The Bitter Script Reader

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later - Part 2

2026-03-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

My talk with Dan Jurgens about SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3 and ARMAGEDDON 2001 continues. For Part 1, go here.

The inciting incident of the story is that Superman has taken American lives for the first time when he sinks an American nuclear sub and eight of the crew don't get out in time. We're shown that's an inadvertent act on his part, almost an accident.

Later when he is responsible for Martian Manhunter's death, that's also unintentional. But at the same time, you have Lana Lang clearly feeling like Clark is not well and Batman's arc is also about getting him to the point where he's ready to take lethal action against Superman.

I feel like it would have been easy to write a version of the story where Superman just writes off any collateral damage as unavoidable and feels justified in taking out any powerful heroes determined to stop him. So, to ask the question in a way where I don't feel like I'm putting some of the answer in your mouth, why take the path where he's culpable for, but perhaps not intentional in committing his worst acts?

If Clark was still an aspect of Superman, he couldn’t possibly be involved with intentionally taking a life. Not in any way. Any loss of life had to be incidental and impossible to foresee. That’s what makes Superman so different from most other heroes.

To spoil a 35 year-old comic for those who haven't read it, this future timeline ends with Batman killing Superman. Typically Batman has had a no-kill rule. You make sure we see how conflicted he is over this, even as he does it. The exchange where Robin says "You did the right thing, Bruce" and Batman responds, "No. This can never be called 'right'" has stuck with me so much I wouldn't have even had to reread the book to remember it.

But at the end of the day, it's always controversial to depict Batman taking a life. How did you navigate for yourself keeping Bruce in character as he did what had to be done?

So, in a hypothetical future story, the guard rails aren’t as restrictive. A writer can go down unlikely corridors of story that they couldn’t otherwise use. That issue’s conclusion is a prime example of that.

But, at the same time, in order to make it work you have to keep the characters consistent with any understanding we have of them. So, yes, Batman needs to have that rule and live by it, at which point he has to acknowledge that he stepped over that line. Batman may not be outwardly emotional, but he still has to show remorse and regret.

You're not the first person to kill off Lois Lane in an alternate future. You're not even the only one who did it in an ARMAGEDDON 2001 annual, and there are multiple prominent examples in the years that follow, so this isn't aimed at any specific instance. I've only seen an issue made of this in recent years, but there are fans who feel that it's somehow disrespectful to Lois Lane as a character to kill her off even in an alternate future. Sometimes this rises to the assumption that Lois was killed because the creator hates Lois.

Do you have any reaction to that point of view? Speaking as a creator, what goes into a decision like killing Lois, or giving any character a "bad end" in an alternate future?

I’d like to think that the bulk of my writing work with Lois Lane would make it quite clear that I don’t hate her as a character.

As much as anything, doing a story where she dies in a speculative future goes back to a couple of comics I had as a kid.

Both are Imaginary Stories, which were the Silver Age’s version of alternative future or “What If?” stories. Lois’ death was the subject of both of these and for that time conveyed great emotional impact for Superman. If you’re dealing with the matter of Lois’ importance to Superman, her death shouldn’t suggest the writer hates her anymore than doing the “Death of Superman” would imply that the writer hates Superman himself.

I’ve also gotten criticized for reducing Lois to nothing more than Superman’s “vessel” because she bore his child.

In short, no matter what you do, someone will find a reason to dislike it.

As for the issues in question, notice how these are basically the exact same cover idea. “Superman, with a child, mourning Lois.” One might see any number of ways they foreshadowed my work, years later.

Shifting to the conclusion of the ARMAGEDDON 2001 event, how last minute was the decision to change Monarch's identity from Captain Atom to Hawk? Had you drawn the complete issue of the "Cap is Monarch" version by the time this happened?

I recall it as being very last minute, for those times. (These days, we can make changes to a book when it’s at the printers. Back then, before email, scanners and digital lettering, it was very different.)

My memory could be a bit spotty here but I know that I had broken down the entire issue with Monarch being Captain Atom. Those are rough sketch thumbnails that I always do printed size, before blowing up into final pencils.

I had drawn most, if not all, of the issue as well.

At the time, there was a 1-900 telephone service that fans could call into and get, “Insider Comic Scoops,” for a fee. Maybe a buck? I’m not sure as I never made the call.

In any case, that phone service revealed that Monarch would be revealed as Captain Atom. If you look a the basic plots of the annuals, they were to set up the notion that Monarch could be most any DC hero and the revelation would be a surprise.

Once that secret as revealed on the insider hotline, DC decided to shift gears as the idea of a surprise was still something worth shooting for. With that in mind, they made the change from Captain Atom to Hawk.

I recall discussing this on a conference call with Archie and Denny. I don’t believe either of them were 100% convinced it was the right way to go. Nor do I remember either of them were totally against it. It was more of a, “This is probably for the best,” type of feeling we shared, though i was probably more inclined to keep it as Captain Atom.

But we went through the script and identified the necessary changes that would have to be made. Denny wrote it up, I drew it and we went from there.

A couple years back, DC decided to print the "Robin lives" version of BATMAN 428, the issue where a fan vote ultimately decided that Robin would die. In that case, the difference between the two amounted to about five pages fully or partially altered. In the case of ARMAGEDDON 2001 #2, it would be significantly more unseen pages. At least in terms of the art that exists, would it be possible for DC to complete an alternate version of the issue - either as its own thing or as part of a long-overdue collection?

In this age of Omnibus Editions, Absolute Editions, Facsimile Editions and just plain cool collections, it certainly seems to me that there should be some type of collection for ARMAGEDDON 2001, books 1 and 2 as well as the connected annuals.

Since I still get a lot of questions about this at Cons, I also think there’d be enough interest in the original ending, which means we should do something to present it as it was meant to be.

The reality, however, is that there is almost no one left on staff at DC who was there when we did the book. Denny [O'Neil] and Archie [Goodwin] passed away and [DC Publisher and Chief Creative Officer] Jim [Lee] and [Editor-in-Chief] Marie [Javins] have greater familiarity with Marvel’s efforts during those years. With that being the case, I doubt anything will ever be done with A:2001, but we can always hope.

Finally, I don't know how many people remember this, but the crossover was followed almost immediately by a miniseries called ARMAGEDDON: THE ALIEN AGENDA, centered on Monarch and Captain Atom battling through time. You drew the first issue and so I wanted to ask, was there some alternate version of this project that was supposed to focus on the Captain Atom Monarch before the change? Or was the entire existence of this mini a result of the change to Hawk?

As I recall, that miniseries came up very late in the game. Since I wasn’t involved in the earliest conversations, I can’t say for sure, but I think it was planned as something that could capitalize on the popularity of the series and was always planned to feature Captain Atom. I really don’t think it was a reaction to having Hawk as Monarch, though that certainly influenced where the series was going to go.

The fact that the four issues were drawn by four different artists shows how sudden it was. The idea was to get the scripts done as soon as possible and get all four pencillers working at the same time. The first issue’s pencil deadline was a real rush— that much I definitely remember!

Thanks to Dan Jurgens for his time and a great interview!

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later

2026-03-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

In comic book circles, Dan Jurgens needs no introduction. It's inevitable the first line of his obituary will be "the man who killed Superman," as he was the writer/artist of the famous SUPERMAN #75. His association with Superman as a regular writer/artist began in 1989, and as it stands, he's almost certainly written more Superman stories than any other creator. While the Superman artist with the most stories to their name is Curt Swan, Dan's body of work pretty handily should put him in 2nd or 3rd place there.

This week is the 35th anniversary of a DC crossover event called ARMAGEDDON 2001. Dan provided the art for the two bookend issues, the first of which established the premise: Ten years in the future - in 2001 - one hero would betray and kill all the others. The identity of that hero was never known, as they then assumed the name Monarch and became an authoritarian leader. By the year 2030, Matthew Ryder has had enough of raising his family in Monarch's joyless dystopia and manages to become a test subject in a time travel experiment that transforms him into the time traveling Waverider.

Determined to stop Monarch before he comes to power, Waverider travels back to 1991 and uses his powers to read the possible futures of the major DC heroes, each encounter being depicted in one of that summer's Annuals. Of course, this is ultimately a device for the creators to explore a bunch of "What If" stories with their characters.

Dan's contribution as a writer was with the very first issue after the bookend - SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3. With pencils by Dusty Abel and inks by Terry Austin, John Beatty, Dick Giordano, and Dennis Janke, Dan brings us a story about a 2001 where Superman has lost almost everyone who mattered to him - including Lois Lane and his coworkers at the Daily Planet - when Intergang nuked Metropolis. He's been on an obsessive anti-nuke crusade ever since, and he crosses a line that results in the loss of innocent lives. Thus, the President drafts the one man who might be able to take Superman down - Batman.

To mark this memorable story's 35th anniversary, I reached out to Dan Jurgens for a chat about crafting alternate futures, killing characters, Evil Superman stories, and writing one of the most memorable Superman vs Batman fights.

Armageddon 2001 was the first - but not the last - time you did the pencils for a major DC event. Did it feel like a big deal joining a relatively small club that counted George Perez and John Byrne as two of its very few members? How did you end up landing the assignment?

By that point, I had, of course, been working on ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN as writer/artist and drawing GREEN ARROW.

I left GA in mid-1990 and was fielding offers. Right around that time Dick Giordano called me up and said they were planning an event that they were hoping I’d be able to draw. He said, “Don’t book anything else!” Before long, I was on the phone with Mike Carlin, Archie Goodwin and Denny O’Neil talking about the story. I was a bit hesitant to take something on that I wasn’t going to write, as well as draw, but when it became clear that Archie would write Book One and Denny would write Book Two, I simply had to do it. One of the great things about working in comics is getting the chance to work with people whose work you enjoy and respect. Archie and Denny were at the top of the list for that.

So, yes, I was definitely on board from the start. And, once Archie’s script came in, I was really thrilled. It was a great story and from a technical standpoint, no one wrote an easier to interpret and clean, visual script than Archie.

I love Monarch's armor. Did you get to design him and Waverider? If so what kind of parameters were you given to work with?

Yes, I designed Monarch’s armor as well.

Archie had asked for something dour in terms of color as well as making sure that it would cover his entire body. That, of course, was to keep his identity secret.

As for Waverider, Archie, Mike, Denny and I had a conversation where we came to the general idea of him being a time traveling Silver Surfer type. Since the Monarch was going to have a larger, heavier appearance, we wanted someone lithe. The timestream trailing color effect was my own idea, kind of based on Star Trek’s Enterprise when it would go to warp. At the time, I thought, “People will realize this signifier will indicate time travel.” I like to think that it worked.

Did you have any involvement in the plotting or the scripting of the ARMAGEDDON bookend issues?

Not with Book One and only a bit with Book Two. By the time that rolled around we had enough conversations that there was a small bit of input. As much as anything, it also came up when it was decided to change the ending. By then we were into the question of how to do it and do it easily, since I was already well into drawing the story.

At the time, what did you think of the plan to turn "a major DC hero" into a major villain?

I totally supported the idea. We have to be able to surprise readers from time to time and something like that works. Frankly, I think it would have worked better with Captain Atom because he had the power level to fit the idea of it all. On top of that, it would have been easier to keep him as a villain over the long haul because he didn’t have the connections to other characters, like Hawk did with Dove, for example.

And that always falls into the category of whether or not later writers will stick with it. Too often, someone else will come along with the sole desire of changing the last thing in print because Hawk, Captain Atom, Popsicle Man or whomever, has been their favorite since age seven and, “How DARE those creators mess with that?!”

I love that this was a crossover that justified a lot of "What if" stories. Once you knew what the crossover premise was, were you determined to write one of the Superman Annuals?

If you go back to the first question where I talked about wanting to write most of what I drew at that point, I was told right from the start that I’d be able to write one of the Annuals. So that made it a bit more enticing to get on board.

And I had hoped to draw it as well, but there was only so much time in the day. And as it was, that’s when I was working crazy hours anyway!

One thing that puts ARMAGEDDON 2001 near the top of my list of crossover events is that its structure doesn't force the tie-ins to be held hostage by certain plot points. Like ZERO HOUR, the event mostly acts as a cool writing prompt for the participating teams to run with. So with the marching orders being "show us where your character is 10 years from now," where did your brainstorming process start?

So, stepping back on this a bit, the first big decision was to set this up in such a way that it didn’t follow the pattern of a monthly book with a lot of different monthlies crossing into it. There was a very deliberate move to step outside all of that on behalf of both retailers and readers, who were a bit tapped out by that process.

It also made the project more enticing to writers of the connected books and stories because it didn’t interrupt the flow of where they were in their own arcs.

In terms of the creative process, it was really the thought of saying, “Show us the future with something fun.” In other words, it as part of the exercise to step outside of where the character might logically go. So, a story idea or whacky new costume might be more likely to get approved than if it were part of the, “This WILL be THE FUTURE!” type of approach.

Did you give any consideration to telling the most plausible version of Superman's future, since at that point in comics, the character's existed in a perpetual present, where it seemed unlikely the storytelling would ever advance to their middle aged years? Or was your interest always in telling a future that you'd never want to experience with Superman? Were there any alternate pitches you toyed with before arriving where you did?

The ideas I had really swept into the one that saw print quite fast. I didn’t pitch anything radically different. It was more along the lines of a dialogue with Mike Carlin where we bounced various aspects of the overall concept back and forth.

And we did want to step outside the continuity of the ongoing books at the time— to give it a bit of a different flavor.

Initially I wanted to talk to you about this because I remembered this as one of the first "Evil Superman" stories before that trope started being beaten to death over the last 10-15 years. And the unexpected thing to me when I reread it was that... I saw a lot more of "real Clark" in this authoritarian-leaning Superman than we've seen in stories like INJUSTICE.

Can you talk about how you approached keeping some familiar aspects of the character even as he's taking actions that make the federal government and even Batman feel like he's stepped over the line? Were there any ideas you considered and then discarded because it would have made him TOO evil?

The balance was to keep Superman “in character” will also putting him on edge.

Evil Superman for the sake of being evil doesn’t interest me because it’s too much of a detour. But keeping Clark more grounded and real makes it more of a logical— and not so distant— jump.

At what point in the development process did you realize that Batman had to be the one to take on Superman in this story?

Batman was involved with the story idea right from the start. Some of the elements and ideas actually came to me while doing the DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS story a few years earlier.

That often happens to me while drawing a story. Basic ideas can perk around in my head while I’m drawing a story, well after I’ve written it. I’ll be drawing page 10 (or whatever) and cooking on the next chapter, which I would have had no idea of beforehand.

The best example of this is Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman, who I always so as a one-shot character. That changed once I started drawing that exact same story.

Of course, with DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS, you're referencing Superman giving Batman the kryptonite ring and telling him that if he ever goes bad, he wants the means to stop him in the hands of a man he'd trust with his life. I can see how once that Chekov's Gun exists, you'd find it an irresistible hook to play out somehow.

Was the idea to homage the Batman/Superman battle from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS simultaneous with that? It certainly was the most famous fight between those two.

Yes, definitely. I’d also add that a lot of creators within the Superman team had conflicting feelings about that fight because Superman was made to look like a government stooge of Ronald Reagan’s.

We didn’t see him that way at all. He and Batman could disagree and be in conflict… and we recognized that Batman was supposed to be the coolest character in that particular story… but Superman coming off as a stooge might have been the wrong way to go.

But… that having been said… once the Kryptonite ring of Luthor’s fell into Batman’s possession, it was too cool NOT to use.

I remember reading this issue at 11 years old and noting the contrast with SUPERMAN IV. In that movie, Superman addresses the United Nations, tells the world he's taking away their nukes, and everyone cheers. Here, you've got a Superman on an extreme anti-nuke crusade and while it seems he still has a lot of public support, we see that the President considers him a threat to national security, which is something we didn't see happen in SUPERMAN IV. Was that movie on your mind at all as you wrote the issue?

Yes, it was.

While I admired aspects of the movie and didn’t care for others, I don’t think we should be naive about what would happen if anyone ever showed up and said, “I’m taking away the world’s weapons. Especially those of the most powerful.”

I don’t believe the current president would react well to such a move, do you?

Certainly not him or ANY other prior U.S President, that’s for sure!

For the conclusion of my chat with Dan Jurgens, go here.

If you want an overview of Dan Jurgens's Superman career, take a look at the tribute I wrote for the publication of ACTION COMICS 1000.

I started writing about BUFFY's "The Body" on the 25th anniversary and it spiraled into a personal story about other episodes that mattered to me

2026-02-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the first anniversary of Michelle Trachtenberg's passing and it got me thinking about how it probably was the anniversary of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode, "The Body." For those not immediately understanding the connection - Michelle played Dawn Summers, Buffy's sister, on that show, and "The Body" is a touchstone episode of TV centered on the death of Buffy's mother.

As it turns out, a day separates the two anniversaries, but it is the 25th anniversary of that powerful episode. As someone who had their budding TV writer mind blown by it when I saw it in my dorm room back in 2001, I kinda reel at the fact it's been that long and modern TV still lives in the shadow of this show's influence and its contemporaries. In 2001, 1976 would have seemed like ancient history in TV terms. Yet, just looking at the words "The Body," takes me back to experiencing the show all over again.

I did a two-part examination of this episode sixteen years ago (I've been really doing this for that long? Oy) and so I'm not going to rehash or recap much of the episode. If you want to see what I said back in 2010, go here and here.

I wrote those pieces while under the shield of anonymity, so there were a couple personal details I didn't bother going into at that point. For me, there are certain shows and episodes that are indelibly linked with what was going on in my personal and professional lives at the same time. This particular season of BUFFY was airing concurrently with me running my campus TV drama. It was my Fantasy Showrunner period while I was writing and directing episodes with friends that would later air on our campus's closed circuit cable channel.

(This too I have talked about in greater length, here and here.)

We'd been shooting the show for about six weeks. At this point, we didn't even have a completed cut of an episode. But everyone involved was having so much fun that the actors had already be asking me "Do you think you'll do this again next year?" My answer was always, "Let's survive this season first!" But in truth, the wheels had already been turning in my head.

The first season was being written in "Exquisite Corpse" style. I wrote the pilot, introduced the characters, set up a lot of conflicts and stories, and ended it on a cliffhanger. I hand the script to the next writer/director and they go wherever they want, setting up the third writer and then the fourth. As showrunner, I set up a rule that in the first round, you couldn't kill off any characters.

But being the first writer in the second round, I had first shot at killing someone, and so I did. The boyfriend, Josh, to our female lead, Katherine, just wasn't coming across on screen the way we wanted. So, first chance I got, he was dead. For fun I'd suggested that when each of us wrote our cliffhangers, we should write down where we'd take the storylines after that if we were in charge. Then at the end of the season, we'd see how close we were.

It forced me to give a lot of thought to the consequences of killing Josh. And in my wannabe showrunner-trained-by-the-WB brain, it didn't take too long to decide that a REAL writer wouldn't just let Josh's murder be a cheap stunt. It should be a character defining story for Katherine and that the next season she should be sliding further and further into depression. It would lead to some powerful, emotional character work akin to what I found in my favorite shows. I even envisioned the climax of this story being her friends staging an intervention as her depression progressed to full on suicidal.

My film professor had warned me years earlier that every student film was about alcohol and suicide. I failed to heed this.

I remember we shot the murder scene outside in the cold on Saturday, February 10th. That was when I tipped off my lead actress to my thoughts and subsequently told one of my other writers. He seemed utterly perplexed that I would want to tell that story on the show. So I explained to him the three episodes of TV that were huge influences on me.

