While the story of what is going on with Jimmy Kimmel has rightfully dominated the entertainment news scene for the past few days, it's also true that Hollywood is undergoing a retrenchment of its approach to representing all voices in its TV programming.
For all of the edgy, often uncomfortable shows that have aired in recent years, there is a growing sense in the industry that "it just isn't the right time to tell this story." From trans characters being eliminated from shows during development to requests from executives along the lines of "Does that character *have* to be gay?," it's getting harder for many writers to tell the stories that resonate with their life experiences.
William Lucas Walker is a veteran television writer who worked on Roseanne, Frasier, Cybill and the first season of Will & Grace. His latest project is the comedy Dads Of DeWitt, which tells the story of two gay men who move to a small town deep in Trump country. ABC bought the script but passed on filming it and its currently being shopped around Hollywood.
On Thursday evening, September 25th, the LGBTQ Riders Committee of the Writers Guild is having a 12-scene evening for members, comprised of 5 to 6-minute scenes from queer writers.
I spoke last weekend with William for close to an hour about that event, his long career and what he hopes will happen with Dads Of DeWitt. The conversation was so long that I had to break it up into two parts, with part two posting late Monday evening.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Looking over your credits, you've had an amazing run on television. Starting with the show Tattingers.
Tattingers? Wow...you know what that was. I'm stunned.
That show has my favorite mid-season reboot in TV history. It starts off as a drama, but struggles in the ratings. So mid-season they change the name of the show, turn it into a half-hour comedy and they add Chris Elliott to the cast.
Yeah, of all people.
That was my first experience ever on a television set, because I was based in New York City. I had founded and ran a theater company, and Langford Wilson, who was one of my favorite playwrights, had given my theater company three of his one-acts to do from over the course of his career. One from the beginning, one from the middle and one from where we were at that time. And it was a huge coup for this tiny loft Broadway theater company, I mean, for me particularly, to be working with this Pulitzer Prize guy whose work was my favorite. And it turned out it was Tom Fontana's as well.
Our non-profit attorney had gone to college with Tom, and she said, "Oh, I'm going to bring this guy I went to college with. I think you guys might hit it off. He also founded a theater company in New York maybe eight years ago, and then got pulled out." And that turned out to be Tom Fontana.
Blythe Danner knew him when he was an intern at Williamstown Theater Festival, and he wrote a play there, and she wanted her husband Bruce Paltrow to see it. And he felt so guilty that he didn't get out to see it that he offered Tom an assignment on this new show he was doing called St. Elsewhere. And then, you know, Tom took off from there.
But anyway, he had come back to New York because they were trying to start Tattingers and trying to start up this production in New York because they were all New Yorkers and wanted to come back. So he took an interest in me, and I sent him a couple of things I wrote, and he invited me because I had directed one of the plays. He had invited me to come on as an observing director of Tattingers.
And that was just wild because the food table at Tattingers for one day cost more than my entire theater company survived on for a year. So I thought, "Oh, this is where I can get out. They've got money."
I was unpaid, but he gave me full access to everybody and said, "Whoever you want to talk to, follow the directors around. When they're not busy, pull them aside and ask questions." But I sort of expanded that because I wanted to know everything about television.
So I went and sat with the accountants. I sat with the editors. I sat with the costume people. And they were all like, "Nobody ever wants to know what we do." So I ended up trying to write an episode of Tattingers just to see if I could do it, not to be considered, just to see if I could figure out how to write a script.
So I had been studying them, and I wrote one, and I handed it in. Oh, and Jerry Stiller was in the cast. And in the little episode I wrote, I wrote a guest starring part for Anne Meira as a sort of love interest who stumbles into the restaurant. So he really liked it, and then I asked Tom if he'd be willing to read it, and he said, "Oh, well, I have a stack of scripts, like three feet high, and I will read it, but it may take a few months. And then the next day the show was canceled, and I thought, well, that's the end of that. But three months later he did call, and he'd read it, and he called me in, and he liked it.
He had some very pertinent notes that were helpful and said, if we sell another show, would you be interested in writing one or writing on it? So I guess he liked it enough. And then I learned one of my first big lessons of television, that even the creators of St. Elsewhere, with all its years and Emmys, it took them three years to sell another show. And in the meantime, he encouraged me to move to Los Angeles because there was so little television production in New York at the time.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I had written a couple of comedy specs, and I was starting to get some meetings. I had an agent, a new literary agent, but he was interested, an acting agent I'd had in New York sent him these comedies. And he said, "Well, if you ever move out here, you know, I'll represent you."
