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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

There’s a version of the television comedy writers’ room that gets described in articles and Hollywood memoirs and old episodes of the Dick Van Dyke Show as a kind of creative paradise — funny people sitting around a table, pitching jokes, laughing, ordering lunch. And that version isn’t wrong, exactly. It just leaves out the part where everyone is also being systematically destroyed.

In a productive way of course. In a funny way.

Comedy writers, when they’ve known each other long enough, will say things to each other’s faces that would end careers if they appeared in a text message. And I don’t mean jokes about forbidden topics with dark humor — yes, we do those a lot, too. There is probably not one world historical cultural hero, not one undisputed saint, who has not been used as a punchline or set-up in some room run. I can remember someone on a writing staff — and really, honestly, not me, I promise — who created a whole scenario about Anne Frank (poor Anne Frank is a foundational part of a lot of really reprehensible writers room runs). Anyway, the premise was that Anne Frank somehow has a cappuccino maker in the the attic and she keeps using it, despite being told not to, and it’s the noise of the milk steamer that draws the calamitous attention of the Gestapo, but look, maybe you had to be there with a long rewrite night ahead of you and a willingness to be distracted by that kind of thing. Again, not defending it. But, you know, it was kind of funny when the guy did the WHHHHHHOOOOOAAAA sound of the streamer and someone with a Dutch accent whisper shouting Annika! Stop it met de melk dinge.

And that’s when we’re making fun of people who aren’t there. But we also zero in on each other — our fears and vulnerabilities, the things we sometimes share with co-workers over take-out lunch. We discover those things about each other, register them for later use and, when the time comes, we tear into them with a claw-like hook.

But look: The room works because the people in it trust each other enough to go further than is strictly advisable, and because going further than is strictly advisable is where the funny stuff is. A room with everyone laughing, even if it’s about something appalling or cruel, is a much better room to write comedy in. It’s easier to write a joke when everyone is laughing anyway than write a joke from silence.

I mention this because the writers’ room, as an institution, is in serious trouble.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I never know how much of a life recap I need to do, so just in case, here’s a quick one: As some of you know, I’m currently a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, working toward a Master of Divinity degree and, eventually, ordination in the Episcopal Church. I know, I know. It’s a lot.

I’m the oldest person in most of my classes, older than some of my professors, and I came to this from many years in the television business, successful years I feel I need to say, and you’ll find out why in a minute. But my new perch means I sometimes see my two worlds collide in ways that are, let’s say, instructive.

Last week, a classmate of mine — a young guy, very sharp — was putting together a short stand-up routine for a seminary event. He tried some of it out on me, and it was pretty good. Funny, confident, a clear point of view. And he asked me if I had any suggestions for some jokes he could add. And because I am who I am and I cannot help myself, I pitched a joke to him. He nodded, sort of, and said, “Huh, yeah.” So I made another pitch. And he looked at me, not unkindly, and said: “Too wordy.”

Too wordy.

I need to stop for a second. I have been a professional comedy writer for decades. Three-plus decades. I have written for one of the most successful sitcoms in the history of American television. I have been handsomely remunerated for my skills in writing and producing comedy for a wide audience. And a seminary student doing his first open mic just gave me a note.

Too wordy. Too wordy?

Which got me thinking about who gets to give notes, and why, and what happens when you find yourself, without quite meaning to, on the wrong side of that transaction. Because it doesn’t matter — at least not to me, unfortunately — if you don’t know anything about anything and that the joke isn’t wordy — what matters is that I now need to explain why you’re wrong and I’m right and even though I need to explain that I know I can’t, so I don’t. But, you know.

Once, I had a show on the air, and it was doing pretty well. I know, I know, but that did occasionally happen.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A friend of mine has been having a hard time in the entertainment business lately. I know, I know — this isn’t really news in the traditional sense. Or unique. It’s been that way for a lot of our friends. And he’s a writer — a good one — but he hasn’t worked in a while, and recently he asked me for advice. We were at Zankou Chicken. Just to set the scene.