The first was an episode of THE WONDER YEARS called "The Accident." Kevin and Winnie see each other for the first time a couple months after they broke up. Kevin is concerned that she's hanging out with some older boys and isn't acting like herself. She pushes him away, tells him she just wants to forget everything that happened the last three years (i.e. since her brother died in Vietnam). Kevin isn't sure what's going on with her, but it's not good. In the end, she's in a car accident and gets a broken leg for her trouble, which seems to be a wakeup call. If you remember anything about the episode, it's probably the final scene, where Kevin climbs up to her window as the anachronistic music cue of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" plays and Kevin and Winnie say "I love you" to each other.

The second one was "Crosetti," an episode of HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET that deals with the suicide of one of the squad's own, Detective Crosetti. When his body is pulled out of the harbor, Detectives Munch and Bolander immediately assume suicide, but out of sensitivity, Bolander is ordered to investigate it as wrongful death. Half the episode is the squad dealing with how shocking it all seems and the other half is about how Lewis, Crosetti's partner, is in denial that it's suicide and actively tries to mess with witnesses who'd speak to Crosetti's depression.

Most people remember that episode for the final scene where Andre Braugher's Pembleton defies a "no honor guard" order and salutes the funeral procession in dress blues. I remember it for the previous act break. The autopsy report comes in and the tox screen leaves no doubt that Crosetti intentionally overdosed. In an incredible performance from Clark Johnson, we see Lewis's denial collapse like a house of cards. His voice breaks and in sobs that make no effort to put on a brave or masculine front, he cries, "He killed himself!" as Bolander immediately drops any antagonism to Lewis and pulls him in a bear hug.

This history informs my third episode of choice, a later episode of HOMICIDE called "Have a Conscience" that climaxed a long-running story where Detective Mike Kellerman, played by Reed Diamond, had been accused of taking bribes and spent weeks being portrayed in the media as a dirty cop. Even though he's exonerated, it wounded him deeply that his coworkers thought he was crooked and the combination of that with a brutal case and a guy on the street recognizing him as that dirty cop sends him over the edge. His partner, Lewis stops by his houseboat that evening and immediately intuits that something is seriously wrong with Mike.

A good chunk of the episode is Mike holding his gun during a breakdown, clearly on the verge of ending it all. Lewis, who probably wouldn't usually be the guy you count on to diffuse that situation, is desperately trying to get through to Mike, to reach him on some level. The emotional stakes couldn't be higher - he lost one partner to suicide. He can't lose another. It's absolutely intense, and I'd never seen ANYTHING like that on TV. Apparently the whole suicide plotline freaked out NBC so it's a minor miracle the episode was even made.

You've probably forgotten how I got here, but all of that was what I was trying to unpack to my skeptical friend who wasn't understanding why I'd send the show down that path. And then a couple weeks later, we were there, watching "The Body" together, both of us determined not to ugly cry in front of the other. The next time the subject came up, I remember eventually he said something like, "No, I get you. For every 'Something Blue,' you're gonna have a 'The Body.'"

Of course, by the time the scripts for season 2 were written and given to the cast, "The Body" was several months old. A very large number of people who worked on my show were BUFFY fans, so more than one person's reaction was, "You're trying to do something like 'The Body,' right?" A couple times I tried to explain, no, I really wanted to do something dark before I even saw that episode, but ultimately it was just easier to say "Yes."

My depression and suicide storyline taught me an extremely important lesson. I knew it was a big tonal departure and ultimately the intervention episode was Episode 5, which meant for four episodes, Katherine's plot was going to be about steadily ratcheting up her depression. Four full episodes where the main character has some heavy stuff to deal with. I wasn't experienced enough to understand how much gravity the main character pulls, even when you try to balance an episode with lighter, wackier humor. Your lead character is like a gravity well, pulling the tone of every other storyline into it.

Basically, in my bid to be dramatic and meaningful, I killed the fun train. I haven't watched it in 24 years, but even at the time, it didn't take me long to realize my error. There were some effective moments, surely... but it was also often too indulgent, too melodramatic and too "Look at me! I'm directing." My dialogue was too on the nose in places and there was too much of it.

In other words, the mistakes everyone makes on their first couple scripts. I'm not kidding when I say I learned more doing this TV show I never got any kind of school credit for than I did from anything else in college. When you're churning out that much output, spotting your weaknesses happens much more quickly and you can start growing past them sooner. The lessons of that season are ones I carry into my work to this very day.

If you've done the math, you might have realized that this second season of our show was being produced while Season Six of BUFFY was airing. That season is built around Buffy suffering intense depression following her resurrection and her friends' discovery they tore her back not from Hell, but Heaven. It's dark but not in the cool, compelling way BUFFY always had been. This season was straight up depressing. Buffy's come back to life and life SUCKS. Season Six piles on the misery and there's a point where it feels like every episode is crafted to add to Buffy's misery.

This was a 22 episode season and to really twist the knife, the emotional low of the season spanned seven or so episodes that took something like four months to play out on screen thanks to long hiatues. Somewhere in the midst of that, I said to myself, "What the hell were these writers thinking? Why would they let this depressing storyline take over the show for so long? No one wants to see our lead just beaten down week-after-week... OH SHIT. I did the same thing!"

There was a bit of a relief in knowing that your idols jumped headfirst into LITERALLY the same mistake you made. And there's also some dark humor in venting and ranting about a creative decision you see as an unforgivable mistake, only to realize you could be talking about yourself. I was so concerned with making something "important" and "meaningful" that I failed to consider how much that storyline ran counter to everything else I enjoyed about the show... and certainly what other people enjoyed in the show.

I don't believe a creator should consider the audience as their first priority. You tell stories you want to tell, something that matters to you, and you hope the right people get it. But sometimes it's possible to lose sight of why you want to tell that story, and you end up making something that you yourself wouldn't even enjoy.

Hard lesson to learn, but I'm glad I learned it early.

An additional grace note to this story is that about two years later, EVERWOOD did a season long arc of Amy Abbott falling into depression after her boyfriend's death... and they fucking nailed it. After like two years of beating myself up for getting it wrong, it was so instructive to see how Greg Berlanti, Rina Mimoun and the rest of the writers crafted a story that took Amy to some dark and unlikable places without it all swallowing the show whole. I spent that whole season going, "This is what I was TRYING to do!"

This was yet another reason why it felt like such a full circle moment when I actually got to write an episode with Rina on SUPERMAN & LOIS. Every now and then, life comes together so neatly that you'd swear someone was writing it.

As for "The Body" itself, it's a powerful episode of TV. I still see it used as a touchstone for when a show does a super-serious episode. At the time, I remember being pissed that the Emmys utterly ignored this in every category. Ignoring Sarah Michelle Gellar's intense performance felt especially criminal. And this is one area where my feelings have evolved in 25 years.

SMG was great in this episode, but you know what? She slayed (ha, ha) every episode. BUFFY was a hard enough tone to hit in the writing, but even when the writing is there, an actor who doesn't know how to play those tonal mixes and shifts can bring everything down. And it's even more clear to me in hindsight that there is far too little respect paid to genre that kicks ass at being genre.

Fans spent years saying "The Body" was Emmy-worthy and it was a snub to show it no respect. And then one day it hit me - one of the defining features of "The Body" is that it has virtually zero supernatural elements. Joyce Summers dies of an aneurysm - nothing supernatural, nothing the result of a villain trying to hurt Buffy. It's so mundane and human. Spike isn't even in the episode and when a vampire does show up in the final moments, it's mostly there just to remind us that Buffy's day job doesn't stop even on the worst day of her life.

And it goes without saying that BUFFY's traditional humor is all but absent.

Are you following where I'm going with this? We bought into the idea that in order for BUFFY to be taken seriously by its peers, it had to strip itself of so many of the defining things that made it "BUFFY." It's like saying that if you want a genre show to be honored, the first thing you do is erase everything that makes it genre and just do what a normal drama would.

Fuck. That.

I'm not saying creators shouldn't do that if they want. But when you step back, there is something deeply elitist about the attitude that "oh, now that you're only playing the piano keys that all the normal shows play, we can take you seriously." It's like saying, "BUFFY's so unique and specific... have you tried just being PARTY OF FIVE for an episode?"

There's a lot in "The Body" that's relatable, emotionally powerful even. For some, it might be cathartic to see their heroes experiencing normal grief that they can relate to. I'm not taking shots at any of that.

But is it superior to letting BUFFY just be BUFFY? Maybe the better question is: of all the stories that could be rewarded, is this one head and shoulders above the rest?

I say no. Give me the Musical Episode, the Graduation Episode, the Angelus-kills-Jenny Episode. Give me the ones that embrace genre, not tamps it down so the normies don't get scared off. When you ask me, "What BUFFYs should have gotten Emmys?" I don't know if I'll be so quick to go to "The Body" as an injustice.

Which is not to say that it isn't still deeply powerful and heart-wrenching. And I'm sure I wasn't the only writer to fall on my face trying to do something like it. The good part is once you make those mistakes, if you're smart you won't make them again.

And sometimes you have the relief of seeing the pros you look up to fall into the same trap, even if they started from much stronger footing than you.

Today is the 5th anniversary of SUPERMAN & LOIS!

2026-02-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

The pandemic absolutely destroyed any sense I had about the passage of time. How else to explain that today marks five years since the premiere of SUPERMAN & LOIS?

As a lifelong Superman fan, this series was a big deal for me on a lot of fronts. It was my first writing credit, my first staff job, and the first time I went to set to produce an episode.

However, it was not my first job in TV. Before that I had been a Writers' PA on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS and a Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE - both CBS shows, by coincidence. There was still a bit of an awe to working on a network show back then. I remember almost exactly ten years ago, around mid-April 2016, I found myself alone in the writers' room on NCIS: NOLA. The finale was just about to start shooting so most of the writers had finished their work for the season and had started hiatus. Our upper-levels were mostly working from home and since the production draft of the finale was distributed, I'd been given the go-ahead to finally clear the board of that episode's storybreak.

As I cleaned the cards, I specifically remember thinking that in a month, some 14 million people were going to be in front of their TVs, watching scenes that started right there in the room a couple weeks ago as just a few words on a dry-erase card. 14 MILLION PEOPLE were going to be entertained by the results of ten people debating in this shitty room in Santa Clarita.

I had to consciously remind myself of that because from my perspective, I never felt any audience reaction to the show. My parents and another family from back home watched the show, but beyond that I didn't know anyone in the real world who even seemed aware of it. And this was not a show with a passionate online following, or at least not one in the internet corners where I went. At the start of the season, then-showrunner Jeff Lieber had introduced my public (i.e. non-Bitter) Twitter handle to his followers as the new assistant on the show. I gained about 50 NCIS-related followers from that... but a significant number of those handles were variations on "Mrs. Scott Bakula." It was a reminder where the truly passionate appeal of the show laid.

Thus, as far as feeling the audience's presence... I really didn't. And certainly, had no place where I felt any appreciation of the work that was being done in the writers room. BLOOD & TREASURE had a smaller audience - it premiered at 5.62 million viewers and finished the season at less than half of that - and it still had more linear viewing eyeballs than our highest rated episode of S&L.

But the difference with S&L was that that audience was very much in evidence. They were impossible not find online. The show was regularly discussed on the geek sites I visited often and in comic stores and at conventions, people were familiar with the show and had a deep awareness of the stories.

When you work on a character like Superman, you're very aware there really aren't any Superman shows or movies that become obscure. (The 1988-92 SUPERBOY TV series is an exception, and only because that show was completely pulled from any kind of distribution for decades.) Whatever you make with that character is going to live forever - for good or for ill. I don't know if there will be any 20 year oral histories of BLOOD & TREASURE, but I'm certain that SUPERMAN & LOIS will get some kind of retrospective whenever a big anniversary rolls around.

I'm proud of our contribution to the Superman mythos. I think we honored the characters and who they were supposed to be while also telling our story in a period of Clark and Lois's life that hadn't been covered on-screen before (and was barely touched in the comics too.) I think it was very important that we didn't just retread the Reeve films, or any of the TV shows. The show had its own voice AND a large number of fans watched because they felt it was doing Superman and Lois Lane "right." That kind of result is never effortless.

It was also a show whose creation was defined by the pandemic to some extent. We were ordered to series in January 2020 and the writers' mini-room assembled a month later, in mid-February. At that point, the plan was that the room would work for six weeks mapping out the start of the series. We were figuring out the characters, the long arcs, even sketching in the first six or seven eps conceptually. Then we take a break at the end of March to shoot and edit the pilot, at which point we'd see how all of that played on screen, which in turn would guide the writing and the shooting of subsequent episodes.

As it turned out, all hell broke loose with COVID in mid-March and so we not only started working via Zoom, but the pilot production was pushed. And then it kept getting pushed further and further. As the lockdowns stretched on, there were definitely days where I worried that the show would just be cancelled outright.

By the time we started shooting the pilot in late October, we'd broken 11 or 12 episodes, and had full scripts for most of the episodes before that. It was probably inevitable that many of them would be adjusted as we saw how the actors and storylines were coming across on-screen. And yes, pretty much every episode got rewritten, many of them significantly. It was an enormous amount of work for our upper level writers, but I'll always remember that since we'd spent nearly a year learning more and more about our characters, those rewrites were what really elevated the show to what the audience experienced. Creatively, it was a better show for the extra time we were forced to take making it. Though I did occasionally threaten to have T-shirts made for everyone that said "The Season So Nice, We Wrote It Twice."

Every now and then I'll see one of our detractors snark about "CW writers." The disrespect irked me, even though I should have just taken it as evidence of the speakers complete ignorance and dismissed their statement altogether. Every writer on S&L who wasn't on their first job had credits on premium cable TV shows, network shows, or both. That's a fact that generally holds true across most of the CW shows. I obviously can't speak about shows I didn't work on, but I know that our team worked as hard as any pay-cable staff and took their work equally seriously.

As I've said before - working on this show was a great gift. During the pandemic, particularly during the part of it when my father died, nothing helped preserve my sanity more than being able to go into a room and spend the better part of the day talking about the Superman mythos. I'll also never forget the thrill that came one day in fall when we saw the first costume fitting photos of Tyler in the new suit. I remember thinking it was one of the best on-screen Superman costumes and it was a privilege to be the first to see it. During a dark time, those wins meant everything. The show became my refuge from the pandemic and everything bad associated with it. When it finally premiered, I recall seeing several viewers talk about what it meant to them to have a positive and uplifting show to invest in while they were emotionally processing the horrible year that had just passed.

For a great many reasons, this show will always be inseparable from the pandemic for me. It hung over the entire production, but particularly the first two years. COVID complicated production in so many ways - and certainly this wasn't unique to our show. Our first season was so delayed in starting filming that our final episodes ended up airing deep into summer. The staff had assembled to begin planning Season 2 before the first season had finished airing, and that was so close to the end of shooting that people like our showrunner Todd Helbing had essentially no break between season 1 and season 2. And that's not even getting into how Season 2's airing schedule ended up with some long breaks between episodes because COVID shutdowns slowed production. It made hard jobs even harder.

In spite of all of that, one aspect of SUPERMAN & LOIS I'm most proud of is that if you just take in the episodes themselves, it doesn't feel like a show that was made during COVID. The many compromises don't show up on the screen and I feel pretty confident that the new audiences that discover the show over the next 20 or so years aren't going to have confusion or questions that end up being explained with "We did it that way because of COVID."

As I said, if there's one thing you know about working on these shows it's that some fans will still be talking about it and debating it years later. We already gain new viewers all the time. I pretty regularly see people posing things on social media to the effect of "I just started binging SUPERMAN & LOIS and it's already one of my favorite shows! How did I never hear about this?"

Back in the late 90s, when I was still in school and could only dream of being a TV writer, two of my favorite shows were STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. Both shows dealt with complex characters who often had to reckon with thorny moral issues and situations that challenged their belief. Another thing they had in common was that despite critical acclaim, neither one ever had a large audience. Even among their peers, they earned fewer eyeballs than some of their more mainstream cousins.

For me, this also meant that stumbling across someone who was as passionate as I was about those shows was a rare occurrence. It wasn't like finding someone who liked SEINFELD, or FRIENDS, or ER. Those were the most popular shows on TV - of course you'd find people who loved them. But a fellow DS9-er? It also was like a secret handshake that revealed "This person is in the club. This one is a cool guy." In college, there was a guy on the fringes of my friend group who I didn't click with the first time we met. We were definitely oil and water... until the day when we discovered we were both HOMICIDE fans. Almost immediately, we reevaluated each other and our connection through the show turned us into great friends.

And so, on those nights when I'd dream of writing for a show like the ones I'd watch, I often thought about how it probably be more rewarding to write for a DS9. It might not be loved by every Star Trek fan, but the fans you HAD were the kind that would hang on every episode. If you hit that kind of audience, you knew that what you wrote would mean a LOT to a small amount of people.

A Superman show that aired on the least-viewed major network and that probably found most of its audience on streaming probably isn't too far off from the kind of reception I imagined getting all those years ago. As time has gone on, DS9 has become so popular in TREK circles, so often cited as "the best" of all the shows that it has become hard to remember just how mixed a reception it got in its original run. I wonder if I might someday look back at this post on a subsequent anniversary and remark that SUPERMAN & LOIS's audience has bloomed similarly?

But even if it doesn't, it was an honor to be a part of this show, no matter how big the audience was.

Five years ago, I had an amazing creative experience with the live-read of CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS

2025-10-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm right in the middle of a seven-day period bracketed by unpleasant anniversaries. And yet, right in between those is the oasis that is the five-year anniversary of the Zoom live read of my script CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS. CRISIS might be the personal project I'm most proud of, and definitely was my favorite experience in terms of seeing an audience react to my work.

It was an idea that first arose out of the boredom of the pandemic. It's strange how that period of time feels so fresh and so distant at the same time. We were just a few months in, positive COVID cases were rising, and no end was in sight. Freezer trucks were outside of hospitals because it was the only way to deal with all the bodies and a good portion of the country was trapped at home. The lucky ones were able to work via Zoom. The unlucky ones saw their savings dwindle.

I can't say it's a time most of us care to revisit. And even then, a lot of us were getting through it by binging old TV shows. I was no exception, and on a day in May, my recent binge led me to a stray quips about two characters who shared the same name. I joked on Twitter that there needed to be a CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS in order to iron out some connections between those shows. I should have expected, but didn't, this would provoke people to tweet at me, "you should write it!"

I wasn't serious about it, but I figured I could write a page or two, just to continue the joke.

An hour later, I'd written the first four pages, just as an exercise. At that link, you can see where I've collected some of the Twitter responses to that first blast. It was the pandemic and dopamine was in low supply so I chased that rush again the following night with four more pages. These pages - involving the GILMORE GIRLS - got an even BETTER response.

Truth be told, I don't know if I ever have gotten such immediate positive reinforcement. And so I dropped another four pages the next night, and six more the night after that. Somewhere in there I got a message from Ben Blacker, who said that whenever this was done, he had a platform for doing Zoom live reads and he'd love to host CRISIS.

I was like, "Ben, this was just a fun exercise. I don't have a complete script, or even know what the full story would be!"

"Then write it," was Ben's simple response. As if it was that easy.

There are a lot of reasons a script comes into being. The best and most noble is when the writer has a story they're burning to tell and it's the right story for that moment.

But a close second is when you have an audience that is telling you they WANT more of what you're doing. When that sincerity is backed up by them telling other people they should read what you're putting out there... it gets a lot easier to face the blank page.

Suffice to say, about a week later, I finished my full draft. There was some turmoil in the world at that exact moment, so I held onto it for an extra week or so before unleashing it publicly. And that started the process of casting this live read. I knew that if possible, I wanted to get as many teen drama actors reprising their roles as I could... and the start of making that happen was with reaching out to my boss on SUPERMAN & LOIS, Greg Berlanti.

