So … I’m in L.A.

Why am I here? How did this happen? What’s going on?

(TL;DR version: I wrote a pilot, it won some competitions, I’m seeing what I can do with that. For those who want to do a deeper dive, read on.)

Last fall, in a fit of Covid-inspired pique, I decided I needed to do … something. Something creative. Something for myself. Something that didn’t involve playing the role of parent/teacher/best friend/therapist to my ten-year old son. Something to take the focus off the fact that the training business I had been trying to build since moving from New York to Knoxville four years earlier had gone up in smoke.

Writing was the obvious choice. In a time of social distancing, what better creative outlet could there be? Writing is solitary. It demands isolation. A global pandemic presents no barriers.

But what to write?

My first thought was a novel. I had never attempted to write a novel before, and it seemed like one of those bucket list items I should try. So I tried it. I made it sixty pages. It was not for me.

My next thought was to write a play, or another play I should say. Playwriting was my bread and butter. It was where my writing journey began when I was in the seventh grade, and where it picked up again in New York many years later when I found my acting career floundering. Writing for the theater was, for many years, a passion, and one that had paid off from time to time. As a playwright, I was published, I was produced, I was favorably reviewed in The New York Times. By training, temperament and experience, I was qualified.

I came up with a couple ideas that I thought had legs and zeroed in on the one that was most interesting to me. But as I began to go through the development process, I was hit by a shocking revelation: I had absolutely no desire to write another play. None. Zero. The passion was gone. The interest was gone. Working on a theater piece felt like a chore, not a privilege.

To be honest, it wasn’t really that much of a shock. I’ve had the good fortune to teach and direct at a local children’s theater the past couple of years and have found that work to be rewarding, but other aspects of the theater have left me cold of late. Acting has lost its spark for me. So has singing. Perhaps most tellingly, going to the theater has lost its appeal. I see social media posts from my many theater friends and colleagues, pining for the days when they can return to the theater as both participants and spectators. And my response to those posts is always … meh. I could take it or leave it. Mostly leave it.

So where does that leave me? Where does that leave a guy with a degree in musical theater and a lifetime of professional experience in live performing arts?

Television.

Why TV? Because I love it. Always have. I’m a junkie. Growing up, TV was everything: babysitter, life coach, closest friend. The soundtrack of my childhood are the theme songs to “Taxi” and “Star Trek” and “WKRP in Cincinnati.” “G.I. Joe” taught me right from wrong. Scrooge McDuck taught me I should work smarter, not harder (a lesson I might have taken a bit too literally). “Cheers” and “Night Court,” with their post-9p.m. airings, were my idea of burning the midnight oil.

So I tried my hand at writing a TV pilot. The first couple of drafts were a bit rough, but with the help and advice of a couple trusted writing friends, I got it to a place where I was comfortable sending it out into the world. With no connections to anyone in that part of the industry, this meant writing competitions.

And much to my surprise, it’s done well! I’ve racked up placements as a quarter-finalist, semi-finalist, finalist, “official selection” and one outright win for best original TV pilot. So, yay.

But what does all that mean? What can I do with that?

No matter how many plays I’ve written or how much time I spent sniffing around the edges of show business in New York, the fact of the matter is that I am a newborn babe in the TV writing game. Maybe not even that. Maybe just an embryo. I’m not starting at the bottom; the bottom is still somewhere above me, barely visible in the distance. Because of that, it’s not realistic to think that this pilot I’ve written would ever be greenlit to series. No one would take a person who’s never even stepped foot in a writer’s room and give that goober their own show. But maybe someone will take some level of interest. An agent. A manager. A fairy godmother. Maybe I could get into one of those writer’s rooms. Maybe that could be a start.

So that’s what I’m here to explore. (Also, after 14 months of lockdown, my family just needed to get away, even it’s only to stare at four different walls than the ones we’ve been staring at throughout this plague.) I plan to chronicle that journey here as much as possible. If you’ve made it to the end of this post, perhaps you’ll like to come along for the ride.