I hate giving advice. I especially hate giving career advice, because career advice is almost always just autobiography — you tell people what worked for you, which may have absolutely nothing to do with what will work for them, and you send them off to do something that made sense in a completely different era, in a completely different business climate, for a completely different person. Career advice, in other words, is mostly just telling stories about yourself and hoping they mean something useful to other people. Which, I guess, is sort of what I do here. That’s an awkward thought.

Anyway, back to Zankou Chicken. My friend wanted to know what I thought: Should he keep pushing, knocking on doors, trying to break into an industry in serious turbulence? Or should he pack it in right now, fold his tents and do something else for the rest of his life. “What do you think I should do?” he wanted to know.

And I paused. And in that pause, I started thinking. And what I thought about was a leather jacket.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A friend asked me to come to his birthday dinner next week. “That is,” he added, “if they’ll let you out.”

“Let me out?” I asked.

I have been a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary for more than a year. I’m about mid-way through the Masters in Divinity program, on my way — God willing and the people consenting — to ordination in the Episcopal Church. But I still have some in my circle who don’t quite understand what I’m doing with my time.

Some of them, like my birthday friend, hear the word “seminary” and assume that I spend my days in robes, cloistered in some stone tower, chanting away in a tiny room. When he asks, “Will they let you out?” I think he’s imagining some fearsome character of indistinct gender with a heavy ring of skeleton keys, guarding a heavy swinging gate. He imagines that I use the heavy ropes that are ordinarily wrapped around my cloaks to form a simple knot-ladder, which I use to slip down from the tower window and into the foggy night.

Instead, I’m a graduate student who spends a lot of time, voluntarily, in the Seminary library — it’s a gorgeous place to read and study, but still: it’s a library — and in my free time I do what other graduate students do, which is to drink espresso and complain about the reading.

It’s the word “seminary” that throws them. Our culture is now so secular that words which used to be in the common vocabulary now have an exotic and spooky vibe. The language of religion — which used to be as familiar and common as words we use every day, like “upload” and “probiotic” — now have a weirdness that causes old friends to ask if “they” will “let” me come to a birthday party.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

When I tell my friends in show business that I am now at Princeton Theological Seminary, getting a Masters in Divinity and on my way — I hope, or inshallah as we Episcopalians say — to ordination in the Episcopal Church, their response is usually to nod thoughtfully and say something along the lines of “can’t wait to read the pilot.”

“But I’m not doing this to get a pilot script out of it,” I always say. And they usually smile indulgently as if to say, C’mon now, we all know this is a good career move.

And then I try again to explain that it’s not really a career move. It’s a matter of genuine faith and curiosity. I say I am trying to make a significant change in my life — yes, at my age — and I impress on my show business friends that my motives are entirely spiritual.

Well, okay, I admit I was intrigued to learn that ordained clergy can apply for a placard to place on their dashboard which, in New York City anyway, allows for a certain leniency in parking law enforcement, but that’s not why I’m doing this. But it’s impossible to convince certain people that I’m here because I genuinely want to learn, to think, to serve. That seems incongruent with what they’ve observed from me in the past decades, and I get it. So they naturally try to think about what else might be driving this.

“Faith-based content is really big right now,” a friend of mine said when I told him where I was and what I was doing for the next three years. “But you probably already have a pitch ready to go, right?”

“Um, no,” I said.

“Seriously? You’re telling me that you’re not writing a screenplay about this? I don’t believe you. I mean, you should be.”

It’s probably never going to make sense to some people. As hard as I tried to explain it to my friend, there was no way I could convince him. It was the same with a studio executive I know. “Wow, fantastic!” she said when I told her my news. “That’s a really great thing. And I totally get it. You get to a certain point in your life and you’re looking for bigger answers.”

“And just so you know, we’re getting into that area a lot more,” she added. “But my question is: are you working mostly in the comedy arena or the drama side?”

“I’m not on a side,” I said. “I’m getting a Masters in Divinity because I’m genuinely called to it.”