Greg had been a showrunner or an executive producer on a few shows depicted in my script, DAWSON'S CREEK, RIVERDALE and KATY KEENE. The better argument for bringing him into the loop was that the show that was his baby, EVERWOOD, was pretty pivotal to the story and those were the returning actors I wanted to get the most. I have a whole post devoted to Greg's involvement, so I'll merely direct you there and sum up that he got me my white whales of Gregory Smith reprising Ephram Brown and Emily VanCamp returning as Amy Abbott.

I'm not sure what was a bigger boost to my ego - the first conversation where Greg Smith told me that he thought I nailed Ephram's voice, or several weeks later when we were recording it. I was watching Greg and Emily become those roles again and got lost in how seamlessly they fell back into character. It felt like a real episode of EVERWOOD - so much so that for a moment, I kinda forgot I had written those words! And then when that was done hitting me, I remember allowing myself to accept that "Wow, it really works. You totally imitated the voice of the show and of those characters."

That was a feeling I got several times during the live-read recording. We ended up with an amazing cast. The very first actor to speak was my friend Mark Gagliardi, who was playing the adult Kevin from THE WONDER YEARS. I'd written a narration that felt very in the style of that show, but as we were slotting in actors, we let them know they had the freedom to interpret the parts however they wanted. They didn't have to feel like they were locked into imitating the actual actors. It gave this wonderful suspense to the recording because - yes, we did in fact get EVERYONE on the same Zoom and record them together - whenever a new character popped up, you were eager to see how they'd be played.

Anyway, Mark came right out of the gate with a pitch-perfect Daniel Stern imitation, right down to the cadence he used. I was staring at something like 15 or 20 people in Zoom boxes with expressions of amazement and delight. They all kinda went, "Holy shit! So that's how it's gonna be!" The 90 minutes or so that followed was some of the most pure joy I've ever experienced in a creative setting. I can't speak for anyone else who was a part of it, but for me it was one of those experiences that reminded me why I wanted to be a writer.

I was not prepared for Melissa Fumero to absolutely own the role of Lorelei Gilmore. I was a massive fan of BROOKLYN NINE-NINE, so just getting her was a coup, but to actually HEAR Lauren Graham in her voice was astounding. On the other end of the spectrum, I wasn't all that familiar with Isabella Gomez but I became a fan for life with how she brought Rory Gilmore to life. And then we had people like Jamie Moyer as Sue Sylvester and Matt Lauria as Dawson Leery, two people who I wasn't terribly familiar with and who played their parts WAY outside the original interpretations.... and still killed it!

My friend Nick Wechlser did double-duty as Archie Andrews and Lucas Scott, going his own way on both and just meshed so well with the hilarious Vella Lovell as Veronica Lodge. Vella really threw herself into the musical number, as did Emmy Raver-Lampman, Lindsay Blackwell, and Carloine Ward.

Did I bury the lede? Yes, Paul and Storm put together a Zoom musical number using the GLEE arrangement of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." When I wrote it, I knew it was the most audacious thing I could put in a live read. I doubted we could pull it off, so that's why it was so gratifying to see the tweet reactions roll in, "Holy shit! They did a MUSICAL NUMBER!"

I saved every one of those reactions, by the way. They all got linked in the reaction post here, and the nice thing about embedding tweets is that even when the original account gets deleted, you can still see the text of what was said. I can't tell you how much I needed those positive vibes that week.

Well, I guess I should. I don't like that it's part of this story, but fate had other plans.

See, just a couple days before this live read dropped, my dad was put on a ventilator. He'd been hospitalized for about two weeks with COVID and that was when he took a heavy turn for the worse. In a segment following the show, I dedicated the production to him, saying that "He'll see it when he wakes up."

He never did. The show premiered on Friday night and he died in the early hours of Monday morning.

The joy of seeing everyone react to CRISIS and telling me what it meant to them was a necessary interruption of the stress and sorrow of that week. I needed this show to be an intrusion on that horror, but that also meant that any time in the last five years this came to mind, the grief would intrude on the accomplishment. It really sucks to have this particular moment of victory forever tied to one of the worst things in my life. And I think that's all the acknowledgment I want to give that.

In that spirit, I was blown away by how many reactions, tweets, and texts I got AS SOON as the show ended. You could watch it at any point for eight days, so I was very moved by the people who HAD to see it as soon as it was released. I could tell a lot of them were people who had grown up on these shows like I had.

That nostalgic connection to more innocent times was something we really needed then. I think that's backed up by how many nostalgia podcasts for those shows have launched in the time since - THE OC, GOSSIP GIRL, SMALLVILLE, and ONE TREE HILL all have or had recent podcasts hosted by cast members taking a look back.

My favorite of those is the ONE TREE HILL podcast, called Drama Queens. Sadly it's on the verge of finishing its run after another couple of episodes, but it launched in Summer 2021 with Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan and Bethany Joy Lenz as hosts, giving us their perspective on the show episode-by-episode. There's a lot of backstory connected to this, as the women of OTH had come forward a few years earlier about how their showrunner was a sexually harassing, abusive, misogynistic asshole. The podcast was a way for three of the shows stars to reclaim the experience for themselves. When necessary, they cued us in to what was really going on behind the scenes at various points in the series, including how the showrunner would stoke conflict among the women to keep them fighting each other and not himself.

Hilarie left the show after season 6, when her character departed, and since then Robert Buckley has filled the third chair. No matter the configuration, I've always enjoyed hearing the actors perspectives, especially when they're so different from what a fan's viewpoint might be. It was a privilege to experience them reliving their early adulthood, and in the show's better moments, we could see the women taking something more profound from the entire experience.

There's a recent exchange between Joy and Sophia that to me sums up not only their journey with their podcast, but also the emotions we get out of reliving these touchstone shows. It happens in Episode 822, covering the finale of the penultimate season. It's a little more than 42 minutes in.

Joy: I'm so grateful for our show. I'm also you know, there are everybody has life experiences where it's packed full of things that you're so grateful for, and then you also realized you've learned so many lessons from because there were a lot of bad things in it too. But you know, overall, I'm so grateful that we got to have the experience that we did.

Sophia: ...The cool thing about the rewatch and the time we get to spend - and I don't just mean us as hosts, I mean all of us - like going to our conventions and doing this podcast together and having all the friends on it all the time... it just it gives you something back... You go through you can go through a hard thing and you kind of lose certain memories. Like when you've been through a trauma or whatever, that thing becomes the biggest thing in your rearview mirror in certain ways in your brain.

And what I've loved about this journey is that it's kind of right size to that stuff. It's shrunken it down to only take up the amount of space, you know, the least amount of space it should... less space than it did at the time, And it feels like it's increased. It feels like it's blown up the balloons of all our good memories to be bigger. Yeah, and I don't know that we would have had that otherwise.

And so in celebrating this project of pure joy, remembering all the connection and creativity I felt during various stages of its birth, I feel like I can finally shrink down the tragedy it also connected to... the COVID shutdowns, the isolation... the death...

And I'll also remember how simple it seemed to Ben Blacker when I told him I didn't have a complete script:

"Then write it."

Kinda takes away every excuse for not going to work, doesn't it?

If you want to download the script, go here.

And if at any point, you're confused about something in the script and want to know what I'm referencing, the complete annotations are here.

Peter David and the art of the tie-in novel

2025-05-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Novelist and comic book writer Peter David died this past weekend. His work had been a part of my life since I was in grade school and any eulogy seems inadequate at conveying the breadth of his work and the impact it had on thousands, if not millions of fans. In seeing other tributes, I've noted that alongside some obvious overlaps, every fan of Peter seemed to have their own distinct favorites among his giant body of work.

Having already championed his brilliant work on the DC comic YOUNG JUSTICE in this Bluesky thread, I want to take a few paragraphs and talk about how he helped bring respectability to a somewhat misunderstood and maligned area of writing - the tie-in novels.

Many of the most popular film and TV franchises have a series of novels set in their respective continuities. STAR TREK and STAR WARS almost certainly account for the largest of these, but over the years, plenty of novels have been set in the worlds of ALIEN, THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, QUANTUM LEAP, UNDERWORLD, TERMINATOR, even TRANSFORMERS. For a long time these had a reputation as quickly churned out product intended to capitalize on the franchise's popularity. The impression I have is that it wasn't cool in writers' circles to say "I write BUFFY and STAR TREK novels." To a serious author, it sounded like the work of fan fiction.

Flashback to the early 90s, when the STAR TREK books were coming out at a pace of about one a month via Pocket Books and occupied multiple shelves of a bookcase at the local Waldenbooks. I had just gotten into STAR TREK and was becoming aware of these books. It was an era when the books were operating on a tighter set of guidelines from Roddenberry's office. Some of these handcuffs have passed into legend among fans, but the gist of it is, writers weren't allowed to write stories that made sweeping changes to the world or the characters.

This isn't unusual for licensed tie-ins for a simple reason - no matter how they market it, no matter what they tell you, THE BOOKS ARE NOT CANON. A novel can't reveal that Uhura is in a secret marriage because that contradicts what we know of her on-screen, and the on-screen canon viewed by millions will never be held hostage by the books that have about 1% of that audience. Strong writers can tell compelling stories within this but during a time when it was hard to get approval for anything that brushed near the lines, the books tended to stick to safe and soft premises. There were a lot of planet-of-the-week stories, middle of the road stuff that would have resembled "filler" eps of the TV show.

That changed for me when I visited the book store at some point in the Summer of 1991 to find a STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION novel called VENDETTA. Seeing Picard and Guinan flanking a Borg on the cover got my attention immediately.

A sequel to The Best of Both Worlds? This wasn't just another novel about the Enterprise running across a new alien species with strange beliefs. This was the kind of story the fans WANTED to see. And that was the kind of story Peter soon had a reputation for. In IMZADI, he told us the backstory of Riker and Troi's courtship. In Q-IN-LAW, he gave us a meeting between TNG's most popular recurring characters - the omnipotent Q and the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi. (Legend has it that Roddenberry's assistant denied approval for that novel and so Peter slipped a copy to Majel Barrett Roddenberry (i.e. both Mrs. Troi and Mrs. Roddenberry), who loved it so much she insisted it be published.

Those high concept premises led to his critics sometimes undervaluing him as a "fannish" writer. And yes, a number of the premises can sound like fan fiction to an uncharitable cynic, but Peter executed these stories at the highest level, while displaying a great love and understanding of the characters. He knew his continuity forwards and backwards too, using it to tie together unrelated pieces of the lore so deftly that it felt like those connections were always intended.

And he was funny. Few STAR TREK works have made me laugh as deeply as a Peter David work. And in his best moments, the humor all came from character, such as when an elderly Spock and McCoy are reunited in the TNG timeframe on the Enterprise-D and immediately resume their friendly bickering in THE MODALA IMPERATIVE. A more satisfying meeting of the generations than the TNG episode "Unification" (released just months later) was, Peter envisioned Spock and Data challenging each other to a chess match... with the boards existing only in their minds!

It was clear these books were never a "paycheck" job to Peter. They were a labor of love. His works were popular enough that he got to push some of the boundaries, and he had the good fortune to be a golden boy in the Trek office as many of the restrictions were relaxed and rescinded.

By 1997, Pocket Books was publishing two new STAR TREK novels a month, spanning the 4 extant series. They were ready to try an experiment - a book-only STAR TREK series under the control of a single author. Naturally, they turned to one of their most popular novelists, Peter David, to conceive of this. The result was STAR TREK: NEW FRONTIER, set aboard a Federation starship assigned to a previously unrevealed region of space, with a new captain and several members of the crew who had been introduced in TNG episodes. The idea was to tell stories where everything didn't have to be reset at the end, where characters could change, die, get promoted and get replaced in ways that the other novels were prohibited from.

NEW FRONTIER ultimately accounts for the majority of Peter's TREK novels, 23 in all. It came of age as TNG, DS9, and VOYAGER were all winding down their onscreen journeys. With no new on-screen canon to restrict the authors, Pocket Books was free to commission novels set after those series and loosen most of the few remaining constraints on canon. This made NEW FRONTIER feel a little less special, but the benefit was the entire novel line felt fresh and a far cry from the "assembly line" it sometimes had been accused of being.

What I learned from Peter David's work (and the work of a number of others) is that these licensed product jobs are what you make of them. Good, even great work can be done in these universes, even with the most fanfiction-y of premises. None of these would be mistaken for the works of a hack, and they were a joy to reread many times over the years. He was an unabashed fan of the worlds he wrote in. He took them seriously and the characters equally seriously, even when plunging them into excessive flights of whimsy.

I can't believe there will never be another new Peter David Star Trek story. Farewell, Peter. You'll be missed.

Being unsure if you're a success story or a cautionary tale?

2025-05-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

"I'm never sure if I'm supposed to be the success story or the cautionary tale."

From time to time, I'm asked to speak to students or recent graduates from my alma mater, Denison University, and this is typically how I begin the conversation. I like to make sure everyone understand that "Yes, I'm a TV writer with four produced episode credits to his name and two seasons on staff... but it also took me 18 years to get there. Are you prepared to spend 18 years getting to where you want to be?"

I moved out to L.A. on November 1, 2002. My WGA card arrived in the mail on October 31, 2020. So when I say it was eighteen years of work to get to that moment, I mean it was 18 years exactly. I wasn't the only one of my friends to come out here soon after graduation in pursuit of similar dreams. But I can tell you this - of probably about a dozen classmates from my year or the year after, I'm the only one left. Some lasted almost 15 years, others five. There were a couple that were gone in as short as six months. The ones I'm in touch with all are happy with their lives now. They all hit a point where they decided they couldn't keep chasing that dream and get what else they wanted out of life.

To be sure, there were a great many wins along the way to that achievement - both personal and professional. My wife and I have been together 18 years and I'm certain one of the biggest reasons any career lows didn't send me either spiraling or running entirely from this business is the fact that I had her. I don't think you're built to sustain both a demoralizing work life AND a demoralizing social life. Because of this, another piece of advice I open with is to pursue fulfilment outside your career.

This has been on my mind a lot lately as I've seen the business go through one of the worst dry patches in remembered history. That's not just me saying that. I've had many a conversation with people whose professional credits go back to the 90s and they say it's never been this bad before. I again point at those 18 years and remind you it has never been easy. Is it even responsible to give any kind of hope for people who are still trying to break in at this point?

My story is just that, one story. A guy who graduated from Denison two years ahead of me, Robert Levine, ended up on the same path but got there much faster than me. Three years after he graduated, he was an office PA on JUDGING AMY. About a year later, he moved up to Showrunner's Assistant and during that season, he got his first writing credit - just in time for the show to be cancelled. But his boss, Carol Barbee, moved on to JERICHO a year later and put him on staff. He's worked pretty steadily ever since, with his credits including co-creating and co-showrunning BLACK SAILS and THE OLD MAN.

The assistant-to-staff-writer path used to be a pretty reliable path. I took a modified version of that, now for me, I didn't get that first Writer PA job until 2015. It wasn't a wasted decade-plus for me. Six months after I moved out here I was working for Lakeshore Entertainment as an Office PA and let me tell you, going to work every day on the Paramount Lot is a great way to convince yourself you're on your way to making it in LA. That pretty quickly led to me becoming a Development Assistant and in time the pivot to being a script reader for several companies.

For six years.

It wasn't a totally wasted sideline. Those years gave me the material that led to me starting this blog and my Twitter feed and you can draw a straight line from my Twitter networking to ever TV job I've ever had:

- I met Jeff Lieber in part through Twitter and two and a half years later he hired me on NCIS: NEW ORLEANS.

- I got to know Matt Federman for something like three years over Twitter before he hired me as the Writers' Assistant on BLOOD & TREASURE.

- Twitter connected me with Greg Berlanti and a year after a general meeting with him, I got hired on SUPERMAN & LOIS.

When I tell this story to people who ask me how they can become a TV writer, I underline two details of that path:

1) Networking rarely shows immediate results. You've gotta be patient and that also means you can't see anyone as just a means to an end. You're building a relationship and some of those contacts aren't gonna lead anywhere. If they do, it could be years - so don't think you're one meeting away from that staff job you want.

2) You might have figured out that my specific hacks to break in - blogs, Twitter - won't work in the same way today. You've gotta figure out your own version of that. The good news? When I started trying to break in, that path didn't exist as a proven one either!

If you're a recent graduate, the specific way you will break in probably hasn't been invented yet.

Is that alone reason enough to discourage people from pursuing dreams of being a screenwriter or TV writer? No, but let's look at the numbers.

According to the most recent WGA Writer Employment Snapshot, there were 1,819 television writing jobs during the 2023-24 television season. That represented a 42% drop from the season before.

You want me to make that number scarier? In the entire NFL, there are 1,696 players. In 2023-24, it was about as hard to get a job in TV writing as it was to get into the NFL.

Now I'm gonna make it even more bleak -- because even if you just limit your competition to people who were employed for the 2022-23 season, that means there are 1,319 writers with more experience than you ALSO fighting for those 1800+ slots next season.

There are almost as many recently experienced pros out of work as there are working. Almost TWO union TV writers for every job available!

I don't have hard data for this next claim, but plenty of anecdotal experience. There is about a decade's worth of the assistant class that have been trapped at the support staff levels much longer than they used to. Smaller rooms, shorter seasons, longer gaps between seasons and fewer shows being renewed all have conspired to make it very difficult for support staff to get their chances to move up. This is especially true with streaming shows.

I would bet there is a not-insignificant number of career support staffers who in another life would be upper level writers.

You can't underestimate the impact the loss of the CW also has on this. There were 10-12 one hour shows, most of which ran 22 eps a season. Writers stayed on through production, they got to produce their episodes and gain skills they'd need as the next generation of showrunners. Assistants got scripts, could afford to stick with the same show for enough seasons until a slot opened up to staff them. People built entire careers at the CW and the loss of that network is devastating to the future of TV writing.

So, not a great time for TV writing in general. To recap:

- This job is as rare as playing for the NFL.

- There is almost an entire NFL's worth of career writers ready to replace the employed TV writers at a moment's notice.

- You're also competing with an assistant class that hasn't gotten out of the way yet.

And you're at the very bottom of the ladder.

I again repeat -- EIGHTEEN YEARS.

If you start counting from my first job in TV in 2015 to my WGA card, that's only five years. But even putting aside how I got the job, was the guy I was in 2003 as likely to be as ready to move up as the guy in 2015 was? Probably not.

And again, this is where the decade's worth of assistant careers standing still becomes relevant.

To return to the topic of the hypothetical recent graduates, I don't know what to tell them about breaking in because right now, I can't imagine what "breaking in" looks like -- aside from a lot of sweat, a lot of waiting, a lot of career uncertainty and more than a lot of competition.

Juliana James and I talk about our time on SUPERMAN & LOIS on the Missing Frames podcast

2025-04-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

With the new SUPERMAN movie coming out this summer, there's a lot of hype in the air for the Man of Steel. I've already done a few podcast interviews focused on my time on SUPERMAN & LOIS and I'm always leery of doing too many podcasts. I'm not Kevin Smith - I don't have enough stories to fill multiple 90-minute slots without repeating myself.

But when Shawn Eastridge reached out to me about appearing on Missing Frames as part of his "Celebrating Superman" series, he mentioned some of the other Superman figures who were participating. I decided I couldn't be the guy to tell him "no" when so many other people I'd grown up idolizing were saying "yes."

To keep things interesting for people who may have heard me already on The Superman & Lois Tapes and All-Star Superfan Podcast, I invited my friend and fellow S&L writer Juliana James along, thereby insuring that at least 50% of the conversation would be unique for listeners.

