Transcript: The Tao of Bob Broder

Rob mourns his late agent who was ‘the good kind of scary’

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

I was sitting in the lobby of a TV network, waiting for a meeting in which we’d find out if our show was going to be renewed or not. And I don’t mean that I was expecting that someone in the meeting would say outright, “You guys are cancelled.” The meeting was to talk about the creative direction of the next season, the hypothetical next season, and to hear the network programming executives give their thoughts about the show, based on the audience research they had conducted. But there would be a vibe. There would be a tone. You know?

Every show gets this kind of meeting, even the ones that are already secretly cancelled. It’s considered a professional courtesy, for some reason, to drag everyone into a pointless meeting. Most executives can think of nothing more fun than a meeting, so they imagine it’s a real treat to come in, make small talk, talk creatively, and then a week or so later give the bad news — the bad news they knew all along — over a fast phone call from a car going over the hill with a bad connection. Show business is about 20 percent real and 80 percent kabuki.

So as we’re waiting for the meeting, I ask my agent what he’s heard about other shows, other pilots, to try to get a sense of how the next season is shaping up, figure out what our chances are.

He stares out of the third floor window, out onto the yellowing sprawl of Los Angeles, the traffic, the desperation, the disappointment, the nail salons, all spread out before him, he thinks for a bit, then says with dramatic resignation, “Dark Skies.”

I didn’t know at the time that there was, in fact, a science fiction drama pilot called Dark Skies or that it had just been ordered. I didn’t know that my agent was being completely literal. “What do you hear about the fall season?” I asked. And he answered, “Dark Skies.”

In retrospect, of course, it was foolish to imagine that an agent — the very emblem of the hard-nosed, practical, totally concrete thinker — would or could answer a question with an impressionistic, almost poetic summing up of our chances, most pilots’ chances, the future of the TV business in general with a grim, moody, “Dark Skies.”

But that agent was Bob Broder, a legendary impresario and showrunner-whisperer, a man who lion-tamed some serious show businesses lions, and who always insisted, like a lot of agents, Hey, you guys are the writers, I’m just an agent but who had a real flair for the dark and the wry and the way of delivering material with weary resignation.