They Went Another Way

September 1, 2024

Kaplan (I Was a Child), a cartoonist for the New Yorker and a Netflix writer and producer who worked on Seinfeld and Girls, ruminates about living a creative life in a dysfunctional world. In this memoir that began as a journal in 2022, Kaplan addresses a wide array of topics, from show business to politics to family life to his heating system. With an 80K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

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September 15, 2024
TV writer Kaplan, whose credits include Seinfeld, Six Feet Under, and Girls, shares what is essentially a diary of the ups and downs of the fickle television business. At the start of 2022, Kaplan is living in Los Angeles with his family, shopping a comedy show starring Glenn Close and eventually Pete Davidson, and signing up to supervise a project cocreated by two more junior writers. But as the year wends on, he runs into obstacles big and small, from struggling to set meetings to the flakiness of one of the actors to things going wrong in his house to despair about world events, including the war in Ukraine. This is the height of inside TV, but Kaplan's stream of consciousness memoir does effectively show just how unglamorous and often maddening the business of making television is. He's also incredibly candid with regards to his feelings about the people and projects he comes across. This is a good read for anyone seeking a truly frank look at what the life and career of a working television writer looks like.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2024
A veteran television writer and producer chronicles his struggle to get a TV show sold and into production. Kaplan's pilot, about a woman in a relationship with a man half her age, attracts industry interest when Glenn Close signs on, then even more buzz when Close suggests Pete Davidson as her co-star. What follows is a blizzard of emails, texts, premeetings, Zoom meetings, and postmortems with the actors, their agents, and reps from streaming services and production companies. These would read as tediously as they sound, were it not for Kaplan's wry, ironic delivery, and his wearied perspective as the pitches and counter-pitches plod on for months. Kaplan is also aNew Yorker cartoonist, and his journal entries have the same snappy rhythm and pace as cartoon captions; each day's reflections rarely run more than a few pages. Because the diary covers 2022, Kaplan notes that year's cataclysmic events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the overturning ofRoe v. Wade, the pandemic. His project thus becomes "an aspirational comedy...in dystopian times." At the same time, he writes about his everyday life with his wife and children in Los Angeles, including home repairs and recipes for vegan soups and casseroles. In the end, Showtime pulls out of the deal, and Kaplan realizes that his book is aboutnot shooting his TV show. But even this he finds "profound," and he achieves a certain equanimity, writing that he doesn't "need or want anything other than what I have." In the context of today's Hollywood, that comes close to achieving enlightenment. Hollywood dealmaking as seen from the inside out.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 12, 2024
Screenwriter and cartoonist Kaplan (I Was a Child) captures the agonizing uncertainty of trying to get a TV series greenlit in this plangently funny memoir. Through a series of diary entries, Kaplan catalogs his monthslong efforts in 2022 to sell a pilot script about a divorcée who finds romance with a man almost 50 years her junior, with actor Glenn Close and comedian Pete Davidson attached as leads. After anxious afternoons waiting for calls from network executives and choked-back fury over creative differences (“This book should now be named I Don’t Enjoy Glenn Close”), Kaplan received a Showtime offer—just before Davidson bailed, killing the project for good. Kaplan supplements the main narrative thread with lamentations about other irons in his fire, including a dreaded writing berth on Hulu’s Life and Beth, and settles his nerves by doing chores, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker, and shepherding his family towards a move to New York City. With a balance of sharpness (“As I meditated, I occasionally paused to text”) and pathos (“This journal definitely might turn into a long suicide note”), the results offer a revealing look at the demoralizing effects of gig work. This mordantly entertaining account buffs the shine off Tinseltown. (Oct.)Correction: A previous version of this review misstated the year during which the author attempted to sell the pilot script.