The result was a fun conversation that we enjoyed so much it seemed to fly by.

If the embed above doesn't work, you can listen to it here and on Apple Podcasts here.

Also, I made an appearance last month on "It All Comes Back To Superman," talking with Michael Bailey about three unmade Superman projects: Superman Reborn, the infamous Kevin Smith/Tim Burton project Superman Lives, and J.J. Abrams's Superman Flyby.

You can listen to that episode here and on Apple Podcasts here.

I'm the featured guest this week on HOMICIDE: LIFE ON REPEAT with Reed Diamond and Kyle Secor!

2024-12-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET wasn't quite my first taste of what we later came to call "Prestige TV" but it might have been the first show I loved that passionately. I wasn't there from the start - though the show debuted in January 1993, it wasn't until almost exactly three years later that I became a serious viewer of the series. By that point, I was already a regular viewer of ER and THE X-FILES, both of which were redefining how network TV looked and felt. I also was an occasional, if not regular viewer, of LAW & ORDER.

Nothing makes me feel older than having to explain that this was a time when network TV drama felt truly groundbreaking and cinematic to a degree that it hadn't before. This was pre-SOPRANOS, before HBO launched what generally gets credited as the start of Prestige TV. It's not hard to see why that's where most tellings of TV history start there. HBO's pedigree for writer-driven, cinematic, elevated television is probably unmatched. There's also a certain romance to framing the most remarkable TV as being the product of premium cable - as opposed to broadcast television, where the major networks were free to all the unwashed masses.

You're paying a premium for cable TV, so you need to believe that HBO is giving you a superior kind of product, right? As much truth as there is to that, at least two of those HBO shows - THE WIRE and OZ - have a direct lineage to HOMICIDE.

The things that made HOMICIDE so innovated on network TV in the 90s have all long since been absorbed by premium cable series, prestige streaming series and even current network television. Handheld camerawork, morally ambiguous heroes, downer endings, and controversial storytelling now practically form the Peak TV Starter Pack. Maybe the only technique that still feels truly unique to HOMICIDE is the editing - specifically the jump cuts and the triple takes. In just about every other way, HOMICIDE feels like a show that could have premiered today.

And to the younger generation, HOMICIDE might as well have just debuted. Though the series got a DVD release, it's barely been syndicated in the last 20 years and it had long been absent from streaming. This year, that was finally redressed, as an HD remastered release came to Peacock. Converted to widescreen and HD, the show doesn't look EXACTLY how it appeared in the 90s, but it holds up well, even though a concession to get the show out there resulted in almost all of the iconic music cues being replaced by material cheaper to license.

As a concession to get the show to a new audience, I'll accept it. This was one of the shows that made me want to be a TV writer. It's the show I found myself emulating often in my early writing. Though it often gets lumped in with other cop procedurals, it's much more character-driven than any other procedural. The emphasis is on the characters more than the cases they work. A case is frequently merely a catalyst to force a character to deal with a personal challenge or to provoke a different side of their personality.

A hallmark of the show was the intense interrogation scenes, with the most powerful of those going to Andre Braugher as Frank Pembleton. He'd get inside a suspect's head, break them down psychologically and more often than not, get a confession out of them. It was riveting character drama that just as often would be balanced by quirky humor and idiosyncratic characters like Richard Belzer's Detective Munch. It did things I didn't know could happen on TV - the heroes didn't get their man everytime. Some cases never got closed, the dead going unavenged.

One hour kicks off with the discovery of Detective Crosetti's body, forcing the unit to confront the likelihood he killed himself. Everyone deals with it differently - his partner Lewis insists it couldn't have been suicide and goes as far as trying to interfere in Detective Bolander's investigation into Crosetti's death. Frank and Tim are sent to plan the memorial service, allowing for some dark humor about the cost of cookies. Lt. Giardello is stuck with department politics over how bad it looks to have another suicide.

All of this leads to a moment I've discussed before - Lewis and Bolander coming to a head over their conflict, only to have the moment interrupted by the autopsy report. The official finding: suicide. Watching Lewis spiral as his denial finally runs out and then fully break down as Bolander pulls him into a bear hug is one of those TV moments that has stayed with me ever since.

Years later I was running a TV drama series for my college campus TV network and I attempted to do a storyline with similar emotional impact. This being 2001, when I shared the script with everyone, they all assumed I was inspired by the equally gut-punching BUFFY episode "The Body." The truth was I'd had the intent for this episode before "The Body" even aired and my direct inspiration was "Crosetti."

Another trope that turned up in a lot of my early work were interrogation scenes. At least three times while in college, I found an excuse to work an interrogation into something I filmed, and it came up in more than one script. The perfect culmination to all of this nearly happened when one of my SUPERMAN & LOIS episodes would have called for what was essentially an interrogation between Lois Lane and an antagonist. Alas, a rebreak of the story ended up denying me the moment that seemingly my entire career was building towards.

As is evident, HOMICIDE made a meaningful impact on me as a creator and an audience member. Over the years, I've paid tribute to it before, broken down the pilot, and reexamined one of the show's most controversial moments - the Luther Mahoney shooting. Thanks to a Twitter conversation, I even connected with and later went out to drinks with Reed Diamond, who played Detective Kellerman. We sorta became whatever you call an internet friendship these days. (Pen-pals? Digital friends?) Which brings me to the real point of this post...

At almost the same time HOMICIDE launched on Peacock, Reed and one of his surviving co-stars, Kyle Secor (Detective Tim Bayliss), launched their rewatch podcast HOMICIDE: LIFE ON REPEAT. Every week, Reed and Kyle recap another HOMICIDE episode, delving into their recollections of making it and sharing their perspectives on the series with three decades of hindsight.

They also usually welcome a guest, typically a writer, director or fellow cast member, but on occasion the guest is someone with no professional connection to the series. If you somehow missed the post title, by now you've probably intuited the reason for this long preamble is because *I* am this week's guest.

I can't tell you what a thrill it was to be "in the Box" with "Kellerman & Bayliss" for a little over an hour. The topic of the show was Season 1, episode 8, "And The Rocket's Dead Glare," but we veer into other topics. I haven't heard the edited episode yet, but I talk about what scenes in David Simon's HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS directly inspired a subplot in this episode, and we even got into a brief discussion of copaganda.

I've done more than a few podcasts and this was easily the most fun I've ever had on a show. Reed and Kyle were great and I just loved the energy I was feeling while we recorded it. Hopefully some of that joy comes across in this week's installment.

The direct YouTube link to this week's episode is here.

You can find it on Apple Podcasts here.

You can find the main site for the podcast here.

All episodes are uploaded - with video - to YouTube here.

And if you're interested in the New York Magazine that discusses the misconduct that many of the Baltimore cops who inspired the show are accused of, you can find it here: David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.

SUPER/MAN is a tribute to not just Christopher Reeve, but his entire family

2024-09-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

Early on in the Christopher Reeve documentary SUPER/MAN, we hear Reeve's own voice in an archival interview, discussing how he took extra care during "the Superman years." He dreaded doing something that would lead to a New York Post headline like "Superman hit by bus." The observation reinforces how aware he was that his image and his on-screen alter ego would always be entwined.

And that certainly was prescient. For nearly a decade after the riding accident that left him a quadriplegic, it seemed no reporter could cover Chistopher Reeve without using some version of "He played Superman and now he IS a super-man." (Heck, I even noted that in my own tribute to Reeve in a piece I wrote commemorating the fifth anniversary of his death. Reading it now, it's exactly the kind of tribute this documentary avoids being, to its benefit)

Certainly even in death, the advocacy he strove for in life has cast a long shadow. Reeve says himself in an archival interview that "People want to believe in a hero." And so, through a combination of his iconic role, some truly bad luck, and his bravery in putting his recovery process on the public stage, Reeve morphed from being the custodian of an inspirational figure, to a source of inspiration himself.

Hope can be a powerful thing. At one point in the documentary, we're told that when faced with a critic who accused Reeve of peddling "false hope," Christopher shot back, "There is no false hope. There is only hope."

No one can decide to be an inspirational figure, as inspiration is ultimately about what people take from you. It's a power that resides with the audience, though it's also dependent on what that figure is willing to give of themselves. For me, that's what a great deal of this documentary is about, how Christopher put aside his ego and allowed the world to see him as disabled during a time when people like him were treated as invisible. A lesser film would have succumbed to a trite and obvious way of telling this story, giving only empty "inspiration porn" to assure us that heroes of untold virtue are among us.

But what I saw in this film is that the hope that Christopher Reeve represented could not have existed without his family around him. And so this loss of privacy and inviting the public into a private tragedy is not just Christopher's, but a toll paid by everyone in his circle. While the movie never gets as far as explicitly stating that, that feeling runs through much of the narrative.

As obvious as it is that the Christopher Reeve documentary is called SUPER/MAN, by the time it was done, I felt like it could have just as accurately been called SUPER/MAN & SUPER/WOMAN, in tribute to Dana Reeve. Dana's presence permeates this entire story, even though she tragically is no longer with us to tell her part of it. She is a constant presence in all the post-accident footage, including many private home movies shared by the Reeve family.

In archival recordings, Christopher credits Dana with saving his life twice, the second being in the immediate aftermath of the accident that left him paralyzed. He was facing the reality of never moving his arms and legs for the rest of his life, pondering that it might be best for everyone if he just died. Dana looked at him and said with conviction, "You're still you, and I love you."

That completely changed how he looked at the new life that lay ahead of him. The movie doesn't sugarcoat what she lost alongside Christopher that tragic day, and throughout the narrative we understand the emotional toll she felt mostly in private. That she died less than two years after Christopher is an incredibly unfair loss. Were this a fictional narrative, it would have felt like screenwriter hackery, designed to manipulate more tears out of an already exhausted audience. Here, it's just a reminder that life is under no obligation to give happy endings to those who would have seemed to earn them many times over.

This film also easily could have justified the title SUPER/FAMILY, for while Christopher Reeve's story is the spine of the movie, the picture of Chris that emerges would not be complete without the voices of his children and many family friends. This especially is where the more complete picture of Chris emerges, thanks to their willingness to be frank and open about some of their most private moments. It's easy to take that for granted as an audience member, but throughout my viewing it became the lens through which I took in everything. Unpacking this will require you to indulge me for a brief tangent.

I think you understand grief in a different way after you've lost a parent. There's a different burden that comes with losing someone that close to you as opposed to an uncle, a friend, a grandparent. In those cases, you generally get to deal with that loss on your own terms. But when it's a parent, a spouse, a child... that relationship means that you become everyone else's vessel for closure with the departed.

And - whether or not this is the intention of the other mourners - the effect is such that you end up taking on their grief. Though they come to console you, the strange nature of this interaction means that you find yourself consoling them, that in this exchange they get closure. Sometimes it means that they feel useful in passing on, "your father was so proud of you. He talked about you all the time." In other instances it's simply a matter of them intending to help with your grief but well before they have managed their own.

You end up hearing a lot of people talk about how much your father meant to them. Which is nice, until you find yourself enduring it ten times in a row - while you're getting a handle on your own feelings. While realizing the obligation of this encounter means the other party must walk away assured they have done A Good Thing. I mean no disrespect to any close family and friends when I say that some of the best conversations I had about losing my father were with people who never knew him and were able to be there just for me.

For most of us dealing with loss, this is something that persists across weeks, perhaps months. When your father was someone like Christopher Reeve, I don't know if that ever ends.

I thought of that often as the film frequently returned to Reeve's children as its narrators. Matthew and Alexandra are from Christopher's relationship with British model Gae Exton, while the younger Will (now a correspondent with ABC News) is Christopher and Dana's child. Among the many voices that contribute to the documentary, their perspective is the most potent.

It was impossible not to think about how over the last nearly 30 years since Chris's accident, these three have had to play the role of giving closure to those who admired and were inspired by their parents. Matthew Reeve and I are less than a month apart in age, a connection that makes it impossible for me not to think about what it would have been like for me to deal with this burden at the age I was at the time of Chris's accident and later his death.

I vividly remember reading the news of Chris's accident the same weekend that I was at a cousin's wedding. It was just before of the end of my 9th grade year, during a summer where I was working as a swim lesson aide and spending many, many days at the local pool. The contrast between my summer and what that summer must have looked like for the Reeve family is rather stark. I can't imagine dealing with a tragedy that enormous, let alone doing it so publicly.

We eventually learn that following Chris and Dana's deaths, Matthew stepped up at the age of 26 to fill in as a surrogate parent to his younger brother Will. Matthew was dealing with that obligation thrust upon him when I was somewhere between writing coverage for agents and sharing an apartment with two roommates.

You don't always get to chose the moments and experiences that define your life for you. Sometimes those come from moments that belong to other people. From what we see here, the Reeve siblings have an incredible amount of grace in accepting what their lives became and how they chose to share some of that with us.

I lost my own father four years ago, an experience I commemorated in this post that I've never quite been able to revisit in full. In that case, the public display of mourning helped, though I'm still not sure I fully grasp that other people have actually read it. Not long after that, I paid him tribute in a story I wrote for the SUPERMAN & LOIS comic. It was another public display, but one where I felt in control of how I presented my feelings, and thus, and experience I was comfortable with.

But not every instance in which I've been asked to tap into those feelings of loss has been cathartic. I've not always had the opportunity to revisit those feelings on my own terms, and sometimes that's resulted in less pleasant experiences. Throughout Matthew, Alexandra and Will's interviews, I couldn't help but think about how much this documentary appeared on their terms, and if the necessity of promoting it via weeks of media interviews was at all more of a burden to endure.

I wondered if this documentary in some ways was how their whole family reclaims the narrative of Christopher Reeve from the "he played Superman, then he became a super-man" distillation. The movie doesn't hold back from pointing out less admirable moments in Reeve's life. It also takes time to explain how he clashed with some in the disabled community. It rarely dwells long on these particulars (we're kept at a respectful distance from some of the inner-family conflicts while still told enough to infer what need not be made explicit), but they're given enough spotlight to keep the film clear of any charges of hagiography

It's to the film's credit that it's able to tell Christopher Reeve's story in ways that feel fresh even to the Superman fan who's seen every special feature pertaining to the movies. His work as Superman gets about as much focus as necessary, but through perspectives not usually employed. The story of how he was cast usually falls to director Richard Donner or casting director Lynn Stalmaster. Both men passed in 2021, before this project was shot (though a few archival interviews with Donner are briefly integrated.) Instead, it's Jeff Daniels, who was in a play with Chris when he went to screen-test for the part, who tells us about those days in Reeve's life.

Some interviews with Reeve also augment that portion. There were moments where I found myself mentally adding what would have been Margot Kidder's stories about working with Reeve, but in general, it's wise that the voice of the film comes from people who knew Reeve as a person before they ever knew him as Superman.

In showing us Reeve's faults and lesser moments alongside his successes, the film somehow becomes more inspirational than it might have otherwise been. A person doesn't have to be defined by their relationship with their distant domineering father, any more than not having a great example of a marriage precludes them from eventually discovering the kind of love that changes your perspective on romance.

We think we need Christopher Reeve to be Superman, but in exposing his human frailties, it highlights that any one of us has the power to be an inspiration to someone. Without Dana Reeve, Christopher might not have seen the final nine years of his life. Certainly it's hard to imagine Christopher being a public face for paralysis without the love and support of his wife. Could he have had so many positive days without his children rallying around him? You need people there to give you the kind of life you want to live for.

This is as much the story of what Christopher Reeve achieved as it is the story about the love around him that made that possible. In opening themselves up to tell that story, I hope the Reeve family has found peace. May they receive at least as much grace and love that they have put out into the world.

Why all three seasons of PICARD were necessary to Jean-Luc Picard's journey after the end of TNG

2023-12-27T14:25:00.000-08:00

I did another rewatch of the two-part finale of STAR TREK: PICARD and between that and some things from Patrick Stewart's memoir swimming in my head, I'm left with some thoughts about Picard, both the man and the series.

When PS was approached for the new series, he was the one who set down the mandates that distanced it from TNG. He didn't want any of the original cast. He didn't want to be in Starfleet or wear a uniform. If they were bringing back Picard, it had to say something new about him rather than re-explore old ground. I actually think there was a lot of merit to these stances, even if all we really wanted was a TNG reunion, which we eventually got. But I don't think S3's reunion undermines the rest of the show, nor do I see it as a retreat. It's a necessary conclusion for Picard.

Think about where Picard was at the end of TNG. He just had his Christmas Carol-like jaunt through time and came out realizing he needed to change the nature of his relationship with his crew. He joins the poker game. He's on his way to becoming less distant. He's opening up... And then what happens six months later in GENERATIONS? His brother and nephew are killed. He's the LAST Picard. There IS no biological family left for him.

And then what else happens? He meets Starfleet's greatest, James T. Kirk. And what's the retired Kirk's firm advice?

"Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do ANYTHING.... that takes you off the bridge of that ship because while you're THERE.... you can make a difference."

Taken together, we see how this pretty much cements the crew of the D as his family.

And over the course of the movies, that changes. It can't last forever. Worf leaves the nest and moves on for a time. Will and Deanna get married and go off on their own. Data DIES. Beverly leaves.

Then comes the whole Romulan crisis and then the android revolt. Picard's at the center of that crisis and Starfleet fails him. After an android sabotage of the shipyards built to evacuate the Romulans, Starfleet scraps the whole project and makes artificial life illegal in the Federation. It goes against everything Picard has fought for. By then, most of his "kids" have moved on. He took Kirk's advice. He stayed devoted to Starfleet and it fucked him in the end. So he quits in protest.

He doesn't recognize Starfleet. Problem is, without Picard - who had no bones about standing up to them in cases like INSURRECTION - Starfleet loses its moral way too. And that's where PICARD the series picks up. Picard's lost his family and the thing that was supposed to matter.

When he has to go on a new adventure, he's determined to do it without getting in the way of the old crew's new lives. This is JLP in his "Wings" phase. (The Enterprise D/E era being his "Beatles".) And look, Wings was a fine band. But they weren't the Beatles.

But step by step, PICARD shows us its title character putting things right. The android ban is lifted. He goes back to Starfleet, beginning to restore its moral center. S2 at first glance, can be mistaken as a bit of a sidequest. Q messes with history to create a timeline where Starfleet is a totalitarian conqueror, which forces Picard to go back in time and try to put things right.

Eventually it's revealed that history hinges on one of Picard's ancestors going on a crucial space mission. The ripple effect of her not going is what would result in the imperialistic Starfleet. What this means is that the moral fibre of Starfleet is inextricably linked with the Picard bloodline. Starfleet and Picard inform each other.

Just as The Sisko is of Bajor, Picard is of Starfleet. Starfleet is what it is because of the Picard family. In Starfleet, Picard found his family - both in spiritual and literally biological terms by the end of the third season. That is the lesson that Q is trying to teach in season 2. Why else show him that?

Picard needed to rediscover Starfleet as being core to his destiny so that on the final adventure, it plays out the only way it can for Picard to truly come full circle. The lesson he's been learning for 30 years finally is achieved.

His old crew IS his family. Of course they are the ones he ultimately has to take this last ride with. And for his full restoration, is there ANY other ending that could be more perfect than him leading the charge to save all of Starfleet with those people by his side?

And if you're putting all The Beatles on stage together, what madman would do that and NOT having them perform?

Kirk insisted that on "the bridge of that ship.... you can make a difference." It HAD to be the Enterprise-D. These seven people had to be by each other's sides one last time, willing to die for each other because if not, what were the last 35 years even for?

