Aline Brosh McKenna

It's a very nice opportunity to like shake everyone's hand, get to know everybody, have a good time.

I knew really early on, this is nothing good's gonna come here out of it.

Like we're never gonna, they're never gonna let us make this the way we want to.

I learned so much on those, shooting those,

Getting nowhere close to having them be a television show, but learning...

how to comport yourself, what that process was, how to deal with the disappointments, how to deal with executives and people kind of, I remember, you know, so I, this is 20, age 25 to 30.

So I was, when I, I stopped writing the pilots when I was 30, partly because I was pregnant and I didn't want to keep writing TV.

Um,

But I remember that the producer of one of the pilots came over to me and he said, you've just been so incredibly poised through this whole disaster.

And I thought, oh, that's so interesting that like, I think you think when you're a writer that you're just going to like...

your best material is going to win and you're going to fight for your material.

And then of course we all know that Hollywood's not like that, but you sort of feel like all the stories you hear are about the great material triumph.

And at some point I just realized, you know what, all you can really do is hope for like the best process you humanly can.

And I, you know, I learned again, as we all learn from our failures, the conversation that the world gave back to me on those shows was like,

Really, to make a television show and to make it good in long term, you're going to have to work pretty much 24 hours a day, because when we were shooting those pilots, I would come home.

pee, brush my teeth, maybe take my pants off, lie down on the bed, get up, put my pants back on, brush my teeth, pee, and go back to work.

I mean, you barely have time to shower.

And the people who were making those TV shows in the night, that's how they lived.

They slept under the...

Desks, they worked 24 seven, making 25 episodes of a television show in 1994, five, six, which is when I was doing it.