Here’s Why TV Writing Is So Bad

Brian Lowry’s Oct. 20 column “Writers’ Shortage: Still a Catch-22” missed the mark badly. Comparing getting into TV to becoming a lawyer or doctor is ludicrous; those professions have objective standards. No one passed the bar or was licensed as a physician because they knew someone.

The real reason it is difficult to break into TV is that the insecure people in charge are scared to death that someone will figure out how to create successful TV shows, invalidate them and cause them to lose their million-dollar salaries. The developmental process they use does not work, and they refuse to acknowledge this, even as their market share plummets.

The issue is not new writers; they don’t know how to create successful shows either. It’s all about fiercely protecting an obsolete system that pays failing very well.

C. RICHARD KAJELYN

Woodland Hills

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Whether the writer’s age is 21 or 81 has nothing to do with why what the viewer sees on the screen is so lousy. Since the buyers of television writing have the taste and judgment of retarded fleas, what the viewer sees on the screen reflects that taste and judgment, and not the best that the writer may be capable of.

I’ve written over 2,000 television scripts that made it to the screen. I prepared for each pitch meeting by coming up with at least three stories: my best effort, my second-best and a last-ditch fall-back one, slavishly modeled on all the stories that show had already done, so cliched and predictable I’d feel embarrassed to mention it, unless I absolutely had to in order to make a sale.

Guess which ones were rejected and which one was invariably seized on enthusiastically as the one I should have offered first? And guess why what you see on television seems to have been written by retarded fleas?

IRVING ELMAN

Pacific Palisades