Transcript: Dumb Comedies Will Save Hollywood

Rob Long marks a big birthday by pondering showbiz ups and downs

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Let me explain the background noise: I’m at the Gare de Lyon, in Paris, catching a train to the south of France, which sounds like a vacation — a nice one, actually — and is a vacation, but it’s also my cowardly way, chickenshit way, if you want to be blunt, of marking a birthday, one of the big ones, by scooting out of town. My birthday was a week ago.

Thank you.

“What a great idea! It’s like you’re on a retreat,” said a friend of mine. “No,” I said, “it’s like I’m in retreat,” because as I mentioned it’s a birthday that inspires a certain amount of gloomy introspection and a lot of wait, this? This was what it was? Wait, let me just start again but this time… oh you mean, you were starting it, we had started it.

I was a young 24 when I started in show business, writing scripts for the most popular show in television, back when that meant 20 million or more people were watching all at once, not a few here and there, streaming whenever, cum’ed up at the end of the week or 10 days, but all at once, in living rooms and airports and bars everywhere. All you really need to know is that back then, shows were broadcast. That’s how we put it: the show was broadcast. Now we say, the show dropped. That’s how we choose to put it. We dropped some shows. Hard to keep up the mystique with that image. Hey, look over there at the streamer dropping shows. Streaming, dropping, it sounds like show business is just going to the toilet.

Wow. I sound like an old man, one of those old entertainment industry guys — I wrote 62 Mister Ed’s, and I can’t get a meeting — and we used to do shows that said something — so that’s quite enough of that.