I did move out, and then he started sending me to meetings, and I was kind of panicking because Tom was the only writer I knew, and he was in New York. So I contacted him, and I said, "Would you be willing to look at these scripts that I wrote and just tell me if they're any good? Because I'm starting to get sent out on meetings based on them, and I need some feedback." And he called me back two days later, and he said, "I read them. I love them. We just sold a comedy. Would you write one of the first seven?" And of course, I said yes.
That was my first writing assignment, and it was burned off. The show (Home Fires) was sort of loosely based on Bruce Paltrow's family, and they had never done a half-hour comedy, and for whatever reasons it didn't go. But then I got into the Warner Brothers Writer's Workshop about six months later, and I didn't even know what it was.
At the first meeting I ever had at Warner Brothers, this guy, who's still one of my good friends today, had said, "Your writing is more sophisticated than the shows that we're doing, like Full House and things like that. But if you ever need any advice, call me any time. I happened to call him six months later, and as he was hanging out, he said, "Oh, would you be interested in being in a writer's workshop?"
At the time, I'm 35, and I'm working as a word processor in a law firm. I knew nobody when I moved to L.A. And he said, "Well, send me those scripts again." And then he called me a couple of weeks later, and he said, you're in. It starts in a couple of weeks. And I asked him, "In whose garage does it meet?" I thought it was like in somebody's garage. He said, "No, this is the Warner Brothers Comedy Writer's Workshop." I didn't know what it was.
I did go to a meeting at Columbia Television the next day. And they asked, "Well, what's been going on? You're new in town? You have a Southern accent." And I said, I just got into this writer's workshop thing. I think it's called the Warner Brothers Workshop. And they said, you got into that? It's really hard to get into. There are like thousands of people who apply for 15 spots. And you got one, and you just got here? And that ended up really launching my career. And it led into my first staff job, which led into all the other ones.
So I had a lot of serendipitous good luck.
That's what fascinated me, reading more about you, is that you were there in the golden era of half-hour comedies. You were right there in the middle of it. Back when there were a million comedies on, and a lot of them were really good.
You know, it's interesting. I was talking to somebody recently. I mentor a lot of young writers. And they're like, oh, my God, you wrote that? I said, yeah, but, you know, when you're in the middle of it, you don't realize it. I wrote the gay wedding episode of Roseanne. It was kind of groundbreaking. I didn't know it was groundbreaking. And people still talk to me about it today. And you know, back then, that was just a Thursday.
I mean, we were just trying to get something done by Thursday. Then you were on to the next thing. So I never really realized, until I can go back and look at it now, sort of the scope of the work I did then, and the great luck of arriving at that time.
And as a gay man, there were very few shows that had any kind of gay representation, but Roseanne was one of them. And my very first show, The Jackie Thomas Show, which was Tom Arnold's show.
It had a great ensemble cast: Martin Mull, Paul Feig, Michael Boatman...
Yep. We did an episode where he stumbles into a gay bar. And they, of course, wanted me to write it so they could get all their ugly gay jokes in, but with my name.
A gay guy wrote it. So it can't be offensive.
Exactly. That happened more than once, I'll tell you. But there was nothing I objected to in it. So I really caught that wave very early. But even then, there were some difficult times.
I was working on The Jackie Thomas Show as a staff writer and I had come right out of the Warner Brothers workshop. I was working with these guys who...several of them were from Roseanne, which was my favorite show at the time. And I didn't know what I was doing. I was listening a lot. And I wasn't out. There was no reason to come out on staff.
But then this writer on Roseanne did a stand-up gig on The Tonight Show. And Roseanne had a lot of stand-up writers as writers that she got a lot of her friends from the stand-up world she hired. And they all loved this guy. So the next moment, they were like, "Oh, my God, you killed last night. It was so amazing. Tell us, what was it like?" And he says, "Oh, God. You know that piano player, that Michael Feinstein guy? What a fag." And all these guys I was working with were just like doubled over in laughter.
