, if they order the show, they’ll maintain they always loved it.” Either way, you can bet you’ll hear Long’s wry take on the proceedings on “Martini Shot,” where the bitter setbacks of showbiz are reborn as beguiling comedy.

“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. His weekly podcast, “The Oscar Call,” with John Horn, can be found at www.theenvelope .latimes.com/custom/podcasts, and you can reach him at patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.