Tina Fey's "Bossy Pants"created a new literary genre of women writers recounting show business successes and horror stories. The fact TV vet Nell Scovell co-wrote Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" made her a natural for her own book.
The book is an expansion of her Vanity Fair article about how Late Night comedy shows ... as a rule .... rarely, if ever, hire women, and how the women interns on these shows are treated as sex toys for the executives and stars.
Apparently, things aren't much better for women working for prime time shows either.
Though her writing is funny, the horror stories are still horror stories: (An early introduction to sexual harassment on the 1980s revival of "The Smothers Brothers" show will make you think differently about a lovable 1970s folk singer; and you can't watch "24" the same way after learning the show hired a woman writer once, but it didn't work out, so they wouldn't hire another.)
"The Larry Sanders Show" touched on one point and she reiterates it, but I'm always shocked at stories of how the stars of shows want as little contact with their writers as possible. She wrote for "Newhart," but didn't speak to him until the last day of shooting, and that was an accidental bump in a doorway. The writers would only see Letterman walk down the hall past their offices. Maybe I'm being naive but I would think TV stars, especially talk show hosts would want to somehow participate in the writing process, and not give them the same regard as the crew from accounting.
(I read somewhere though that Leno was the exception, having the writers come to his house every night to work on the next day's show.)
The book has some frustrating passages. She talks about career dry spells, but she also walked away from some clearly lucrative gigs. It's understandable why she bailed on the toxic Letterman show, but I'm still wondering why she quit "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," after the first season. It was a show she created, was an executive for, was a hit, and likely would have a healthy run. She was in charge! She later complains how her replacements wrote the characters.
I also don't understand her job timeline at the end of the book. Instead of writing, "I wrote dozens of unproduced scripts," she lists them all by title. The titles really don't mean much.
Ultimately, things haven't changed much since the Vanity Fair article. On Letterman's new Netflix series, "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction," he's at a loss to explain to Tina Fey why he didn't hire more women writers. In an interview pushing the book, Scovell points out that Letterman seems contrite, but of the five executive producers for "My Next Guest ..." none of them are women.
