Josh Friedman talks about “Sarah Connor Chronicles”

Josh Friedman is a film and TV writer whose credits include The War of the Worlds (2005) and The Black Dahlia (2006). For the last few years, he’s been busy as the show runner for “Teminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles”, overseeing 31 episodes… until Fox canceled it.

Friedman is also a blogger at I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing.

So how does a writer handle the disappointment of a TV series’ termination? Friedman handled it this way:

I had this little scary robot show and for whatever reason couldn’t convince enough people that it was a) scary enough b) robot enough or c) in English. Add that dim sum combo of factors to a red bean paste of non-monetizable early adopters dvring the show like motherfuckers and now I’m unemployed.

Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I’ve been dead before and at least when you’re dead you don’t get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it’s like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it’s YOUR friend or family member and even then it’s mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.

Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

People say the bright side to losing your show is gaining time to spend with your family but I’m pretty sure that waking up next to your ex-showrunner spouse whom you haven’t seen for two and a half years is pretty close to waking up next to that special someone you met the night before at Carlos n’ Charlie’s in Cancun on Spring Break.

WIFE: Oh…It’s you.
EX-SHOWRUNNER: Hey baby.
WIFE: You look…different than I remember.
EX-SHOWRUNNER: I’ve gone a little grey.
WIFE: Or a little fat.
EX-SHOWRUNNER: Pretty sure it’s grey.
WIFE: Pretty sure…fat. Was I…drunk?
EX-SHOWRUNNER: Drunk? When?
WIFE: I don’t know. The whole time?

Go read the whole thing as it’s honest, funny, but also an open window into the soul of a writer who has poured all his available creativity, words, ideas, and sheer man-hours into the Sisyphusian struggle to get a TV series on the air and keep it there — only to see it roll back down the hill, flattening (emotionally) those involved in the process.

There are many life-skills a Hwood writer has to have in order to survive. One of the most important is to know how to handle defeat. I like Friedman’s approach as it seems quite natural: He wrote about the experience.

Visit his blog and if you feel like it, drop him a kind word in comments.

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