“Of course, of course,” she said. “But I just want to know if whatever you write about it is, like, going to be funny? Because there’s a lot of room for the comedy take of the whole religion thing right now. Basically, our research suggests that shows like The Chosen and House of David are kind of running the table with the serious angle. Might be interesting to look at the lighter version?”

I shouldn’t be surprised. The entertainment industry is deeply confused right now, I’ve sure you’ve noticed.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

In Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy’s lovely and affectionate comedy about an amateur theater troupe, there’s a moment where the local musical theater king and queen — a married couple, they own the local travel agency — are auditioning for the big community musical. They’re played by the late Fred Willard and now, unfathomably, the late Catherine O’Hara, and the audition is pitch-perfect terrible. It’s a wonderful movie — all of Christopher Guest’s movies, well, as a writer, I like to say they’re movies directed by Christopher Guest but written by Guest and Eugene Levy, you know, the script’s important.

But okay. Back to the audition scene.

It’s the two of them — Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara, and they’re like bad high school actors all grown up — and the audition piece they’re doing is an original and unforgettable version of Maria Muldaur’s Midnight at the Oasis — and look, I have seen this moment a zillion times — it’s in snippets all over the place, I’ve seen it in the theater, I’ve seen it on Instagram and TikTok, and I’ve seen it, unfortunately, a lot since last week when the news broke that Catherine O’Hara had died — but it was only a little while ago that I noticed that during the audition scene, whenever Fred Willard has a line, Catherine O’Hara almost imperceptibly mouths the line along with him.

It’s something, again, you sometimes see in really bad school plays. The players have memorized the whole thing so completely and robotically that they’ll just mouth along with the other people on stage. O’Hara does it, and it’s wonderful, but you might, like me, miss it the first couple of times you see the movie.

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Correcting others in public is an irresistible temptation — and almost always a mistake. Rob learned that lesson early, as a young writer on Cheers, when he pointed out that a character, a sort of ’80s finance type, couldn’t actually be arrested for launching a hostile takeover as the line was written. He was right. But it annoyed everyone. The lesson stuck: Knowing when to let things go matters a lot more than knowing you’re correct.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I was a guest on a television show a few years back, and I told a story about buying a used car. “It was an old Subaru Outback,” I explained, “and when I bought it in 1988 it was already eight years old, with a rusted undercarriage and a perpetual oil leak.”

“Subaru didn’t make an Outback back then,” about two dozen angry viewers tweeted at me the next day. “Why are you lying? What else are you lying about?”

Well, a lot actually. But in this specific instance, it was more like an honest mistake.

And I tried to explain that it was a slip of the tongue. “I own a Subaru Outback now,” I replied, “and it’s basically the same model as the one I bought in 1988.”

Some took that at face value and accepted the correction, but added, “Wait, you wrote on TV shows, you’re a producer and showrunner, are you seriously driving a Subaru? What happened? What bad decisions did you make?”

There are only so many things you can explain to people, I discovered, on social media. Or, actually, face to face, too. We like to pretend that social media is this uniquely difficult place to have a thoughtful conversation, but I’m not sure it’s all that much easier around the dinner table, or at a coffee place, or anywhere, really. So I just let the Subaru detractors do their detracting — detractors gonna detract, is my feeling — and went silent on the issue.

But some couldn’t let it go. “You need to be more careful with your words,” one person wrote, “especially because you’re a public figure.” Which is technically true but also a ludicrous thing to say, especially because right at this minute I am recording this in my underwear and I’m sorry but you’re just going to have to live with that image.

This is all to say: people can be real jerks about stuff. If you somehow blunder into someone’s area of oddly specific expertise, expect to hear about it. Correcting others in public is an irresistible temptation.

It’s also something young people like to do, loudly, in the office. Or annoyingly in the writers room, and I try to forgive that tendency because I have experienced that forgiveness myself.

