What is this thing your people call “shame”?
There’s a pretty-good-to-great comedy on FX right now called You’re the Worst. The premise is simple: It’s an anti-romcom, a story about two more or less immature, selfish assholes who get into a relationship and have to deal with the fact that they’re basically assholes, as are their friends to a large extent. It can be intermittently hilarious, as the show so far has walked a fine line between depicting its characters as believably monstrous without turning them into monsters. In short, I can often see the seeds of real human behavior that isn’t often depicted on your normally feel-good, stupor-inducing television in here.
But who cares about that, because clever TV shows are the norm these days (seriously, I am still recovering from the emotional black hole that was the Rick and Morty season two finale). I am not here to lather faint praise on You’re the Worst because it occasionally makes me giggle. I am here to lather faint praise upon You’re the Worst because it may be the first TV show in history to realistically portray what it’s like to be a published author who isn’t a bestseller. It’s so good it hurts.
TV <> REALITY
In most TV shows and films (heck, even in most novels) the novelist is typically presented as either struggling and unknown or uber-successful — call it the Richard Castle Effect. Many writers fall into the trap of making their characters writers because it’s all they know how to depict believably, and the further temptation to then imagine that writer character as wildly successful must be pretty strong.
Much more rare is the Believably Successful Writer, that is a character whose literary career matches what most writers experience. Most of us are not Richard Castle, after all — most of us are also not Grady Tripp, with our literary agent flying in every few months to urge us to write a followup novel.
This is where You’re the Worst wins, because Jimmy Shive-Overly is like the Iggy Azalea of fictional novelists: He’s the realest. Jimmy’s debut novel garnered some nice reviews, and Jimmy strives to be cool, literary, and clever. His apartment is a carefully curated collection of signifiers that he’s a smart young writer. At the same time, Jimmy’s book didn’t sell particularly well, very few people have heard of him, and in season two he’s chasing down side jobs in order to make a living (while, yes, dealing with writer’s block because fictional writers must suffer from writer’s block all the goddamn time). Jimmy meets with a more famous novelist about taking a research job. Jimmy meets with slick, soulless corporate types about doing some novelization and ghost-writing work; he initially proposes writing tie-in novels for decades-old classic art films, and then is hit with reality: They want him to write a novel tying into a roller coaster that’s shaped like a dragon. After this humiliation, Jimmy eagerly accepts the novelization of NCIS: Los Angeles because he’s a fan of the show and because at least it has a narrative.
I Love Jimmy
Say what you will about other aspects of the show, this depiction of authorly squalor is pretty real. Plenty of us manage to sell a book and then watch as it lands with a thud in the marketplace, and then we’re no longer mysterious debut authors, we’re now Authors with a Poor Sales Record. Many of us have to hustle with side jobs, and many of us struggle with not being nearly as cool and literary as we’d like to imagine ourselves to be. Jimmy taking the job of writing an NCIS: Los Angeles novelization is hilarious, but it’s also well within the often sad reality of writing.
The best part, of course, is that Jimmy then discovers that writing a novel for a TV show with a huge cast of characters and dense mythology is difficult. You can look down your nose at pop culture junk food like the NCIS shows, but honey they can be as complex as a Russian novel, and it takes a certain talent and work ethic to do that work.
Don’t get me wrong — as a writer I’m incredibly happy to have the privilege of earning my living by writing words. No one’s complaining. It’s just nice to see an author on TV who’s not a millionaire or a walking collection of quirks. In the mean time, if anyone wants me to write a novelization of a TV show, hit me up.