For Picard's arc since the series - the man who lost his blood family, lost his ship, lost his friend Data, lost his faith in the institution that was supposed to be his life - he gets a new family. He gets back the ship and the friend that he lost and he restores it all. Yes, I know.... every brick on that road was laid individually, with no real plan of it leading all the way to this path for much of it. But when you look back with hindsight, it all makes so much sense. PICARD S1 and 2 had to happen to make 3 the earned ending to EVERYTHING.

And that's why STAR TREK: PICARD was my favorite show this year. It wasn't a mere farewell tour that played the easy crowd pleasing hits.... it was an ending, one where each of those gracenotes had a purpose in the narrative and MATTERED.

Podcast appearances on The Writers Panel and Children of Tendu

2023-06-27T22:39:00.002-07:00

In a complete coincidence I had two podcast appearances drop on the same day this week.

First, my friend Ben Blacker had me on The Writers' Panel to discuss my thoughts on networking on the picket line. We're in the nineth week of picketing and I've met something like fifty writers while picketing. And as I mention in this podcast, I also met Brandon Routh (SUPERMAN RETURNS) and his wife Courtney Ford (LEGENDS OF TOMORROW.)

Listen to The Writers' Panel here.

And then I got to fulfill a nearly decade-long dream by appearing on a podcast hosted by another two of my friends and former co-workers, Javier Grillo-Marxauch and Jose Molina. Their show Children of Tendu is one of the greatest resources for an up-and-coming TV writer and it was an honor to speak with them about my path from internet guy to assistant to staff writer.

The episode I'm on is called "Live from the Strike Line."

Listen to Children of Tendu on Stitcher here.

Listen to Children of Tendu on Apple Podcasts here.

Listen to Children of Tendu and download the ep as an MP3 here.

A SUPERMAN & LOIS comic I co-wrote is out today and it has a very personal meaning for me

2022-04-19T10:30:00.029-07:00

Today's the day! The SUPERMAN & LOIS comic book I wrote with fellow S&L writers Jai Jamison and Andrew N. Wong is on sale.

As a lifelong Superman fan, it is absolutely surreal to see my name on a Superman comic, let alone one with pencils by Tom Grummett - one of my favorite Superman artists. Tom was one of the artists on the book during the 90s, particularly during the period that covered the Death and Return of Superman. Tom's art is what a Superman comic should look like to me.

The writing was a very collaborative process, but I wrote the actual script for the second and third stories in the issue. The second one was very personal for me. It's a story about Clark thinking about some of those small moments in his childhood where his father's influence put him on the path to be the man he'd become.

I lost my father to COVID in November 2020, after I'd been working on SUPERMAN & LOIS for about 8 months and only a couple months after I'd gotten a script assignment. My dad never got to see the show I'd waited my whole life to work on. He never got to see my first episode of TV, and as I started this, I was aware he'd never see my first comic book. That one especially stung because when I was younger, he bought me many of my first comics.

As the three of us writing the issue generated ideas for our stories, I landed on the second story that eventually saw print. I pitched it to Jai and Andrew as a story about the father/son relationship. Though I didn't specifically underline it was inspired by my feelings about my dad, they certainly knew what I was drawing on. Between the three of us we had several ideas and we had to whittle them down. They absolutely could have vetoed this early on... but they didn't.

Then we had to pitch our stories to our showrunner Todd Helbing. There were a couple that Todd passed on for one reason or another, but he gave the thumbs-up to "Father's Day" along with four other premises. We had to pitch three stories to our editor at DC, Andrew Marino. Andrew and Jai were supportive of "Father's Day" and it survived the culling.

After Andrew Marino approved the story, I told him about how it was a tribute to my dad and asked if there was any way it would be possible to dedicate it to him. He was immediately supportive of it, much to my gratitude.

To Todd, Jai, Andrew and Andrew... I lack the words to tell you what this means to me. I sent my mother and my brother advance copies of the issue and I'm at a similar loss of vocabulary when it comes to expressing how meaningful it was to all of us to pay tribute to my father, to make him a part of this experience even though he's no longer with us.

To Tom Grummett and Norm Rapmund, you rendered this story exactly as I saw it in my mind's eye. Thank you for the gift of your beautiful art.

Eventually I'm going to feel like I've said "thank you" enough times. So far I haven't reached that benchmark. The entire experience of working on SUPERMAN & LOIS has been one that I'm full of gratitude for. Losing my dad is always going to be tied to my history with this show... but thanks to this issue, so is celebrating him.

You can buy the issue digitally at Comixology and Amazon by going here.

For a peak behind the curtain, check out this interview that Jai and I did with ScreenRant.

We also did a very in-depth interview with Craig Byrne over at KryptonSite.

Michael Bailey of the Superman Homepage (which might be the first Superman site I read on the internet EVER) gave our issue 5/5 in Art and Story for all three of our tales. He writes: "Reading a story where you get to have all of the action of a standard Superman tale and see Lois going all out to get the story and on top of that throw in some amazing Easter eggs and on top of that give them a special way to celebrate their anniversary… I really can’t ask for anything more than that. It’s Superman and Lois as a show in a microcosm."

We also got the most generous review from Cori McCreery, whom I know to be a massive fan of the Pre-Crisis Era of Superman. In a tweet, she said, "This was one of the best Superman comics I've read in a long time, and really captured both the feeling of my favorite era and of the show it was spun out of. Great job guys." The review made me unexpectedly emotional and I'm grateful to Cori for what she said.

I hope you all enjoy the issue. And if you don't, as Ed Wood says, "My next one will be better!"

Here are the preview pages, which are basically just an excuse for me to show off Tom and Norm's lovely work.

Sometimes you get to work with your heroes while you write for your heroes

2022-02-22T09:00:00.056-08:00

Anyone who told you "don't meet your heroes" never got to write an episode of TV with Rina Mimoun.

I'll back up a little bit. Longtime readers of this blog - assuming any of you are still out there - are probably well aware of my affection for the WB TV series EVERWOOD. I not only once wrote a breakdown of the pilot, I also wrote a fun script called CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS that incorporated the characters of Ephram Brown and Amy Abbot in a multiversal teen drama crossover.

And then amazingly, got to see Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp perform the script for a live read a little over a year ago. My point is, there's little point in pretending I'm not an EVERWOOD superfan, or that the show hasn't been a major touchstone for me in my own writing.

So with that, imagine my delight when EVERWOOD writer and showrunner for seasons 3 and 4 Rina Mimoun joined the writers room of SUPERMAN & LOIS this year. I wasted no time in trying to get EVERWOOD stories out of her. And by no time I mean that I'm pretty sure the first thing I said to her was "Hi, I'm Adam and I'm a huge fan of EVERWOOD."

Flash-forward a couple months. The first four episodes are broken and episode five had yet to be assigned. Our writers were doubling up, so that meant that Rina and I were the only two left without an episode. That didn't necessarily mean we were going to be teamed and at one point it looked like each of us might fly solo on different eps.

As an aside, most of the time episodes are assigned based on seniority and availability. Indeed, you'll see that the writer breakdown this season mostly starts with the highest ranking writers on staff and works its way down. In rare cases, there might be an effort at matching a writer to their particular strength, but usually I'd caution against making assumptions about an episode that are based on what the writer has been credited on before.

For example, my name is on two of the biggest Lana episodes, but I actually didn't write any of her scenes in this week's episode at all.

To make a long story less long, I was thrilled when the assignment came down that I'd be working with Rina AND that we indeed were going to be getting "the quinceañera episode." Also, by that point, our EVERWOOD shorthand was well established so we were saying thing back and forth like, "It's like the Amy Abbott thing."

Our story break went pretty well. Most of the other writers were off on their own episodes for large parts of the break so much of it was just me, Rina and our excellent support staff. Showrunner Todd Helbing kept approving our beats along the way and eventually we were sent off to Story Area.

In the middle of this, Rina and I also reached out to Inde Navarrette, who plays Sarah. We wanted to get her perspective on what was absolutely essential to get right about our quinceañera and what elements of the celebration were likely to vary in real life. One of the notes became something we hammered again and again in our production meetings - "Make sure the tamales are authentic."

The way our show works is that we do a pretty detailed story break, send a 5-6 page Story Area (basically a synopsis of each storyline, broken into A, B, C stories) to the Studio and Network and then are sent off to script. Rina and I divided responsibilities on Story Area, which sailed through with mostly no notes and then had to decide how to divide the script.

The storyline of Sarah's quinceañera is filled with the kind of family drama that Rina is known for, BUT I also was prepared for the possibility that she might feel like she's written all that before and was more eager to dive into the superhero stuff. It turned out she was hungry for the Cushing family storyline, which was a relief to me because I did NOT want to be the guy trying to play "Piano Man" while Billy Joel was in the room.

I took the Jon and Jordan storyline and we divided the Clark/Lois A-story up by act. This worked pretty well, but while I was writing Act Two, I arrived at a concern that hadn't been evident in the story break. When Rina and I compared pages, we discovered we both had the exact same note. Still, we did the job we were sent off to do, completing the first draft according to the story break. Neither of us were shocked when Todd's assessment of that story element was the same as ours.

We rebroke the offending scenes and the second draft played much smoother. At that point, my job was done as the script rewrites become the purview of the showrunner and the upper-level writers. By the time we got to the Production Draft, it was in really good shape.

At the start of November I went to Vancouver for the shooting of my episode. After I arrived, I was told that usually they have separate cars to take the episode's director and writer from hotel to set, but for the first couple days, they needed me to double up with the director because we were tandem shooting with the previous episode. I had no problem with that.

My director was a wonderful woman named Diana Valentine. She's directed about 40 episodes of television and had worked her way up through the ranks to get there. The ice was broken immediately on our 30-minute drive to set. I mentioned she'd directed an episode of TV a friend of mine wrote and that just started a run of stories where we discovered all our various industry contacts in common.

I took my lead from Diana on set and very quickly picked up where I should be standing to be out of the way while still being available and engaged. While we waited in Video Village before our first shot, she said, "You know, I used to be Lynda Carter's photo double on WONDER WOMAN." What can you really say to that but, "Tell me more!" This was how I learned she got her start as a stuntwoman in the 70s and 80s and let me tell you, someone ABSOLUTELY needs to make a movie centered on the stuntwomen of that era because it's an underexplored topic rife with entertainment.

Also, I very much feel like we had extra superhero karma, making a Superman episode with a Wonder Woman calling the shots.

Suffice to say, by the next morning I went to our PA and told them they could just send one car to pick me and Diana up together for the rest of the shoot because we were getting on like a house on fire. It was great to start the day riding with her, and always fun doing a post-mortem on the way back.

On top of that, Diana was just a fantastic director, period. I learned quickly that she could anticipate almost any note I had and was thinking two steps ahead, always with an eye to the edit. She came prepared, knew what she wanted and - most importantly - knew how to communicate that to everyone. This was her first time on our show, but if you wandered onto our set at any point, you'd have assumed she'd worked with everyone there for years. That's a testament to her and to our crew.

I don't want to get into too many set-stories here, but I will say that the very first scene we shot for my episode had Tyler Hoechlin in full Superman regalia. That was a pretty cool moment. The day I traveled to Vancouver happened to be the anniversary of the day my dad died. I was already thinking about him, but as I was standing there, two feet from Superman, I felt very sad I wasn't able to tell him about this moment, and that he missed it by such little time.

I also resolved not to immediately turn into a fanboy and ask for a picture with Superman. After all, I was a professional there with a job to do. Also, due to COVID protocols, I had to be masked on set, so what good would ANY picture be?

All of our cast are fantastic people, by the way. I had only met Bitsie Tulloch and Erik Valdez prior to this, as they both briefly visited the writers' office at the start of the season. Both of them were friendly, personable people. I knew Erik slightly better, with our first interaction coming via Twitter. In the early weeks of shooting season 1, he saw a tweet I posted about my dad's death and that led him to realize I worked on the same show as him. He reached out over DMs and was very kind to me during a tough time. The day after that, I got flowers and a lovely note from "The S&L Cast." I'm sure that was Erik's doing, and it shows you the kind of guy he is. By the time I saw him on set, Erik felt like an old friend.

Erik's friendliness is not an anomaly among our performers. All of them proved to be very kind people. Though I didn't get to work with Wolé Parks, I did run into him at base camp and got to tell him, "I'm the reason you're Steel!" He immediately hugged me. I probably ended up spending the most time chatting up "the boys," Alex Garfin and Jordan Elsass. Because L.A. is like Neverland, I foolishly still think I'm the 22 year-old who moved out here and not someone much older. Inevitably, hanging out with the boys would disabuse me of that delusion, such as when I referenced at teen drama character of my youth and one of them responded, "Who?"

But all of our actors were wonderful professionals who came to set prepared and often brought their own suggestions and nuances to the scene. We had a ball spending two days filming the quinceañera scenes because most of the cast was there, but there was a lot of down time between shots when they were needed. They all hung out in the green room area together and I gather that for some of them, they don't often get to work with certain other cast members. Any time I happened back there, it seemed like they just delighted in each other's company and really enjoyed having that time together.

I also have nothing but raves about the crew as well. In the writers' room, we're all very passionate about our show and our characters, but we're very much isolated from the other production workers and the actors. It was very exciting to meet everyone and see they're just as jazzed about the show as we are. It was a very enjoyable two-plus weeks on set.

Our penultimate day was spent shooting a massive fight scene involving Superman. Our stunt coordinator Rob Hayter did an amazing job with this fight. I got to speak to Rob on set during a different action scene for the episode and it was great hearing him talk about how they go about making sure every fight tells a story, and how everyone knows exactly what they should be doing. For this fight, we were in a very large space and so Rob was on the "God Mike" talking our performers through the beats and moves of the fight. It was a little like hearing a boxing commentator call a match.

And I'm talking around spoilers here, but at one point we had one actor on a throwback rig and I got to watch - LIVE - Superman punch a dude and send him flying thirty feet backwards in the air! That was a helluva thing to see, and a great thing to come near the end of the experience.

Oh yeah, and in the middle of all that... I couldn't resist any longer.

I had come over to Tyler during a long downtime between set-ups and said, "So... I can't come all this way and NOT get a picture with Superman." He was happy to oblige. After someone from our crew took the picture, I said, "I just realized, you can't tell I'm smiling with the mask on." They said, "Oh, you can tell!"

You might also be able to tell by the four layers I had on that it was FREEZING there.

I hope you tune in tonight and see the results of all our hard work. The entire experience of making this episode was a delight, and a collaboration with so many awesome people I'm looking forward to working with again.

I'm writing a SUPERMAN & LOIS comic and want your help to make it a best-seller!

2022-01-21T14:06:00.002-08:00

It was announced today on the official DC blog that I wrote a SUPERMAN & LOIS comic book with my fellow writers Jai Jamison & Andrew Wong. Even more awesome for me personally is that DC got iconic Superman artist and co-creator of the Kon-El Superboy to draw it - Tom Grummett!

I've been a fan of Tom's work for literally 30 years and he was always one of my favorite Superman artists. Nothing I say here can adequately convey the thrill that my first comic book will be drawn by him.

It's coming out in April and I hope it sells well enough that DC will ask us to do more. Also, just from a purely ego standpoint, I'd love if we could make this the best-selling Superman book that comes out that month. To that end, I have a plan...

Pre-orders are incredibly important because they help determine the print run and how many copies a particular shop has in stock. If you know you want to buy the comic, it would really help out if you went to your local shop and preordered it. Most stores offer a discount if you do because you're helping them out too. At my store, you get 25% off if you pre-order.

Step 1 - Go to www.comicshoplocator.com/ and find your nearest shop.

Step 2 - Go to the store before 2/19/22 and ask them to put aside a copy of EARTH PRIME #2: SUPERMAN & LOIS for you.

That's it!

On Sale: April 19th.

Spread the word and thanks! The full press release is below.

EARTH-PRIME #2, Featuring The CW’s Superman & Lois, in Comic Book Shops and Digital Platforms April 19

The creative minds behind The CW’s hottest DC super hero shows are bringing their talents and the characters they’ve made so popular to comic books in a can’t-miss comic book event!

EARTH-PRIME is a three-month, six-issue event set entirely in the universe of DC’s popular super hero TV shows. All issues are part of the Warner Bros. Television show canon, approved by CW television show producers. Each of the first five issues spotlights a different CW/DC super hero show, with the sixth issue serving as a cross-over finale.

EARTH-PRIME #1 (The CW’s Batwoman)

Ryan Wilder, aka Batwoman, makes her costumed comic book debut in a story co-written by series writers Natalie Abrams and Kelley Larson, plus series cast member Camrus Johnson (Luke Fox/Batwing), with art by Clayton Henry.

Ever since the tech that created many of Batman’s rogues hit the streets, Ryan Wilder has been running herself ragged trying to contain the new villains popping up around Gotham City. But when Clayface’s (making his CW debut) mud binds itself to a local high schooler, Batwoman will need help from an unexpected source to contain this muddy foe! Also, follow how Luke Fox balances his life as a super hero and a boyfriend!

EARTH-PRIME #2 (The CW’s Superman & Lois)

Superman & Lois series writers Adam Mallinger, Jai Jamison and Andrew Wong join DC fan-favorite artists Tom Grummett and Norm Rapmund in a story spotlighting Clark Kent and Lois Lane’s first anniversary. Trying to celebrate their marital bliss is never easy when you’re a super hero husband and news reporter wife; especially when world-saving and creating hard-hitting stories continue to spoil your plans! Plus, the true origins of the evil Superman from John Henry Irons’ world are finally revealed!

Both issues feature cover art by Kim Jacinto and will feature photo variant covers based on each individual show. Subsequent issues will spotlight The CW television shows DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, DC’s Stargirl and The Flash, all written or co-written by creative talent from the shows. Each issue will also include bonus material created by cast members of The CW shows, as well as “teasers” that will provide clues to the nature of the final crossover in issue #6

Richard Donner put me on the path I'm on today and I'll be forever grateful

2021-07-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

Richard Donner's SUPERMAN was the first movie I can remember falling in love with. It wasn't my introduction to Superman - Super Friends, SUPERMAN FROM THE 30s TO THE 70s, and a few stray comics had taken care of that - but it was my first experience with a living, breathing Superman who looked like he could have stepped right off the pages of the comics.

As a kid, I remember first knowing the film only in segments, as my bedtime meant I never saw the regular ABC broadcasts to completion. At first, the movie ended for me after Superman saved the helicopter. The next time, I saw all the way to just after Superman and Lois's flight together. The first time I saw the complete movie was around the time of my sixth birthday.

This seems impossible to fathom now, but my family didn't yet own a VCR. We had to rent one along with two movies that were selected to show at my party. My parents knew I wanted to see SUPERMAN but they also knew that another movie was likely to go over bigger with my friends. They agreed to let me put it to a vote - my film versus the other one.

STAR WARS won. And so it was with some slight bitterness that I experienced my first viewing of another film that would eventually become an obsession of my childhood.

Of course I finally saw SUPERMAN in full, and soon after that my family got their own VCR and I rented all of the SUPERMAN films obsessively. For some people of my generation, STAR WARS is the movie that made them want to be storytellers. For me, it was always SUPERMAN.

I began to learn what visual and special effects were by studying that film and the making of it. Donner's dedication to "verisimilitude" opened my eyes to WHY certain stories work. Around the same time I discovered reruns of the old BATMAN series, which could not have taken a more different approach to how it adapted a beloved comic book character. Where that show played up how absurd Batman and his villains were within their world, Donner's movie was reverent. It somehow gave us a Superman who was true to his comic depiction and set him in an approximation of the real world.

Richard Donner showed us that you could make a good, optimistic Superman without compromising the character or the world he was set in. The post-Watergate era was a cynical one, and Donner ran right at that. He showed us that while the world was becoming more jaded, Superman's continued purity in the face of that made him an even more aspirational hero than ever.