Years ago, and I mean years ago, when I was a very young writer whose job it was to be very quiet unless I had a surefire pitch, we were working on an episode where a character was about to be arrested for launching a hostile takeover of a big corporation. There was more to it than that — and I had forgotten this incident until I saw a snippet of the episode recently on Instagram — there’s someone moving through all of the seasons of Cheers and posting little moments from each episode, along with synopses and notes, and so far he hasn’t had any trouble with the copyright police, which is probably because the new owners of the Cheers library are busy trying to buy the Warner Bros. library — so in the meantime I can scroll and relive very specific career memories, which isn’t really as fun as it sounds.

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Awards season is here, which means Hollywood is again awash in parties, cocktails and mocktails. And yet, somehow, none of it feels like much of a celebration. Rob Long remembers the best awards party he ever went to — the one no one planned — and traces how an industry that once knew how to have fun became serious, fragmented and anxious. His antidote to malaise? A really good, wide-open bash — that someone else pays for.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

It’s awards season, maybe you noticed. And if you didn’t, I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re not quite what they used to be. Maybe you noticed that, too.

What they used to be — aside from a hilarious cage match of ambition and desperation — was a chance to go to parties and get gift bags and be one big happy entertainment business. It really was an amazing eight weeks where it seemed like everyone in show business had been visited by three ghosts the night before. I remember going to some event once, at whatever restaurant was happening at the time, and being warmly embraced, and I do mean warmly, and I do mean embraced, by a person I didn’t really know that well, with whom I had had one meeting, years before, and he hugged me closer and sort of sidled me along to the gift bag table. He said, “I love this community.” It was him talking. It was awards season. And he had a hand in the movie that the party was designed to promote — I think. It might have been that he was the publicist for one of the actors who was on the cover of a magazine and this party was for that, but that’s sort of the point of awards season. It didn’t matter. There was joy in the community and also gift bags.

I don’t know if they still give out the really swanky gift bags anymore. I do know that the parties don’t have the same zip. But that’s maybe because at some point between the collapse of the broadcast networks and the razor thin margins of the streamers, people in show business stopped knowing how to throw a party. Everyone got very serious.

Do you want to hear something sad? I’ve been a working writer and producer in show business for 30 years, but the only really great Hollywood party I’ve ever been to was my first one, way back in 1991, after the Golden Globe Awards.

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Heated Rivalry, the horny hockey drama, employs a classic Hollywood formula: Sprinkle in some nudity, and suddenly the odds of your project becoming a phenom improve. Like the perpetually packed “European-style” pool in Las Vegas, audiences are drawn in by the allure of illicit skin. And here’s what has always been true: It’s much easier to show a good-looking naked person than it is to make a hit. But if you do the first part right, maybe the second part happens automatically.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I got an email a few weeks ago and I made the mistake of answering it. “Would you,” the emailer who turned out to be a journalist from Europe asked, “be interested in talking to us in a Zoom conversation about how Hollywood can regain some of its economic momentum?” Like an idiot, I said yes, though I was smart enough to tell them they couldn’t put it online, because what I knew — though they did not — was that anything specific that I suggested would sound instantly wrong, because the only answer to that question is, keep trying to make the hits. Which nobody wants to hear.

I once sat next to someone who was part of a team that had just acquired a big television network, and he politely asked me if I had any advice for the new managers of the enterprise, and I said, “Yeah, make some hits,” and he chuckled indulgently and said, “Well, I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” at which point I said, “No, actually it’s not. That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole thing.”

So I knew I was in trouble with the European journalists, because they were actually paying me for my appearance, not just coincidentally sitting next to me at a fundraising dinner, so if I actually told them the truth — more hits and problem solved — they’d want their money back and I have already spent it, so I did what I truly hate to do, and that’s, I did some thinking.

So what I did was a classic evasion maneuver. Instead of providing answers, I framed and reframed the question. Here’s a version of what I said.

At the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, there are two large swimming pools. Both are ringed by colorful cabanas and festooned with fountains and amoeba-shaped nooks. But only one of them — a little more secluded than the other — allows something called, with mysterious glamour, “European-style bathing.”

Meaning: topless. The hotel’s management took the idea of topless girls lounging around the pool and made it classy-sounding. As we say in show business, they walked it upstairs.

