Thread by @JeffLowell

Middle aged showrunner rant warning.

I work with a ton of younger writers. Almost universally, they are completely ignorant of television history. They've never seen The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy or All In The Family or The Odd Couple...

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Or MASH or The Mary Tyler Moore Show or or or...
And the usual reaction is mocking the writers who know the shows for being out of touch. All of those shows were before my time, and I know them inside out. How many shows that get made today are remakes of The Odd Couple?

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You're writing about a woman working in a man's world and you've never seen Mary Tyler Moore? You want to create a show about political correctness and you've never seen All In The Family? These shows are our industry's shared language.

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I doubt there are many novelists who've never read Dickens or Nabakov or Fitzgerald. Besides, not knowing these shows mean you're re-inventing the wheel every time you try to write. It's a free education on how great writers handled plots and characters.

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I'm not saying to ignore what's being made today. That's a sure path to irrelevancy. But wearing your ignorance as a badge of honor just makes you less useful to showrunners. Besides, those shows were amazing. It isn't painful homework.

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Rant over.

(And let this serve as a warning to my staff - if you guys come back next season and I say "Felix Unger" or "Archie Bunker" and you look at me like I'm speaking another language, you're fired.)

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