And I just felt my stomach shrivel to like the size of a raisin. I'm thinking "Oh, my God, these are the guys I'm working with. I thought they were great guys. And it was just like a huge kick in the gut. And I realized I could either could quit or come out to my showrunner and say, "I don't know if I can keep working here." I called, I asked him if he'd talk to me. And I sit down and tell him what happened. And he says, "Don't worry about it. I'll handle it." And I don't know what he did or said. But nothing was ever said again in the room that was in the slightest bit homophobic.
But I really felt like, if this is the atmosphere I'm working in, I just, I can't, I just can't do that.
Well, talking to other people who have dealt with similar situations, that showrunner's attitude is not the usual approach. They're more likely to shrug it with "Oh, it's just comics. They're just joking."
No, you're right. His name was Brad Isaacs. He was a terrific writer. He went on, I think he wrote some Larry Sanders shows after that. He was a very compassionate guy and very sweet. And he could see, I guess he could see the pain in my face. I like these guys. I just didn't know this side of them. And this doesn't feel good to me at all. I wasn't being like a whistleblower. I just felt like, I don't know if I can stay.
That was a big moment for me. I think I knew one other guy who was gay, because I went to him for advice. He worked on Roseanne and he told me, "I don't ever talk about that. You don't ever talk about it. You'll lose your job."
As a staff writer, I was the most easily expendable person. And I thought if I lose this, I may never get this opportunity again. That's what made it particularly difficult. But then when The Jackie Thomas Show was canceled, I was brought on to Roseanne. And they had two gay characters. They had Martin Ball playing Leon. And they had Nancy, who's played by Sandra Bernhardt. So there was another team of gay writers. Roseanne was sort of like, "Fuck you to everybody. I'm going to do what I want."
So she really did sort of blaze a trail. And the thing that she did that I loved, because this was in the era where gay characters were sort of written in a golden light, you know, like the guy on Steve Carrington on Dynasty and all that. And Roseanne made our gay characters as flawed and unlikable as everybody else on the show.
I mean, Martin was this gay Republican, you know, that kind of guy. He was just an asshole. And he didn't even know his character was gay when he was hired. I think she did that as a ha-ha at the end of the first season he was on. It was revealed that he was gay. And I think he was shocked. But it became a groundbreaking character. And then Sandy's character as well. So I was lucky in that I got here at a time when these kinds of characters were being written.
And then I went on after that to Frasier, which was the gayest straight show. And then Cybill and Will and Grace. So my being gay helped. But, five years earlier it would not have. So I was very lucky that way.
How much do you think things have really changed in the industry? One of the things I've heard from other gay writers is, yes, you can have gay characters, but it's got to be a certain kind of gay character. It's still difficult to showcase the universe of gay people on television.
Usually it's because there are very few shows where there's a lot of gay characters. Like in a black show, it's the same problem. But if you have a black show with a large cast, you have the room to show all kinds of different people.
And that's what you want to do as any writer. You want your characters to represent all kinds of humanity. And there've been very few, I guess Queer as Folk was one, and The L Word was one, but there are very few.
I think we were all shocked when Will And Grace was so well received. And we realized, oh, wow, the country's really further along than we thought. You know, nobody would have ever predicted it, but people were ready for that show. And I think it had a huge impact, just by bringing two gay men into people's living rooms every week. Viewers realized "Oh, God, these guys are great. They're funny. They have problems. They have pain. They're hilarious."
I think Biden even credited it when he was still vice president, credited it for helping him go to Obama and try to get him to embrace the idea of gay marriage because the country seemed ready for it.
And then the thing that really surprised me was on Modern Family, they had gay dads. The time that show came on, I was a gay dad. I had left my career for a long time - 15 years - to raise our kids. And I never dreamed I'd be able to sit down and watch a funny show with two gay dads on it.
But it was really interesting because my son, who was about six at the time, I remember he turned to me after we watched an episode. He goes, "Dad, why is it every time I see gay guys on TV, they always act so girly. You and Papa don't act like that. Why can't there be gay guys like you on TV?" And I was really shocked that even at six, it didn't ring true to him.
Now, I mean, they were these types. One was the fussy guy and one was the flamboyant guy. And they were the types that America was used to or comfortable with seeing. I could see why they did it. But I told him, "Well, James, you know, maybe I'll write that show for you one day."
And I ultimately did, which was this show Dads of DeWitt. And I wanted to write about, and it was very, very much based on our family. My personality, my husband's personality, our kids' personalities.