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The easy thing to say about anything new in show business is, “Never gonna work.” In the case of Quibi — Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s short-form mobile streamer — plenty of people laughed, and they were right to. But did Quibi fail because it was a bad idea, or because it spent and promised too much? Even Rob Long’s TikTok algo now serves soapy microdramas. Quibi may not have ended up a punchline because it was wrong, but because — after three glasses of wine — it ordered the deluxe version of the future and forgot the return policy.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A friend of mine has a bad habit of pouring himself a big glass of wine in the evening, sometimes more than one, and then going shopping on the internet.

Then, a few days later, the delivery guys bring him a mystery package.

Sometimes it’s stuff he needs — pen refills or a USB drive or a new box of printer ink. But sometimes it’s stuff that only seems useful, and imperative, after a few glasses of wine or whiskey late at night, when there’s no one else awake or around to tell him to just close the lid of the MacBook Pro and go to bed.

That’s when he opens up the package and pulls out nootropic supplements or a toothbrush sanitizer or one of those travel pillows that looks like a toilet seat.

And the stuff sits on the kitchen counter in silent reproach — look at what you did, it all seems to say — and he ends up sending most of it back, which you can almost always do, though they usually ask why — wrong size? Not as described? Doesn’t fit? — though never allowing you to tell them the real reason, which was, judgment impaired by the following: Long day, skipped dinner, three glasses of cabernet, WiFi.

That’s when the phrase, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” really comes into its own.

I remember, years ago, when a Hollywood insider sent me a text with a link to a recent announcement about a new company, called Quibi, which was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, a show business entrepreneur and hugely successful producer, and Meg Whitman, who ran eBay and Hewlett Packard and almost became the governor of the state of California.

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As Rob Long sits in his small New York City apartment surrounded by stuff — hard copies of old scripts, four umbrellas — he feels lucky to have it all. And in an industry where even modest success feels like a lottery ticket, Rob asks us to pause and consider an annual plea: supporting My Friend’s Place, an organization that works tirelessly to turn the tide for unhoused youth in Los Angeles. For young people who’ve been failed again and again by the adults in their lives, My Friend’s Place does life-changing work — and for far less than this industry would spend on a half-hour pilot (if those even still exist).

Head to My Friend’s Place, Rob’s charity of choice, to help support youth experiencing homelessness.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

For mostly happy reasons, I have spent the past 10 years moving into smaller and smaller living quarters. When I tell people this, they either look at me sadly and think Poor guy is going through some bad stuff or they brighten and loudly say something like, That’s so great! I wish I could do that!

The truth is, as my life changed — both vocationally and geographically — I didn’t need as much room as I had when I lived in Los Angeles. Southern California is a place that’s mostly about space and sunlight. But it’s also about spending hours in the car creeping along in traffic, so by the time you get home you’re really ready to spread out. California houses have lots of big, empty spaces and outside spaces to let the light in. In Los Angeles, people head over to Costco in their giant SUVs and load up with everything, confident that it’ll all fit somewhere. California houses have plenty of closet space — it helps that there aren’t a lot of heavy coats fighting for space — though because the California uniform is mostly t-shirts, there’s plenty of rack space to spare.

But then I moved to Manhattan, where space and light are things that you buy with money — and it takes lots and lots of it — and even the rich people I know have trouble stacking the sweaters and t-shirts in their closets. When I finally sold my house in Los Angeles and moved permanently to Manhattan, it was like trying to squeeze into a pair of pants you wore many decades and a thousand pints of ice cream ago.