That's one of those great things you learn about writing Superman. You don't "update" him so much as you change the world around him and much of your conflict comes out of his reaction to that. For instance, KINGDOM COME is a wonderful story about how the world seems to pass Superman's values behind and then when he returns, it's more apparent than ever that his brand of heroism is necessary.

Donner's Superman is the North Star for many Superman writers across multiple generations. Obviously, a lot of that comes from Christopher Reeve's iconic performance, which I paid tribute to long ago here. And much of the power of that film's script comes from Donner's brilliant collaborator, Tom Mankiewicz, honored here. But it was Dick Donner who was the conductor of it all, the steward of that vision. The theatrical cut of SUPERMAN II (a patchwork of production by Donner and his replacement Richard Lester) and especially SUPERMAN III make it clear how much was lost when Donner's voice was out of the conversation.

Without Richard Donner’s SUPERMAN, there would be no modern superhero films as we know them. Every successful superhero franchise since has built on his work. It was the CITIZEN KANE of comic book adaptations. He was as much a legend as the character he curated.

Earlier this year I showed my five year old son Donner’s SUPERMAN. I was worried that after SPIDER-VERSE and LEGO BATMAN he’d find it slow and boring. He was enthralled the entire time, barely even asking questions (usually the more questions, the less interested he is.) 43 years after release, it hasn't lost its magic.

Something I had suspected but didn't realize until yesterday was that Donner's SUPERMAN is the most commercially successful film adaptation of the character. Per this THR article, in 2016 dollars, the film made $1.09 billion. That makes it not only the most successful film to feature Superman, but more successful than any DCEU film except for AQUAMAN. That's rarified air up there with the last two Nolan Batman films.

Richard Donner’s Superman obviously was massively influential on SUPERMAN & LOIS and an inspiration to those who make it. Our Superman is drawn from a lot of eras, but I think it's fair to say that our Superman compass very often points to Donner's vision.

Dick Donner made me a Superman fan, a filmmaker and a storyteller. He's as much responsible for where I am today as anyone. And that's why it was especially sad to get the news the same week I'm about to walk into the SUPERMAN & LOIS room as a full Staff Writer.

Yes, I'm burying the lede. I almost made that announcement its own post, but it seemed fitting to say that here. You can draw a straight line from Richard Donner's work to where I am today, the path I've been on most of my life, and it is so bittersweet to have this personal achievement in tandem with his passing.

91 years is a long time to be on this planet, but that doesn't make it any less sad to lose him. I'm sorry I never got the chance to meet him and my condolences to everyone who was blessed enough to know him and love him in life.

How my first episode of SUPERMAN & LOIS came together and reflected an emotional year

2021-06-16T08:00:00.001-07:00

"How would you like to write episode 10?"

That was the way Todd Helbing, my showrunner, told me I was getting to write the next episode of SUPERMAN & LOIS. It was the last week of August and when Todd called me at home, I was in the shower and missed the call. The voicemail he'd left was an ambiguous "Call me back when you can. I'm about to go into a meeting." After cursing myself for missing the call, I returned... and got voicemail. The interval between then and Todd calling me back had given me time to ponder... every other writer had been assigned an ep... was he calling to offer me an episode?

Having correctly forecast what the call was about in no way diminished my excitement. "Yeah, you know... I, uh, think I could squeeze it in. If you don't have anyone else," I seem to recall saying before going on to thanking him profusely. As with many moments in my life, I recall the meta-reaction of "Remember this moment" right alongside the rush of "Holy shit. My name's going to be on a Superman story!"

The day before, we'd batted around some ideas for 110 just to see what might fly. At that point, 109 was going to end with Edge's compound destroyed and some of the media insinuating Superman was responsible. It was in the air that 110 might deal with some of the public turning against Superman and part of that idea would also be ratcheting up the tension between Superman and the military, to the point that they might unveil a new super-operative who also becomes a media rival for Superman.

I was into this idea. I even had a fresh spin on the old chestnut of "the world wonders if it can trust its hero." We didn't need the entire population to turn against Superman, as if they were easily swayed residents of Springfield. All we'd need is 30% or so to embrace that and show how much damage Edge could do by manipulating that small portion of the population.

In my zeal, I spent the weekend sketching out several acts worth of story for these concepts and sent them to Todd. It was more information than Todd was expecting from me, though I wasn't the first first-timer to get so carried away by his enthusiasm that season. Todd politely told me I could pump the breaks a little. He wasn't quite feeling this story, but at this point, it was the start of September and since we wouldn't start shooting the first episode of the series for well over a month, we were massively ahead.

Todd basically said he didn't know if this was the right story, but we had time, so give it a few days in the room to see where it goes. We fleshed it out and pitched it to Todd a few days later. Alas, our efforts failed to move the needle. Todd told us to move on to something else. At that point, I couldn't really complain, even though I was very into the idea.

An important thing to understand about a writers room is that it's not a democracy. To borrow a phrase I learned from my friend Javi Grillo-Marxauch, "you serve at the pleasure of the showrunner." Todd had given me days to flesh out my idea so I could present him the most polished version of it. That was more than fair. When you're in that situation and the showrunner says "no," it's like the Supreme Court ruling. It's settled law - move on.

We tried a second idea, dubbed in the room "The Frost/Nixon episode." It fared little better than the first pitch.

For the third go-round, we shifted focus. Episode 108 had ended with Morgan Edge using his mole to take possession of Project 7734, the military's cache of anti-Superman weapons. What if this was the episode where Edge used them on Superman? The brainstorming started with the premise that Superman and Lane could be hunting Edge's mole Rosetti after Rosetti took 7734. Rosetti somehow could get the drop on them and use the kryptonite on Superman.

At that point someone had the idea, "What if Superman gets hit with Kryptonite and it transfers to Jordan somehow? Being in proximity to Jordan poisons him with residual Kryptonite radiation. Superman takes Jordan to the cabin to help him recover. It’s a story about a father taking care of his sick son." (This is what it says in the notes, verbatim.)

THAT was when we knew we had gold. In eighty years of Superman history there have been hundreds of stories of him dealing with Kryptonite traps, and hundreds more about him losing his powers. In terms of incident, it's unlikely you're going to come up with something that hasn't been done before. The challenge becomes, what makes "Superman loses his power" into a uniquely SUPERMAN & LOIS story? Answer: have it threaten one of the kids.

The very next idea we had was to make this the ep where the Kent farm comes under siege by Edge's goons. The first version we batted around had Lois, Jon and General Lane defending the farm on their own while Superman stayed with Jordan. As this developed further, Clark and Jordan would be at the farm when the siege happens, with Clark having to don his Superman outfit and take on a couple Subjekts mostly powerless, showing that he's learned a thing or two about fighting depowered in the nearly 20 years he's been Superman.

If you watch the show this season, this is about the point where you're saying, "Uh, Adam? You're confused. This is the plot of episode 109." You're not wrong, but that story didn't originate in 109. As for how it ended up there, I'll get there in a minute.

We spent a little over a week refining this pitch. Todd was in and out of the room and for much of this, when he'd pop in, it fell to Co-EP Mike Narducci to summarize our progress. Todd would give his notes and we'd incorporate them as we developed the story further.

That same afternoon, we hit on the major emotional runner. Lois's father was running this "Kill Superman" project for the military behind his family's back. Lois and General Lane have had a strained relationship most of Lois's life, but especially in the twenty years since she became a reporter. When something her dad did threatens Jordan's life and he doesn't even have a cure, that's when she's hit her redline. Twenty years of putting up with her father's bullshit finally gets to her and she tells him that their relationship can't come back from this - not when his mistrust has made her son deathly ill.

At the time we were breaking this, I was in the middle of a conflict with my own father, so all of that went into how I was writing Lois's POV. I was pretty assertive about no matter how pissed and emotional Lois is, that shouldn't be a reason to dismiss the points she makes. Her emotion is justified by the circumstances, not something that should be used to minimize how it pushes her to react.

There's an easy out here where you could say, "Well, Lois is just too mad to think about this objectively." It was important to me to not dismiss her argument just because she was emotional. She earned that emotion. It's based in history and experience. To say she should take emotion out of that would be ridiculous.

At one point, we were going to see a little more of General Lane's perspective, just to understand what led him here. Here's a teaching moment for all you aspiring staff writers - I wrote to Todd just to let him know I was concerned that telling too much of the story from Lane's side might leave the impression that we were putting our thumb on the scale for him. I didn't want the takeaway to be that the episode was on Lane's side and Lois just needed to come around to the "right" answer.

Todd could have said to me "Look, this is the episode you've been sent off to write, just do it." Instead, he did something really smart and said that if I felt this passionate about Lois's perspective, then there was no way that the episode could undercut her because the way I'd write her was guaranteed to make the case for how justified her feelings were. That was going to withstand anything that came out of scenes from her father's perspective.

In a way, he made me realize I was inadvertently arguing that the only way I could make Lois's case is if it went unchallenged. Todd was right - I should be more focused on depicting Lois's stance so powerfully that it can withstand ANY challenge.

Eventually came the moment when I had to pitch the episode board to Todd. I did a conscious imitation of my friend Javi, who tends to infuse his episode pitches with some humor, high energy, and engaging with the room. Some people go more sedate, merely reciting the action scene by scene. I try to keep the emotion up during scenes. If you're talking about a scene where Lois tells her father she never wants to see him again, bring some of that intensity to the description.

Anyway, the pitch went over big and at that point I got sent off to Story Area. Once that got through the network/studio approval levels, I was sent off to write the outline. When you're writing on a show, the way it works is you write your Story Area or Outline, then turn it into the showrunner. From there, they rewrite it and turn it into the studio and network. Your showrunner's rewrites might alter the outline drastically before it's turned in, so you want to always be tracking what's changed and why.

My recollection is that more than 50% of my outline changed, though the story didn't substantially get altered. Once that was approved, I was sent off to script.

Our outlines are about 20 pages long... which is pretty long. My job is to take those twenty pages and turn them into a 50-53 page script. The trick to this is that outlines of scenes can sometimes go as deep as "Lois says X and then Clark says Y." It might look easy - surely all you have to do is rewrite everything in Final Draft form? That's the wrong angle to take. The goal is to preserve the thrust and intent of the scene, but bring in your own voice and scene work. Make the scene your own while still accomplishing everything the outline shows.

Easy, right?

This process took a little longer than normal because I was sent to Story Area before we'd even started shooting the first episode and then I was writing the outline during production of our first couple episodes, while Todd's attention was focused on launching the show. What this means is that my outline didn't actually get turned in until about two and a half months after my story break was approved.

I was sent to script just after the New Year. About two weeks later, I had a draft ready to turn in.

Right about then was when all of the earlier episodes were being rewritten for production. Keep in mind, the first nine scripts or so were all written before we saw a complete episode, before we had a real understanding of what production during COVID was like and how much of a typical script was needed to be cut in order to fit into our timeslot.

Once Todd and the other upper level writers saw a couple finished episodes, they began adjusting the subsequent scripts for production. In the process, some plot points got affected. Most notably is the fact that we had kept the Cushings mostly out of the genre side of the show early on, reasoning they needed to stay grounded.

The B-story of my episode took place just after Edge hired Lana. Lois tries to warn her away from the job, Lana doesn't listen. She goes to Edge's corporate offices and is given a physical, during which she realizes something strange is going on. She tries to escape, gets caught and becomes the latest person to be possessed by a Kryptonian.

If you've watched this season, you know that the rewrites moved up Lana's awareness quite a bit. We now have her in episode 106 agreeing to be Lois's eyes and ears inside Edge's company after she takes the job. (As soon as that rewrite came out, I thought, "Well there goes a third of my episode.")

The A-stories of the season were mostly unaffected up through episode 108. Lana's family had been siloed enough off from the A-stories that the ripple effect of that change fortunately was not a massive seismic shift right away. Still, with each episode, a few things got reshaped SLIGHTLY differently and the ripple effect grew.

The original version of 108 built to Rosetti revealing himself as a mole, kidnapping John Henry Irons out of the DOD and delivering him to Edge. Edge was going to interrogate him and then try to turn him into one of his Subjekts. Superman, Lois and Lane would track Edge's Subjekts to their location, fight, and rescue John Henry, who would be left in a coma for a few episodes, following his near transformation. After that, they'd discover while Superman and team were occupied against Edge, other Subjekts raided the DOD for 7734 weapons.

It was a cool idea, but it was big. To make 108 more producible, it was rewritten so that the action sequence would be contained within the DOD. So how do we accomplish that? How about Rosetti exposes Superman to some anti-Superman measures that weaken his powers? And then Superman has to save John Henry at great risk to himself, even knowing that John Henry might turn on him.

Honestly, I think the rewrite plays out more powerfully that our original notion. But in moving the kryptonite weapon from 110 to 108, it pretty much ensured that 110 could no longer exist in the form I wrote.

As you've seen, 108 sets up Superman to lose his powers and then pass the virus to Jordan in 109. Several elements of my story moved up from 110 to 109, though many aspects of the story were altered, meaning it couldn't be a simple cut-and-paste from my draft into the new 109.

And so we arrive at 110, with everything that once was in there now absorbed into earlier episodes or eliminated entirely. That meant an entirely new story had to be crafted. One notion we had originally earmarked for later episodes was that Edge would possess Lana with Lara, his and Superman's mother. She was the scientist who developed the resurrection process, and though he tries to manipulate her into supporting him, she eventually would turn on him.

I think the notion of this being the episode where Superman frees all of Edge's Subjekts came first. We were pretty sure no one would see that coming with this many episodes to go, the assumption being they'd be built up for a massive battle in the finale. From there it was a short hop to realizing the way to accomplish this would be to resurrect Lara via Lana.

Most of the break was me, Mike Narducci and Kristi Korzec going act by act and figuring out the story, with Todd popping in and out to either approve or to redirect us. We broke the first three acts, then Mike, Kristi and I each went off to write an act individually, regrouped, broke the NEXT three acts, and then did pages for those acts, stitching it all together for Todd's approval.

This process once had a very politically incorrect name, but we now call it a "Voltron."

There's a certain irony about the process of this episode. When we broke the first version of 110, I was in the middle of a fight with my father and channeled a lot of that into Lois's conflict with General Lane. As many of you may know, after that story was approved by studio and network, my father died of COVID. When this new version of 110 was being developed, it now was a story about a son who resurrects a dead parent for one more day with them.

Is it coincidence that my story emotionally resonated with what was going on in my life, or was I deliberately working out my issues via the script? The answer... is yes.

Mike and Kristi were very accommodating in letting me write the acts that leaned on the emotion of Clark getting to know his dead mother. I thought about Dad a lot as I wrote those scenes. Sadly, two of my favorite moments didn't survive into the episode you saw.

In our first draft, we'd contrived a reason for Lara to need some Kryptonian components from Clark's pod. It justified getting her to see the farm where he grew up and also facilitated an emotional moment when she sees the pod that she designed to take Clark from Krypton to Earth. It was a really nice scene, but it had to go in the rewrite when taking that detour just drained too much urgency from the stakes of the episode.

The other moment I really missed was a concluding beat with Lois and Clark visiting the graves of Jonathan and Martha Kent. Clark had a moment where he said he hoped somehow they knew what happened today and how proud Lara was of the man they'd helped him become. Clark said that they deserved to be here today for that moment, to know they'd done their jobs right. It was me talking to my Dad through Clark's words. Maybe a little too on the nose, I grant you. Alas, the more we started understanding the handoff between 110 and 111, the more clear it became that there's no way Clark would have time for a cemetery visit in the coda.

Even though I wasn't able to pay tribute to Dad through Clark, he was there in spirit.

Dad bought me my first Superman comic book. He let me drag him to local comic conventions three times a year when I was growing up. He was so exposed to the comic world through me that when an episode of LAW & ORDER used the name of Superman artist John Byrne for a victim, Dad immediately recognized the person writing it (who turned out to be ARROW co-creator Marc Guggenheim) was probably a comic book fan.

It is a mark of how terribly unfair life is that Dad could not be here this week to see the credit "Written by Adam Mallinger" on a Superman story. But he will always be a part of this episode as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you Todd Helbing for this episode. Thank you Greg Berlanti for championing me for the Writers Assistant position. Thank you to the entire writing staff for your incredible support through the writing of this episode, especially Mike and Kristi for including me in the rewrites, and Max for taking notes so that I wouldn't have to. Thank you to the cast who gave such great performances, to the crew who really made this episode look great, and to Harry Jierjian, who directed the hell out of it.

I think a lot about that phone call from Todd in late August, and how very grateful I am that he gave me 110 instead of, say, 114, which would have been assigned well after Dad died. He didn't get to see it, but he at least knew I was getting it. It's not everything I would have wanted this moment to be, but it's enough.

Inside that big Steel reveal on SUPERMAN & LOIS

2021-06-02T22:12:00.002-07:00

Most of you know I've spent the last year-plus as the writers' assistant on season 1 of SUPERMAN & LOIS. Last week, our seventh episode "Man of Steel," was built around a reveal that I've spent over a year terrified would leak early - that the man addressed by his armor as "Captain Luthor" was actually John Henry Irons from another Earth.

Superman fans will recognize John Henry Irons as the hero who becomes Steel, first introduced as a replacement Superman back in the REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN story in 1993. Thus far, the character's only live action appearance has been in the 1997 Shaquille O'Neal movie STEEL, but he's long been a fan favorite in the comics. His arrival on the show was a big deal. Just check out some of these reaction videos (conveniently queued up to the moment just before the big reveals.):

I was extra giddy to see these reactions and to watch our fans on Twitter completely lose their minds for the twist during the East Coast feed. The reason for that is... revealing "Luthor" as Steel was MY pitch.

A little SUPERMAN & LOIS behind the scenes. When we first met as a room in late February 2020, I walked in with a list of about 15 characters I hoped we could use. I've spoken many times before about being a Superman fan and even more specifically, a fan of the REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN, so it's probably not a surprise that I came in hoping to introduce elements from the Post-Crisis comics I devoured as a kid.

When I saw the deck of characters already approved for us to pull from, three of my biggest hopes were on there. I remember staff writer Jai Jamison got VERY excited when he saw Steel was on the list of people we could use, if so inclined. I remember thinking, "If I don't get a good Steel pitch in soon, this guy's gonna get there first!"

Early on, the room was tasked with figuring out the backstory and motivations of the character known in the pilot as The Stranger. His dialogue suggested a knowledge of the multiverse and likely some kind of connection to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. His armor also addressed him as Captain Luthor, but beyond that, nothing was set in stone. We brainstormed a number of pitches and motivations, but nothing really seemed to stick. I tossed out the idea that, "What if he's a Luthor from a world where Superman is evil and Luthor is the only hero?"

If you're a comic book fan, you'll recognize that as a premise that originated in storylines from the mid-60s, where the JLA explored Earth-3, a world where all their counterparts were evil. This shift to making "Captain Luthor" less of a villain and more of an antagonist or an anti-hero seemed to open up a lot of doors and the staff latched onto this idea.

I do not remember if I also pitched the fact that that Earth's version of Luthor was married to Lois Lane. I have a vague sense that once we started discussing alt-universal possibilities, someone else came up with that independently. With this backstory being developed, we set out to do some broad sketches of the first several episodes and start to fill in how we'd use all of the characters.

For about six weeks or so, the Stranger really was Alex Luthor, a good Luthor on an Earth with an evil Superman. The more we filled out how we were gonna use this guy, and how he was going to interact with Lois, the more it became clear that while he presented as an antagonist, he had a very empathetic, honorable storyline, and that his trajectory was more akin to an eventual ally than a recurring foe.

