Blog post from Kyle Killen re the fate of “Lone Star”
In its entirety:
Lone Star Loves You, Even From The Grave
Wednesday was the first time I’d been in Austin on a weekday in almost six months. One of the twins woke me by saying “No one watch Daddy’s show?” I said, no, I’m afraid not. The other twin said, “Not even a little people?” Sorry. No. And then one said, “So this means you be here now?” And I thought, yes, yes I will.
So see, even a mushroom cloud has a silver lining.
The truth of the matter is, shows come and go every year. Good ideas, bad ideas, whatever. They all get a run, people find them or they don’t, and the world keeps turning. I’m incredibly grateful that we were given an opportunity to try a premise that, as the numbers seem to confirm, was perhaps a little riskier than I estimated. But I enjoyed every minute of it and would gladly do it all again and just the same, because, well, I’m just that stupid.
Except, well, I lied when I said I enjoyed every minute of it. There were a few minutes there at the end which I didn’t enjoy. Moments that will bother me for a long time to come. Moments I guess I never really thought I’d have to deal with.
When you’re just a guy in a room thinking ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ everything is theoretical. But when your ‘if’ becomes a show, it gets very real. There’s a cast and crew and… like, accountants and things, all showing up everyday to make that ‘if’ a show. And those are the people I had to face and apologize to for the fact that my ‘if’ had been such a spectacular failure that they were now out of a job a mere two weeks after we hit the air. Again, it happens all the time, but that didn’t make it easy. At all.
So here’s the thing. We made a good show. Not Shakespeare. Not MASH. But something I was proud of. I can’t really speak to anyone else’s reaction, I can only be honest about my own. We assembled a staff, a cast, and a crew that I think was committed to telling interesting and thought provoking stories and who were excited about where we’d planned to head. And now it’s over. The part of me that feels awful that these people are now out of work wishes they’d done anything other than join this show. The part of me that’s so excited about what we did can’t thank them enough for signing on and making it happen.
As for the show’s future, if you read the news you know what I know. We’re actively looking at other homes for it, but those situations are rare. Imagine trying to just jam the engine from a Toyota in a Chevy and you get some idea how hard it is to take a show from one network to another. These things are custom jobs and what looks simple on the surface requires an incredible amount of engineering underneath. Whether we’ll pull something like that off is anyone’s guess. But we’re certainly trying.
Lastly, I literally don’t have the words to thank those of you who participated here and on twitter and facebook and, you know, the real world, in supporting the show. I’ve been in the habit of writing incredibly inane things in this space for some time and have to say that I was blindsided by the scale of the reaction to my last post. Of all the incredible and unexpected things to come out of this entire process, those last few days were perhaps the most incredible and certainly the least expected. I feel like we tried to get a write in candidate elected president together, and while we were completely and utterly destroyed when the votes were tallied, I’ve never felt such an odd and full connection to a group of people I’ve never met and likely never will. Given all that, ‘Thank you’ seems woefully insufficient to convey my gratitude. Perhaps I can just mow all your lawns for the hell of it.
In the meantime, from the bottom of my everything-
Thank you.
The thing is… writers are humans. And while Kyle is nice enough to acknowledge the efforts of the entire team of people who gathered together to produce “Lone Star” — and they certainly deserve it — the only person who was there at the very beginning, staring at a blank monitor screen, then making the leap of faith into that story universe by typing FADE IN and writing the rest of the pilot script is the series creator.
No matter how impersonal the process is, it’s personal to the writer.
I don’t know Kyle. We’ve never talked. Or swapped emails. I just know that he wrote a helluva good script in The Beaver and he deserved better with “Lone Star.”
One more thing I know: He will come out on top. The next movie script. The next TV pilot. He’s got talent. And you can tell from posts like the one above, he’s a human being. A mensch.
I think I speak for all of us when I say that I look forward to seeing what other stories Mr. Killen has to tell.