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Rob Long once walked into a packed table read for a Paramount show airing on CBS, only to learn that Paramount had announced it was buying the network that very morning. Suddenly, every exec who feared for their job materialized, bringing tension, chaos and definitely not enough doughnuts. It’s hard not to picture a similar scene at Warner Bros. right now as Netflix scrambles to outmaneuver Paramount. But while bosses barricade themselves in conference rooms and pray for synergies that never happen, creatives shouldn’t wait for rescue. In the worst possible moment to be in this business, the best move is the simplest one: Make something. Go to YouTube, Instagram, wherever your work can live today. Because Hollywood isn’t coming to save you. You’re going to have to save yourself.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

The “table reading” of a script is the first time it’s heard out loud, read by the actors. It’s usually convened in a conference room on the studio lot on the first day of a production week, and it’s attended by the cast, the writers and producers, and a few representatives of the network and the studio. After the reading there are brief huddles among the constituents followed by a (nearly always) excruciating session where the executives (nearly always) attempt to get the writers to remove every single interesting and funny thing about the script. When all of the participants are suitably exhausted by the passive-aggressive hostility, the session is over and everyone goes back to their offices for lunch. This is the way the television business has worked since Dick van Dyke tripped over the ottoman, and if you don’t get that reference, congratulations on being a young person. And if you do, I’m so sorry.

Once, though, I walked into the table reading of a script to discover an unusually full room. Every seat was taken and there were people pressed against the wall. In addition to the expected complement of executives representing the studio and the network, the assembled group included the president of the network, the president of the studio, the chairman of the studio, a few senior vice presidents of current programming on the network and the studio side, the heads of on-air promotion and marketing for both groups, the managing partner of the management company representing one of the lead actors, about a dozen people I didn’t recognize and, for some reason, the head of the studio finance department and the lead attorney for the network’s Office of Business Affairs.

I took one look at the crowd and I knew that something big had happened, and that the news was either going to be very good or very bad.

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When the axe swings in Hollywood today, there’s no cushy deal, no soft landing, no assistant guarding your Rolodex anymore like in the old days. You’re out — at least for the moment. But after the gate stops lifting for you, there is a way back in. And it’s the same one it has always been: you keep moving. You take every meeting. You hustle. You become that person — popular, persistent, maybe pitching a terrible show — who stays alive in the business simply by refusing to vanish.

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This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Years ago I had lunch with a studio executive who had left his job — that’s what the story was, anyway, though it was less about leaving and more about being asked to leave, less ankle more axe, to put it in terms that fans of The Ankler will understand.

The good news for most of these executives is — well, was — they still paid you. You shifted effortlessly into a production deal and life went on — if not as usual than at least as well as can be expected.

You would have meetings and drive around and eat lunch and try to get a project going and, probably, spend a little too much time wondering if this or that executive at this or that studio or network is going to last, and if maybe they’ll call you back into the executive ranks, where the studio gates all rise as you approach and you can always get a good table at lunch.

But for the time being, then and now, you’re sort of in the wilderness. You’re just a person driving around town showing your ID to the guard.

I start a lot of these Martini Shots with what we call a “handle” — I’ll say something like, I had lunch with a friend a few weeks ago, or, Once, not long ago… and then I’ll launch into a story that occurred either a week ago or 20 years ago, sometimes I can’t remember myself.

But this one happened a long time ago. And here’s how you know:

“Thank God,” the executive told me over lunch, “I had my assistant print out all of my contacts and update them.”

Because when you’re fired, or axed, or even if you ankle unexpectedly, you lose access to the trappings you need to stay in the game.

He added, and this is how you know my story is an old one: “I wish we still had a Rolodex. Because it’s hard,” he said, “to contact people.”

I am aware that there are some young people listening to this right now, for whom the word Rolodex is a baffling mystery. A Rolodex, young friends, was a physical thing, a card file on a metal ring, on which your assistant kept every important someone’s name and address up to date somehow. When agents would sneak out of their old agencies to start working at a new place, they first had to figure out how to steal the Rolodex. You can’t poach clients if you don’t know where to call them. You needed paper. Because once you leave the office for the last time, they shut off your Outlook.

I thought of this recently when I got an email from a newly independent producer, which is a euphemism as I know you’ll understand from the layoff news coming out of every studio and network these days, who was an executive I have worked with before and who I like a lot, and of course would love to work with again and who is now, well, producing instead of executive-ing, and who now wants everyone to know how to connect at the new email and new office.

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