Then it hit me. On April 10, 2020, I sent our Co-EP Brent Fletcher my pitch, wanting to test the waters with him before going to our showrunner Todd Helbing with an idea that could upend what we'd been talking about. I proposed we reveal Alex Luthor was actually Steel. Brent got back to me almost immediately. He loved it. He told me either he'd tee me up to pitch it to Todd, or if he saw an opening, he'd pitch it to Todd himself and credit me.

The latter scenario ended up being how it played out. A couple days later, Todd came into the writers' Zoom room and said, "I think it's fucking awesome. We're gonna do it!"

At this point in the season, we were still breaking the third episode and the script for the second episode had yet to be written. With a big reveal like this, it's not uncommon for the creators to be asked, "When did you know? When did you decide?" So just to be clear about this: every script after the pilot was written with the knowledge that the Stranger was actually another world's John Henry Irons.

My understanding is that Todd Helbing eventually let our Stranger actor, Wolé Parks, in on the secret in June 2020. We didn't start filming until October 2020, so Wolé had plenty of time to prepare. I'm not aware of if any of the main cast knew before they received the script to 107, so I can't speak to their reactions.

So when I say we had to keep this secret a long time, I mean we had to keep this secret a LONG time.

Amazingly, aside from the occasional odd guess here and there, it remained a completely hidden twist until last week. Writing TV for the online age comes with a lot of hazards. Between Twitter, Reddit and other places for fans to congregate, writers now have to outsmart an entire collective. It often feels like if one person figures out a secret, the entire group mind now knows it. I'm delighted we were able to blindside a ton of the audience.

Another great joy of this was that once we settled on the Steel reveal, Jai Jamison lobbied hard to get the big John Henry Irons episode. In an Entertainment Weekly interview, Jai recalled, "I just got so excited. Todd will tell you, I spent so much time thinking about John Henry's Earth and background. I came in one day and was like, 'and then all this happened and then this happened, and then this.' And we're not going to see any of it, but…"

Todd interjected, "It's funny because Jai came in one day [after] emailing me [with] just a machine gun of ideas. And I was like, 'Dude, don't take this the wrong way, just pump the brakes a second. We got to slow down just a second. I haven't had this many ideas thrown…' No, but it was awesome, because you want the staff, everybody, to be that enthusiastic about it. So it was fantastic."

I have deeply enjoyed working with the staff this season and that interview, as well as every other interview surrounding it, demonstrates the caliber of people I'm working with. Just look at this exchange in full:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's start with you, Todd. How early in the development process did you know the Stranger would actually be John Henry Irons?

TODD HELBING: It was a little bit of a problem. We knew from day one that we just didn't want to do a classic villain. We wanted to do something cool with Luthor. And then it was pretty early on where it was pitched by our writers' assistant, Adam Mallinger, that we should make him Steel. I mean, that was really early on. And I can't remember when I called you, Wolé. That was in like June or something, right?

WOLÉ PARKS: Yeah, it was like June or July. Or something like that.

HELBING: But it was just one of those pitches where you're like, "Oh my God, this just takes it to a different level! And then we can do Nat, and we can just expand this family." And it was just one thing after the other. And then the story got so much richer and deeper.

In all my years of reading about TV, I can't think of too many instances where a showrunner went out of his way to credit an idea to a writers' assistant - BY NAME - in a national publication. To say I was incredibly touched that Todd did so doesn't begin to convey my gratitude.

Jai also dropped my name in virtually every interview he did about his episode. Those are the kind of stand-up people I've been working with and hope to continue to work with for a very long time. I didn't expect them to go the extra mile and it was even more rewarding as a result.

There are some rooms where the writers assistants aren't even allowed to contribute, so to be in a room where I was encouraged to speak up, heard when I pitched a good idea, and then singled out as the person who had the initial pitch is incredibly rare. It was a highlight of this year, and probably will remain a highlight of my career.

The entire staff had their hands in the Steel storyline and in each episode. It was a delight to work with them and a real thrill to make a contribution to screen Superman canon.

I'm a guest on the GEEK HISTORY LESSON podcast!

2021-01-19T20:57:00.001-08:00

Another podcast appearance (I'm really enjoying these), this time with Jason Inman and Ashley V. Robinson on Geek History Lesson. We're talking about the greatest Superman stories ever. If you ever wondered what my Top 5 Superman Stories are, wonder no more.

You can access the podcast at any of these locations:

Direct Post

Apple

Spotify

This was a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy it!

CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS is back for a return engagement until Jan 8!

2020-12-25T13:31:00.001-08:00

Did you miss CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS the first time it was released? Did you buy tickets and forget to watch? Did you love it and want to see it again?

Well, as a Christmas gift to you, we are making CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS available again until January 8th. For only $5 you can watch, though if you're motivated to donate more, you certainly can give more if you want because the proceeds go to two worthy causes.

And if you bought tickets for the first airing, those tickets still work at no additional charge! It's like rewatching for free!

1) The Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund - This has been established by the Actors Fund to benefit L.A. based support staffers affected by the COVID-19 shutdowns. I'm a Writers' Assistant on SUPERMAN & LOIS, and I'm very fortunate to have a job right now. Many of my peers aren't as fortunate and I really want to help them out with this show. Please give generously. You'll be helping a lot of future TV writers stay in the game.

2) The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation - This is a non-profit that does legal work to protect the land rightfully owned by the descendants of former slaves as well as ecologic and economic work to sustain those properties and their communities. Basically, they help underserved families protect land that the government or rich white people want to take from them and exploit.

Click HERE to get your tickets!

Related links:

Download the script here.

Then, for an EXHAUSTIVE list of annotations that list every reference, go here.

Links to interviews that I've done about CRISIS can be found here.

For a roundup of the reactions to the first airing, go here.

And for a little history about how this came together, go here.

A Crisis is erasing the world of the Teen Drama multiverse and the only thing that can save it is an all-star cast of teen archetypes assembled by Kevin Arnold and Dawson Leery! The worlds of VERONICA MARS, EVERWOOD, RIVERDALE, ONE TREE HILL, GILMORE GIRLS and 13 REASONS WHY are just a few that collide in this meeting of the angstiest, sexiest and fastest talking teens in TV history.

And in a special treat, this dream team includes Ephram Brown and Amy Abbott from EVERWOOD - played by their original performers: Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp! Yes, it's an EVERWOOD reunion, and that's not the end of the surprises here!

From producers Greg Berlanti (Dawson’s Creek; Everwood; The Flash; Riverdale, and many more) and Ben Blacker (Thrilling Adventure Hour; Dead Pilots Society) and writer Adam Mallinger comes a tribute to the classic WB teen dramas of yesterday and an affectionate parody of the CW superhero shows of today.

Starring

Gregory Smith (ROOKIE BLUE) as Ephram Brown

Emily VanCamp (THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER) as Amy Abbott

Melissa Fumero (BROOKLYN NINE-NINE) as Lorelei Gilmore

Isabella Gomez (ONE DAY AT A TIME) as Rory Gilmore and Brooke Davis

Emmy Raver-Lampman (UMBRELLA ACADEMY) as Veronica Mars

Vella Lovell (CRAZY EX- GIRLFRIEND) as Veronica Lodge

Nick Wechsler (REVENGE) as Archie Andrews and Lucas Scott

Matt Lauria (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS) as Dawson Leery

Anjelica Fellini (TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS) as Hannah Baker

Mark Gagliardi (BLOOD & TREASURE) as Kevin Arnold

Caroline Ward (HOST) as Peyton Sawyer

Jaime Moyer (A.P. BIO) as Sue Sylvester

Lindsey Blackwell (DAVID MAKES MAN) as Young Veronica Mars

Autumn Reeser (THE O.C.) as Taylor Townsend

And Greg Berlanti as The Flash

2020 seemed to give me everything I wanted... and then it took my Dad

2020-12-21T10:18:00.003-08:00

As 2020 winds down, I'm left with the realization that it's a year I'm always gonna remember as "the year I lost my dad." Considering how much has happened this year, it's sobering that that is what leaves a mark.

From the time Donald Trump, truly one of the worst Americans alive and easily the worst American president ever, had been elected, I'd spent practically every day counting down to Election Day 2020. In a truly dark turn of events, that day, November 3, 2020, was the first day in 73 years that my father was not on this Earth, having died the previous morning.

I started the year with so much optimism. Just two weeks in, SUPERMAN & LOIS had been picked up and thanks to prior encounters with Greg Berlanti, I had a meeting with Todd Helbing, the showrunner. Having been up for a Berlanti show the prior season, I knew that nothing was in the bag, so I went in as prepared as possible and managed to walk out with the job.

Holy shit! I'm was going to be working on a Superman show! Produced by Greg Berlanti! It was pretty much everything I wanted from the time I first came out here. When I finally met the staff, they proved to be a great bunch of people and for a month, it was a dream job. As writers' assistant, I was spending my entire day in a room with people talking about Superman, and I got to contribute quite a bit too.

Then, about a month into the room, the whole world changed. Due to a complete failure on the part of the Trump Administration to contain COVID-19, the pandemic broke out. The room moved to Zoom, and here again, I have to commend the staff I was working with. Working on Zoom is draining in a way that working in a normal room isn't, but I think we adapted about as well as any team could have.

I think it helped that as a collective, this might be the best writing staff I've been lucky enough to work with. In other rooms, I've watched as animosity brewed between some specific writers, to the point that it was obvious everyone in the room was noticing it too as it led to daily clashes between those two. I've witnessed one writer push another writer so far that the second writer simply walked out of the room at 11:30am, drove home, and didn't return until the next day. I've seen writers not intuit after months in a room which pitches aren't anywhere near viable, or be able to adapt their style when it's clear their personality isn't getting results.

We didn't really have that on our show. It was a great bunch of writers who all seemed to feel that the best part of our day was getting together and talking story. Most days, you could feel the excitement even across Zoom. I'm not exaggerating when I say that working on SUPERMAN & LOIS kept me sane this year, and helped me through what otherwise would have been an extremely difficult several months where I was isolating with only my wife and son.

At one point, we took a brief hiatus, and so, with nothing else to do, I found myself writing the teen drama mega-crossover I was born to do: CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS. I've told that story here, so I won't retread most of that ground again. But as you know, I was as shocked as anyone when - at a point when only four pages of this script existed - Ben Blacker contacted me and told me he wanted to do the Zoom live read of the script. Then, once the script was done and I showed it to Greg Berlanti, Greg generously offered to help us with casting. This is how we got Gregory Smith and Emily VanCamp to reprise their roles and make it sort of an EVERWOOD reunion.

As I returned to the show, the summer found me focusing my attention on either SUPERMAN & LOIS, or the production of the live read. Both were welcome distractions and as our amazing cast came together, it was clear that we had something special. At the same time, it was the end of the summer when Todd Helbing called me with a question, "How would you like to write the next episode?"

I found myself breaking my episode as the last pieces of the live read were falling into place. That all but confirmed to me that it was time for something that had been long delayed - I was going to remove the anonymity from The Bitter Script Reader. And so, once we had filmed and edited the Zoom live read and announced a release date, I made that reveal as part of the announcement... on October 11, 2020.

Mere hours after I made that announcement, my mother texted me with news. My father had symptoms that appeared to be COVID and had gone for a test. 24 hours later, while I was in the Zoom Room, I got another text from my father: "I tested positive for COVID."

Late that night, I got a call from my mother. Dad had collapsed and hit his head, necessitating a trip to the emergency room. The next day, Tuesday, October 13, he was admitted to the hospital and was being given oxygen to get his blood-ox up. I spoke to him on the phone that day, immediately surprised that he sounded normal. I expected his voice to be weak, or for him to be coughing heavily, or at least sound winded. He didn't. I allowed myself to believe that this was a relatively minor case of COVID, especially when he was released that Thursday.

Friday night, October 16, he was back in the hospital after his blood-ox remained low. He would not leave again.

I spoke to him on the phone the next couple of days. Dad told me he was looking forward to my live read. He hadn't watched most of those teen shows, but he knew it was a big deal for me. He was impressed to see it all come together. In what turned out to be one of our last conversations, he said, "I'm most excited to see Greg Berlanti as The Flash."

I always took that to mean he was very impressed that I was doing something that someone as accomplished as Greg wanted to be a part of. And I think he was very excited for me that I was working with one of my professional idols.

In that same conversation, I told him that I'd just been on the notes call for my episode story area and that everyone raved about it. I read him the non-spoilery parts of the pre-meeting email, which was "We. Loved. This. Episode." He was so happy for me. I told him that I'd been working on my episode's paperwork, which included applying to the WGA. He asked what that meant. I told him it meant I was a writer. I'd be joining the union, card and everything.

But there became concern that he was talking too much and it was affecting his blood ox, so on Tuesday, October 20, they told me "no voice calls." The last conversation I would ever have with him was the day before that. I didn't realize for a few days that he had been allowed to keep his cell phone and was receiving texts, but once I did, I sent him a few pics of my son and we had a brief chat that Sunday, October 25. We texted again on Monday, October 26.

I woke up on Tuesday, October 27 to the news he'd been intubated and sedated.

This was three days before my live read premiered. The one he'd been so excited for.

The rest of the week was a series of updates as to his condition, communicated in the forms or numbers and levels and benchmarks that aren't worth recapping. There's be improvement in one area, and then something else would go south. They'd address developing blood clots by using thinners, and then the thinners would cause trouble elsewhere in his body. So they would address that, and the distress then cascaded elsewhere.

What this leads to is a FaceTime call with my unconscious father on Saturday, October 31. He'd had a bad morning, but seemed to be turning around by the time they put me on the phone. I knew why they were doing this. I knew that this was the call where I was supposed to say goodbye, just in case there wouldn't be any other opportunity.

I hate goodbyes. I told him that. I told him I knew why they wanted me to talk to him. And then I said to him that I wasn't going to say goodbye. This call would not be goodbye. Instead I told him about everything that was going on. I told him I'd dedicated the live read to him and that since it debuted, so many people were sending well-wishes.

I reminded him of the line he often quoted from Dumb and Dumber, when Lloyd is told by Mary that his chances with her are "one in a million" and Lloyd says, "So you're saying there's a chance!" I told Dad that I needed him to believe it, and that I believed it.

The next day, I posted a picture of my newly-arrived WGA card to Twitter and spent the day fielding congrats from so many of my followers and peers. This was on the heels of CRISIS being very well-received just two days earlier, so my feed that weekend had been like a geyser of well-wishes and positivity. It was a lot of kindness at a time I truly needed it.

Dad did not have a good Sunday. Late in the evening here, I got a call from Mom that his condition was bad. My brother was making the four hour drive to get there because there was a very real chance that he wouldn't make it through the night. I've already told you as much about that night as I can bear, and you'll find that post here.

What I was left with in the wake of Dad's death was anger, so much anger. His death, like so many of the other 250,000 COVID casualties at the time he passed, didn't have to happen.

Any competent administration and Congress would have put everything on a true lockdown, paid people to stay home for two months, and then done contact tracing to isolate active cases and prevent a spread. They would have promoted the science aggressively, and let it be known that masks drastically reduce transmission and embraced the necessity of social distancing. They would not have prioritized "the economy" over human lives, and they wouldn't have acted like it was encouraging freeloading to take financial burdens off of people so wouldn't have to choose between going to work and staying safe.

My father is dead because of Donald Trump, because he chose to fight a pandemic like a PR problem.

My father is dead because not enough people understood how grossly unqualified and incapable this man was to lead... and that wasn't a hard thing to see. Myself and many others knew from the day he was elected that he would only bring ruin to this nation and we spent four years begging everyone else to see it.

My father is dead because of every ignorant person who voted for Donald Trump despite all the red flags in 2016, and I promise you that just about all of them voted for Trump again the day AFTER my father died, thereby making it crystal clear their denial that boorish ignoramous completely screwed up the pandemic response. Other countries got a handle on it. We didn't - because we have a sociopathic asshole guiding our response.

I hold all of those people responsible, even those who once might have considered themselves close friends or blood relatives of my family. I will never be able to forgive them for what they did in putting that man in the White House. And I don't want people to tell me that I need to "understand" why they supported this racist garbage of a human. I have zero interest in salvaging those relationships and I could not have a lower opinion of those who tied themselves to Trump.

So you can see how all of that tends to overshadow the overwhelming positivity that happened elsewhere in the year.

I was grateful for the many people who reached out to me as they heard of Dad's passing. One of the advantages of having a robust social media presence is that news travels fast. One of my oldest friends let me know that he felt "like I lost my second dad." A college friend who I first met at a pre-orientation event for Columbus locals attending Denison emailed me to say that he remembered meeting my Dad at that event 22 years ago, and talked about how friendly Dad was to him then.

A writer I worked with on my last show emailed me to say he spoke to my dad when I dragged my parents along to a cookout hosted by another of the writers earlier this year. Apparently Dad told him all about how we drove across the country together when I moved out here and "You know this already, but it bears repeating: he was damn proud of you. For your hard work, your perseverance, and having landed your dream show. He knew you were starting a new chapter and he was positively beaming. It was clear you and your family were the apples of his eye."

I wasn't prepared for how hard it hit to hear that from someone who'd only had one encounter with him.

So many people who Dad met only once or twice, often YEARS ago, emailed me to tell me details of their conversations with him. I have been to so many parties where a friend introduced me to their parents and I promise you, I probably couldn't pick them out of a lineup today. I don't even know if I often had any kind of in-depth conversations with those people... but Dad had such a presence that even in those short encounters, he made an impression.

These last seven weeks have been about me realizing that this impression is now a gigantic hole in the wake of his passing.

Again, the people on SUPERMAN & LOIS couldn't have been more wonderful to me. The morning of my Dad's passing, Greg Berlanti and Todd Helbing had flowers sent not just to me, but to my mother as well. That night, one of the actors on the show, Erik Valdez, happened to see a RT of my tweets about my dad's passing, noticed that we worked on the show together, and DM'd me to introduce himself and send his condolences. The next morning, I returned from a walk to find more flowers waiting for me and a very kind note from "The S&L Cast." Though he didn't claim credit, I'm sure that was Erik's doing.

All of the writers were so wonderful to me, reaching out, covering for me, being there to listen when I needed it. And in perhaps the most unexpected kindness of all, the other Arrowverse assistants - many of them, mind you, whom I've not yet met aside from email - reached out with a condolence card and gift card.

I'm telling you this because I want you to know that contrary to the stereotype of people who work in Hollywood, my co-workers, bosses, and counterparts on other shows are some of the kindest, most empathetic people you could know. Their big hearts made a horrible situation much more bearable than it would have been. All I can do is try to live up to that kindness and pay it forward when it's my turn.

Everything good about this year was connected to this show and Greg Berlanti. I got to write my first episode of TV. I got to write SUPERMAN. I did a star-studded crossover of my favorite teen shows and got Emily VanCamp and Gregory Smith from my FAVORITE teen show to come read MY words. Because of my job, I didn't have to worry about supporting my family during the pandemic, and because of the attention the live read got, I didn't have to go through the days after it alone.

2020 took my father from me and it feels like the only way it could balance the scales is by giving me everything else I ever wanted. And yet, as I sit here reliving the past year, I'm left with these thoughts:

As your parents get older, you confront the reality that one day, they will leave you. That had definitely crossed my mind the last few years. My father was 73, but he looked nearly a decade younger. He'd been taking care of himself. His father passed at the age of 79 and looking at pictures of him, I'm struck by how he looked at least 15 years older than my father did this year.

Beyond that, my father's mother - my grandmother - had died only four months earlier at the age of 97. I never expected we could lose him so soon after her. Think about that... my father only lived four months of his life without his mother.

I feel like an entire decade was stolen from him. He should have been here to see my four year-old son grow older. Maybe he'd have even made it to his high school graduation, or at least been around long enough that my son wouldn't only know "Papa" as a distant memory.

