Former TV writer Patty Lin takes some shots at the industry with her memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood. Lin wrote for Friends, Breaking Bad, Freaks and Geeks and Desperate Housewives, among other series, but departed the writers room when the “chaotic, abusive, male-dominated work culture,” according to the book’s back copy, got to be too much. Lin was “not just…one of the few women in the room, but the only Asian person,” the copy notes.
Lin talks about her first TV job as assistant to a production manager on The Late Show with David Letterman, moving to Los Angeles to write for late ‘90s comedy Martial Law, landing on Freaks and Geeks, and meeting with a bunch of TV luminaries, including Carlton Cuse, Paul Feig, Ben Silverman and Judd Apatow.
Lin shares about her time on Desperate Housewives: “Gang banging scripts at Desperate Housewives was dysfunctional and sloppy. Every scene was hastily written by a different person. Marc [Cherry, creator] would barely be involved in the first few drafts, but once the script was in semi-decent shape, he’d take it from us, climb into a golf cart, and drive off to his ‘writing bungalow’ to do a pass. He was given this detached room in an undisclosed location because he had a short attention span and tended to involve himself in all sorts of office minutiae. Keeping him solitary was the only way to get this goose to lay any eggs.”
A couple other staff writers would punch up the script, and it would move on to production.
“With this wildly inefficient system, it’s a miracle that any episodes of Desperate Housewives ever got made,” Lin writes. “The quality that had attracted me to the pilot–the dark humor–was lost in the slapdash, assembly-line approach to what was supposed to be a creative process. We were putting out schlock. The fact that it became the hottest show on TV, won multiple awards, ran for eight years, and earned more revenue than God, still boggles my mind.”
During her time on Breaking Bad, Lin thinks more and more about starting another, less harried, career. “Could I do it?” she writes. “Could I quit the business? I felt torn as I went back and forth trying to make up my mind.”
End Credits comes out September 5.
