And know what? he deserves it. TVWriter™ doffs its collective cap to Justin Halpern. Well played, sir. Very well done.
by Justin Halpern
In 2009, When I sold my Shit My Dad Says Twitter feed to CBS, the most common response was, “They bought a Twitter feed? Hollywood is completely out of anything resembling an original idea.” (The second most common was, “Fuck you.” There was a random guy who just tweeted me “fuck you” every day for a year, the longest relationship I’ve had aside from my wife.) If I’m being honest, I would have agreed with all of the above if it hadn’t been my Twitter feed.
Now that I’ve worked as a TV writer for six years, I’ve come to realize why networks were eager to buy my feed. Writers and broadcast networks have a specific relationship. Think of them as a middle-aged married couple who has sex once a week, mostly in the missionary position, then rolls over and cruises on their iPads. Both parties might like to try something new, but nobody wants to make a move that ends up going so badly that you can’t look at each other in the morning.
But then the broadcast networks see writers and cable networks fucking in all kinds of crazy, nasty ways, and the broadcast networks think, “You know, I don’t want to have sex like that, but I would be interested in spicing it up a bit. Maybe next time we have sex, I’d like to try having a finger stuck up my asshole.” And in 2009, with Twitter starting to burst out, Shit My Dad Says was that finger….