Our kids are now 24 and almost 20. In the show, they're 13 and 11, I think. But the basic idea is what happens when a couple of liberal L.A. dads move their children to Trump country is sort of the short pitch. The interesting thing is that, I'm very close to my hometown and my parents who are deceased now, but at the time I wrote it, they weren't. And we would go back with the kids two, three, four times a year for a week or two at a time. So my kids were there from the time they were babies.
And because I was sort of in that, I guess that early first wave of gay dads, there really was no roadmap or blueprint. We were just sort of winging it and didn't know what to expect and didn't know what our children would be able to experience, which turned out to be nothing. Well, not much, but they were, the issues that they had all happened in Los Angeles, not in South Carolina, which was interesting.
We'd take them to the church I grew up in. They played in the nursery I played in as a little boy. Everybody at church, they were all people I'd known my whole life. And I think because we just showed up at church with my parents one day and we weren't on any kind of soap box. We were kids trying to get our baby fed and get our daughter to sit still and all that. And because it was me, who they all had known since I was a little boy, we never had a single, not one ugly experience in that town or even negative experience.
I'm sure we'd spurred a lot of dinner table conversation behind our backs, but that's kind of what I wanted to do with this show because the central conflict in the pilot is the character of my mother. We basically move back because my mother is going to sell my childhood home so she can move into a fancy retirement community. And I just can't deal with it.
So I end up having to outbid everyone to get my childhood home back. And my husband and I in the show both grew up in small towns and we want to get our city kids out of the city before they get to be teenagers and give them a chance to grow up in a slower, simpler place. And my character is sort of glass half full and thinks, you know, this is going to be great.
And my mother thinks, are you out of your mind? Move, go back. This is going to be bad. And the truth from week to week would be somewhere in the middle. It would be sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen, but that's the tension and there's conflict and hopefully the joy of the show because it's a very loving family.
And then Norman Lear got it.
His partner Brent Miller got it first and read it and just loved it and said, "I want to show this to Norman. We love this." And Norman read it and they wanted to be the executive producers on this, which was a huge shock. It was just a huge wild moment for me because I had grown up on his shows and I had met him once or twice before, but never in a million years did I dream he would even read something I wrote, much less want to join and hop on board with it.
And then right before the strike, we got it to ABC and it was a spec script. It was written. ABC, they were buying stuff right before the strike. And I think that's the only reason they read it. They called me days before the strike and said, "Oh my God, we love this. If you had come in here for 10 development meetings, you couldn't have gotten any closer to what we're looking for in a family comedy. And it's not like anything that's been on before." And of course I was thrilled.
I mean, they knew, I guess, who I was, but I'd been out of business for a long time. And the strike happened before my deal was made. Then during the strike, Bob Iger was saying, "Oh, we're not going to inflame the culture wars." And I just thought, "Well, it's dead. Disney's not going to do this."
Then to my shock, when the strike was over, they said, we're ready to make your deal. We want to move ahead. And we did. And it was just a glorious network development experience, which is like an oxymoron. They absolutely saw the same show I was writing. All their notes were helpful. They had really smart, really good notes. I had written it as a streaming half hour with no commercials. And the first thing they said, and it was a single cam, they said, can you make it a multi-cam?
And all I basically did was go into Final Draft and change the template from single-cam to multi-cam. I basically didn't change anything else. But I had to cut eight minutes out of it. I thought, "Oh my God, am I going to do that?" And it turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. I lifted two scenes completely and was able to take what was pertinent in those scenes, tuck them into other scenes easily. It became quicker and faster and it just sort of flew. And they loved it.
They were like, "Oh my God, we love this. We're ready to turn it in, to send it up to our bosses." And this was a year before the election.
The industry was already shaky because of the strike and the streaming bubble bursting. And the networks shrinking. And all of that played into their decision not to move forward with Dads Of DeWitt. I found out that ABC only had a couple of other comedies in development. And one of them was the Tim Allen pilot. And I thought, "Well, of course they're going to go with the Tim Allen pilot. He's had two huge hits for them. Conservatives love him. He's a proven entity."
I just feel like so many things have gone right for it. It's very hard for me to wrap my head around that it's not going to happen.
But now I have my lifetime health insurance from the Writers Guild, which I've been chasing because I took so much time off to raise my kids. You you need a certain number of years. And I was one year away. I had one Guild-covered year I needed to get. And selling the script got me that year. So suddenly I don't have to chase TV jobs anymore, because that's what I was chasing before.