It's unfair and it hurts and it never should have happened.

I miss him. And I will continue to miss him forever.

I love you, Dad.

I talk 13 REASONS WHY, spec episodes and CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS on the podcast WHY NOT?

2020-12-15T00:45:00.002-08:00

I was very excited to make an appearance this week on the podcast Why Not? This is one of my favorite podcasts this year. During the pandemic, David and Taylor launched the podcast as an episode-by-episode recap of 13 REASONS WHY. It was a show that they couldn't stop talking about, so they decided to make the podcast and find other people who couldn't stop talking about it.

I really enjoyed their examination of the first two seasons, but it was as they dissected season 3 (a lesser effort), that I realized that David and Taylor were examining the show with a fusion of the critical and humorous that I had not seen applied at that level since the glory days of Television Without Pity. When a show takes a ridiculous or an unpleasant turn, it's easy to just say, "This sucks" and rage at it. David and Taylor were great at engaging with what was embedded deep in the DNA of the series. They engaged with an obsession that could only come from someone invested in the show and they were hilarious as they laid it all out.

If you've been here a while, you know I was deeply invested in Season 1 of 13 REASONS WHY, to the point I wrote 13 posts about it. My thoughts about Season 2 were also largely positive, particularly with regard to Dylan Minnette's performance, though the heavy retcons left me conflicted. So this was the perfect podcast for me.

What you'll hear is a fun conversation between me, David and Taylor about the series in general before we turn to discussing my 13 REASONS WHY spec episode, which actually is the first episode of an alternate season 3. I wrote it over two years ago as an exercise in how one might write a spec episode. It's sort of a mash-up with the premise of AWAKE. As the one year anniversary of Hannah's suicide approaches, Clay finds himself leaping between two worlds - the one he's known, and an alternate timeline where Hannah survived her suicide attempt and is still recovering. In doing so, this storyline would have explored all the ways someone in Hannah's situation could have sought help instead of trying to kill herself.

In breaking the story for that one script, I eventually ended up crafting an entire season's worth of story so that I could have a sense of what that first episode needed to put into play. Though I've shared the script before, I haven't posted that full season treatment on the blog. That comes up in my talk with David and Taylor too.

And finally, we have a little talk about CRISIS ON INFINITE TEEN DRAMAS and why it was a fun project as both a fan and a writer.

So listen to the podcast here or here on Soundcloud.

And check out some of their other episodes. Since moving on from 13 REASONS WHY, David and Taylor have turned their insight and humor towards all manner of cultural garbage, including TikTok feuds, Fast Food brackets, Pretty Little Liars, Kid Nation, Emily in Paris, and much, more.

Notes:

My original 13 Reasons Why Posts

My posts on my 13 Reasons Why spec, with "How to Write a Spec Episode"

Link to my spec episode

Link to my treatment of my alternate Season 3

Crisis on Infinite Teen Dramas script

Crisis on Infinite Teen Dramas reaction

Crisis on Infinite Teen Dramas Annotations

Note: when downloading the script or the treatment, after you click the link, press only the button that says "Download" next to the title. Ignore all pop-ups and anything that tries to tell you your Adobe Flash is out of date.

2-for-1 MasterClass annual memberships with "Give One, Get One Free"

2020-11-27T13:56:00.001-08:00

Note: this post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after using one of my links.)

If you've read my MasterClass reviews over the last couple years, but have been waiting for the right opportunity to buy, you might be interested in this Christmas deal. MasterClass is doing a "Give One, Get One Free" sale. The promotion allows a new customer to purchase an annual membership for someone else and get one for yourself completely free!

Each class runs about 5-6 hours and comes with a workbook and often valuable supplementary materials. For instance, if you take Shonda Rhimes's class, you get the series bible for Grey's Anatomy, the original 10-page pitch document for the series, and the pilot scripts for both Grey's and Scandal.

As I've said in my reviews, I consider the Ron Howard class on directing to be essential for anyone who wants to be a film director. I absolutely will guarantee its value. If there's someone in your life who might find this of value, definitely consider gifting them the All-Access Pass. To help you out, I've included links below to the reviews I've written for the writing and filmmaking-related classes, as well as links to the full roster if that helps convince you that this purchase will be worthwhile for your interests.

And best of all, if you use any of these links, I get a commission, so it's like giving a gift to a friend or family member AND me!

To gift one and get one, go here. The offer is good until Monday, 11/30 at 11:59 PST.

Prior MasterClass Reviews:
Aaron Sorkin's MasterClass on TV Writing (review)
David Mamet Teaches Dramatic Writing (review)
Ron Howard Teaches Directing (review)
Shonda Rhimes Teaches TV Writing (review)
Judd Apatow Teaches Comedy (review)
Steve Martin Teaches Comedy (review)
Samuel L. Jackson Teaches Acting (review)
Dustin Hoffman's MasterClass on Acting (review)

Highlights of the MasterClass roster:

Filmmaking/Directing
Spike Lee teaches Filmmaking
Judd Apatow teaches Comedy
Malcolm Gladwell teaches Writing
Martin Scorsese teaches Filmmaking
Werner Herzog teaches Filmmaking
Ken Burns teaches Documentary Filmmaking
Mira Nair teaches Independent Filmmaking
David Lynch Teaches Creativity and Film
Jodie Foster Teaches Filmmaking

Writing:
Shonda Rhimes teaches TV Writing
Aaron Sorkin's Masterclass on TV Writing
David Mamet teaches Dramatic Writing
Steve Martin teaches Comedy
Judy Blume teaches Writing
Margaret Atwood teaches Creative Writing
James Patterson teaches Writing
R.L. Stein teaches Writing for Young Audiences
Dan Brown teaches Writing Thrillers
David Sedaris Teaches Storytelling and Humor
Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling
Margaret Atwood Teaches Creative Writing
Joyce Carol Oates Teaches the Art of the Short Story
Malcolm Gladwell Teaches Writing
David Baldacci Teaches Mystery and Thriller Writing
Billy Collins Teaches Reading and Writing Poetry

Acting:
Samuel L. Jackson teaches Acting
Helen Mirren teaches Acting
Natalie Portman Teaches Acting

Music/Performance
Christina Aguilera's MasterClass
deadmau5's MasterClass
Herbie Hancock teaches Jazz
Hans Zimmer teaches Film Scoring
Reba McEntire teaches Country Music
Usher teaches Performance
Tom Morello teaches Electric Guitar
Carlos Santana teaches the Art and Soul of Guitar
Danny Elfman Teaches Music for Film
Timbaland Teaches Producing and Beatmaking
Itzhak Perlman Teaches Violin

Sports
Stephen Curry teaches Basketball
Serena Williams teaches Tennis
Garry Kasparov teaches Chess
Misty Copeland Teaches Ballet Technique and Artistry
Simone Biles Teaches Gymnastics Fundamentals

Cooking/Food:
Wolfgang Puck teaches Cooking
Gordon Ramsay teaches Cooking.
Gordon Ramsay teaches Cooking Techniques II: Restaurant Recipes at Home
Thomas Keller teaches Cooking
Thomas Keller teaches Cooking Techniques II: Meats, Stocks and Sauces
Dominique Ansel teaches French Pastry Fundamentals
James Suckling teaches Wine Appreciation
Aaron Franklin Teaches Texas-Style BBQ

Business:
Bob Iger Teaches Business Strategy and Leadership
Anna Wintour Teaches Creativity and Leadership

Politics:
Bob Woodward Teaches Investigative Journalism
Doris Kearns Goodwin Teaches U.S. Presidential History and Leadership
David Axelrod and Karl Rove teach Campaign Strategy

Other:
Jane Goodall teaches Conservation
Marc Jacobs teaches Fashion Design
Annie Leibovitz teaches Photography
Chris Hadfield teaches Space Exploration
Daniel Negreanu teaches Poker
Paul Krugman teaches Economics and Society
Jimmy Chin teaches Adventure Photography
Will Wright teaches Game Design and Theory
Penn and Teller Teach the Art of Magic
Phil Ivey Teaches Poker Strategy

SPONTANEOUS, one of the best films of the year, is now out on DVD

2020-11-10T00:00:00.002-08:00

When SPONTANEOUS hit VOD about five weeks ago, I was preparing for an extremely hectic month, so I opted not to do one of my long reviews then, figuring that by the time it came out on DVD on November 10th, I'd be able to really give it the attention it deserved.

Ha. If you've read this blog over the last few weeks, you know that my life is WAY too busy to do that, so I've decided to do a briefer, spoiler free review. I'm writing this because I want you to see it.

SPONTANEOUS is easily my favorite movie of the year. I realize that's not saying much in a year like this, so it might help to add that this would have been in my Top 5, maybe Top 3 of last year, had it come out then. It's one of those movies that I call a "magic trick" film. If someone told you about it, you'd never imagine in a million years that it would work flawlessly on screen. It walks this amazing tonal tightrope between being a dark comedy, and heartfelt, sincere, and heartbreaking. If I saw it as a teen, it's the kind of movie that would have made me want to MAKE movies.

A number of my early scripts were attempts at mashing up tones and genres that didn't usually work together. The result was a lot of scripts that few people knew what to make of, and if I'm being honest with myself, there probably was a question if the tone worked on the page, let alone was going to be effective on-screen. When I see someone stick the landing with a movie that almost invents its own tone, I take notice.

The premise is that teenagers start spontaneously exploding. One of the script's boldest decisions is the deaths are played for laughs BEFORE we're asked to care about people whose lives are at stake. Some 45 seconds into the film, a student has exploded suddenly, splattering their classmates with blood. As everyone else in her class is trying to make sense of it, Katherine Langford's Mara reacts to the first death with ironic detachment.

This is a risk. It's like doing a slasher film where we're laughing at the killer BEFORE he has to be scary. It can be pulled off, but a layer of difficultly has just been added. And the movie has to do that while continuing to absurdly blow up its cast.

Oh. And it's also a love story. It's a really heartfelt romance that blossoms between Mara and Charlie Plummer's Dylan. He's admired her from afar for a while, but when the exploding classmates make everyone feel like they could go at any time, Dylan takes his shot, and for a while they go through the expected moments of teenage romance, until the pandemic takes over and accelerates their story in a different direction.

There's a sequence an hour into the film that's balls-out insane - it's comedy, horror and tragedy all in one perfect symphony that would be ruined if any single instrument was off-key. I don't want to say anything about it for fear of diluting the sequence's impact, but I consider it a major tragedy of 2020 that I couldn't experience it in a theatre full of screaming moviegoers.

I'd read the Aaron Starmer novel upon which the film is based, and as much as it worked on the page, I really wondered if the movie could blow up so many teenagers on screen and maintain the wry tone of the novel, told through Mara's eyes. It's one thing to have her say something like, "Oh, and then they blew up." It's quite enough to put that very absurd image on screen and not have it be too horrifying or too silly to keep the emotional reality going. As much as I enjoyed the novel, I think the film is sharper and more focused. It trims away a few subplots and reshapes Mara and Dylan slightly.

If you've been here a while, you'll know I've been a fan of Katherine Langford since her breakout performance in season one of 13 REASONS WHY. That was her first major role, even though I've enjoyed her in every thing she's appeared in since, she's usually been playing supporting parts that have been less challenging than Hannah Baker. SPONTANEOUS is my favorite performance of hers since that first season and she plays Mara unlike any of her other parts. With the curly blonde wig, she's almost unrecognizble as the suicidal teen she became famous for playing.

Her performance is equally unrecognizable. Langford proved she could do heavy drama on 13RW, but here she's got razor sharp comic timing and is clearly having a ball playing a broader character, one with a more sardonic edge. The best way I can describe her character here is "the love child of Michelle Williams and Busy Philipps." There's an energy to her performance that's completely apart from the shy, withdrawn teens she's played before.

The film doesn't shy away from dealing with death and the devastation it visits on those left behind. I think the ending of Mara's journey is one that doesn't deserve to be spoiled in this review, but I do want to say that after all the loss, the movie ends up in a very life-affirming place. After seeing so many people around you randomly dying, and knowing you could be next, how do you move forward with your life?

As timely as these themes feel in a pandemic, I feel like the movie wouldn't even need that extra context to resonate so hard here. I'm not kidding when I say this film deserves to be on a lot of Best of lists at the end of the year. I'm totally available to do the door-to-door canvasing for the Oscars when the time comes.

What it's like when your dad is going to die that morning

2020-11-05T11:46:00.001-08:00

My dad died in the wee hours of the morning on Monday. He'd been in the hospital for about three weeks fighting COVID-19. Up until Saturday, there was never a doubt in my mind he'd be walking out of there, even after he was intubated.

The day he died, I didn't know what to do with my feelings. The next day I wrote this and posted it to Facebook. It helped to write it and seeing the responses actually was healing.

I'm posting it here in honor of the man who supported me through everything it took to get me where I am, and who really deserved to be here when I finally made it. He was 73 and in otherwise great shape until this. I will never feel like I wasn't robbed of another decade with him.

----------

You’ve just hung up from the call. The call you’ve dreaded since he took a turn for the worse yesterday. The doctor told you a lot of explanations and reasons and jargon for how we arrived at this moment, but all you really need to understand is this: they’re moving to comfort care. Your dad is going to die that morning.

Your brother and your mother are with him, but you are not. You’re three thousand miles away. It’s 2:58am. You’re in the living room, waiting for the next call, the one that will come when your mother and your brother are actually by his side. They’ll hold up the phone so he can hear. “Can he really hear you?” you wonder. It will be the last time you talk to him. And then they will let him go. He’ll be comfortable, but he’ll be gone before the sun comes up where you are.

This is it, so you’ll have to make those words count. But you can’t wing it, because if you fall apart you’ll forget something. You’ll get it wrong and you’ll hate yourself for the rest of your life for getting it wrong. It has to be right. Even if he can’t hear you it has to be right.

The clock in the living room ticks each second as you try to gather your thoughts. Most of the time you don’t hear it, but the house is so still that the sound travels. It just turns up the pressure. How long will it take your mother and brother to put on their gowns? That’s how long you have to figure out what to say.

There’s no rewrites. No rainbow draft. They’re not even giving you blue pages. They’re shooting the white pages of this script and you have minutes to get them to set.

There’s so much to say. No, so much you COULD say. What do you NEED to say? Better, what does he NEED to hear? Focus, this is not about you. When you hang up it can be about you. This is about him.

You figure out what was unsaid. Oh god, when he was in the hospital, did you tell him you loved him? You check your texts with him, the messages that go right up to the night before he was intubated. The guilt comes back. They stopped voice calls a week before that to preserve his oxygen, but somewhere wires got crossed and you didn’t learn until almost a week later that he was still reading and responding to texts. When you realized, you sent him pics of your son to raise his spirits. You convinced yourself it was just a few days missed, that he’d be fine.

Now you wish you had those days back. But you see the last text you sent that he saw: “Love you too.” You breathe, and then you remember that you said that to him in at least two of your phone calls to him. You’re not sure if you did on that one. The one that freaked you out a little bit.

It is 3:20am. You think you’ve found the words. Why haven’t they called? What’s taking them so long? You find yourself impatient for a moment you dreaded, only because you’re afraid of losing it all.

It is 3:35am. The phone buzzes. This is it. Once you take the call it becomes real. You take that last second and put on your game face.

They put your brother’s phone to his ear. You think about how it’s easier to do this without having to see him and then immediately curse yourself for such selfishness. It’s not about YOU.

You start by reminding him of your call yesterday. Then one where you knew they wanted you to say goodbye. You’re terrible at goodbyes so you told him you weren’t going to say goodbye. Instead, you told him about your big show. You told him about the dreams coming true. The ones he’d helped nurture in you.

And then you reminded him of a favorite movie quote – that moment in DUMB & DUMBER when Jim Carrey is told his chances with the girl are “one in a million” and his instant response was “so you’re saying there’s a chance!” Dad loved that quote. He used it all the time. You remember that time when your school was threatened with closure and the odds of stopping it were just as long. Dad was one of the people whose attitude was “So you’re saying there’s a chance.” You reminded him of this. You told him he had to believe it. You told him he had to believe it because YOU believed it.

But that was last night. Tonight you start by reminding him you said you weren’t going to say goodbye, but this is goodbye. God, this was so much easier in your head. Speaking it outloud, it becomes a incantation that summons all the feelings you’re not ready to deal with. You breathe.

You tell him not to worry. That you’ll be okay. Mom will be okay because she’ll have us. We’ll take care of each other, you promise him.

You tell him you were glad you got to talk when he was in the hospital. You say you enjoyed those talks. You know he’ll know what it means – the talk that freaked you out because you could feel him trying to tie up loose ends just in case. The one where he kept saying how much you impressed him and you just wanted him to stop because all you heard was the subtext “I need to say this in case I die.” The one where the only way to deal with it was to become modest and self-deprecating.

And then you tell him you’ve been thinking about his favorite movie, THE WIZARD OF OZ. Specifically, you’ve been thinking of the quote he used in your grandfather’s funeral 26 years earlier: “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” You tell him, “Dad, you are loved.” You tell him “I love you” and it hurts because you know it’s the last time he’ll hear you say it.

You tell him goodbye.

You hear your brother say his goodbyes and the pain in his voice makes you wish you could do anything to comfort him. This is not how you imagined this moment ever going down.

You expect that your mother will be next, but you can’t hear anything. Is she whispering? Did she speak to him privately? You wonder what’s happening. Eventually you decide this is where they’re making him comfortable. Where your mother and brother will be with him. Should you be with them? Will it help?

You can’t do this. You’re not there. You can’t see him. You’re a blind phantom, unable to touch or see anything, only hear the silence of a life slipping away. This is not helping. You tell them you have to go.

It is 3:50am. You go to bed. Your wife tries to offer comfort, but there’s no comfort to be found. This is going to hurt. You toss and turn. How can you not be tired this late? How are you not exhausted?

Why can’t you cry enough right now? You remember that insane cathartic cry you got watching that ER episode where Anthony Edwards died. The one where his daughter played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for him as he passed. Shit! Why didn’t you think of that an hour ago? Why didn’t YOU suggest playing that song for Dad? That would have been perfect. If you’d given it more thought during those fifteen minutes you were impatient, you might have come up with it.

You wonder if it’s too late to call and suggest it. You decide to let it go.

Shit. That would have been so perfect. You kick yourself again.

It is later. You are still trying to sleep. Suddenly, with your eyes closed you see something that looks like golden starbursts. They’re not afterimages. You know what afterimages look like. This is different. And as they pulse you feel the slightest tapping on your eyelids. It’s not normal. But it has to be normal because you don’t believe in this stuff. You’re not Mulder, you’re Scully. You’re not spiritual.

But you check the clock anyway, just in case. It is 4:46am. If you don’t believe, then why did you check? Was it him?

You don’t remember falling asleep, but you must have because now you’re being awakened by the email alert on your phone. It’s Mom. A mass email to spread the word. It says he died this morning at about 8:00am, meaning 5:00am where you are.

Later you’ll tell your brother about the experience. You’ll feel stupid and silly. You think he’ll see you as a drama queen trying to make it about you, or boasting that “Dad reached out to me!” It’s neither, you just have to know. He tells you Dad died at about five minutes before eight, but that 4:45 was about when they stopped the ventilator. He'll later tell you that was the minute he felt like he saw the spirit leaving his body, even mentioning that to your mother.

Was it him? Was he telling you he knew what you said? That he knew that you loved him? You think about this until you realize of course he knew you loved him. He’s your dad.

No, the past tense hits you, he WAS your dad.

No, you realize, he will ALWAYS be your dad.

And you will always love him.