Transcript: The Lineman TikTok TV Show
Rob Long calls for new much-needed words in the Hollywood lexicon
This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.
I once worked with a ferociously competitive, vaguely insane person who would fly into an angry depression every time he perceived that someone else was doing okay in show business — and no, I’m not talking about myself. I’m not even talking about a friend.
We had a project at a network and when they ordered another project before ours, he needed to be talked down off the ledge. “The sequence of the series orders,” I told him, “had more to do with option dates than anything else. They had shot their pilot months before ours, so that option was up much sooner.”
He didn’t care. It felt like a loss.
“But we want this project to go,” I said. “We want this network to be in the comedy business. We want them to be making investments in comedy shows like ours.”
He didn’t care. He wanted to be first.
“But we want them to go first,” I said. “This is a new kind of show for the network and we want someone else to soften up the field and break in a new audience pattern.”
He didn’t care. In the trades, it looked like a failure. He couldn’t see the good news.
I’m not sure who realized this first, but there are two kinds of people. I mean, yes, there are more than two kinds of people, but for this thing to work we’re going to have to let some generalizations slide. And I know I’ve said a version of this before, but it’s still relevant. I’m a writer, anyway, and most of what we do is repurpose material we’ve used before but we just didn’t think got its due.
So here’s what I want to say.
There are two kinds of people. The first kind, when they hear a knock on the door, they think:
“They’re here!”
The second kind, when they hear a knock on the door, they think:
“They’re here.”
And for a lot of us, we started out the first kind but we’re slowly realizing we’re turned into the second kind. We’ve turned into people who hear the knock on the door and instinctively think, this cannot be good, this cannot be fun, this cannot be something I should be grateful for.