For the past 30 years or so, Bruce Eric Kaplan has toiled away as a staff writer on some of the best television series ever produced, including Seinfeld, Six Feet Under, and Girls. But as he writes in his new book They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir—and discusses in this bonus episode of The Last Laugh podcast—Kaplan has never managed to get his own show past the pilot stage.
And it’s not for lack of trying. Kaplan has written more unproduced pilots than anyone else he knows, and tells the story of how the Hollywood system has slowly beaten him down in hilarious fashion in the new book. He also reveals some details about his new gig as co-showrunner for Season 2 of the Netflix hit rom-com Nobody Wants This, shares what it was like to join Seinfeld in its final season, and so much more.
Kaplan’s plight as a TV writer trying to get several different projects off the ground is perhaps best summed up by a quote he includes in the book from his teenage son. After Kaplan casually remarks that a meeting he just had went well, his son Henry replies, “It always goes well, then nothing ever happens.”
They Went Another Way, which chronicles about six months in Kaplan’s life as he tries to schedule Zoom meetings with potential collaborators like Glenn Close and Pete Davidson (who both agreed to star in his pilot as lovers) ends up taking on a Waiting for Godot-esque energy as each project fails to move forward.
“I wanted [readers] to understand that this was my life,” he tells me, “that the meetings were my life, the scheduling of the meetings were my life.” The question he kept asking himself was, “How can I be at peace and enjoy my life, which, at this moment in time, is scheduling meetings that don’t happen?”
Out of clear frustration with his situation as a working writer who isn’t working, Kaplan openly vents in the book about someone like Close not understanding his creative vision or Davidson skipping meetings because he’s “sick” even as he’s being photographed by paparazzi out with then-girlfriend Kim Kardashian. “My genuine hope is that anyone who reads this really sees that this is a portrait of the torturous fever dream that is my brain,” he says, “not a portrait of the people in the book.”
Kaplan also agonizes over the possibility of taking a job in the writers’ room for Season 2 of Amy Schumer’s autobiographical sitcom Life & Beth, which he tries watching and can’t stand. So it was notable earlier this month when Netflix announced that Kaplan would be reuniting with his old Girls colleague Jenni Konner to serve as co-showrunner for the second season of Nobody Wants This.
“I took the job because I love the show,” Kaplan says as he praises its “wildly talented” creator Erin Foster. “I love the characters. And I really responded to the material.” At its core, Kaplan says that Nobody Wants This, which centers on the budding romance between a Los Angeles rabbi played by Adam Brody and a “shiksa” podcaster played by Kristen Bell, is about “people navigating daily life” which is something he “will always be very drawn to.”
But even as he takes the reins on yet another cultural phenomenon—and joins the writers’ room for Lena Dunham’s highly anticipated Netflix show Too Much—the various projects he writes about in his book are no closer to getting made.
“Nope, that’s a big no, the biggest no of all time,” Kaplan deadpans. “You know, I’m so crazy that I still think the Glenn and Pete project is going to happen with Glenn and Pete. That’s how crazy I am.”
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