Take 35 - Showrunner and Doctor Neal Baer, ER, Designated Survivor

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for shore, dozens of unproduced scripts littering the floor.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, of painful failure. This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

That's the norm. You have to be able to first reveal.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

That process takes place. That doesn't happen overnight. I was being told by my manager it's yours to lose. And I promptly lost it. And I remember thinking like, well, that's it for me. I blew my one big shot. What I've realized from that moment is it's never one big shot. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_03 0:59

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. Uh as always, I am your non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rutstein, and we have Noah back in his co-host duties.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Hey Dan, how are you doing? Uh today I'd love to introduce the prolific TV writer, showrunner, and currently not practicing pediatrician Dr. Neil Baer to the podcast. Neil was a writer on China Beach and ER, amongst other shows, before becoming the showrunner of Law and Order SVU, Under the Dome, and designated survivor. He also currently lectures at both Harvard Medical School and Yale School of Public Health. Welcome, Neil.

SPEAKER_03 1:41

Hey, how are you? So with credits such as yours and shows as successful as yours, it's a little bit tricky to find a way into a uh rejection and failure podcast. So I'm actually going to start with an adversity question that's sort of nothing to do with uh the traditional writing side of it. Um it's more to do with uh I think probably sort of public health and science more broadly. Given that you're obviously a a storyteller in that world, there is a bit of a crisis happening in terms of how people uh interact with public health and science. So I'd love to hear your views on sort of what's happening in in the broader world and actually maybe how entertainment can play a part in solving some of those issues.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Well, I've been thinking about that for about I don't know, 27 years since ER started, because I wanted to make sure that we were accurate in the information that we were putting on our medical series. We were the first show, and I'm the first doctor of two to be actual writers and then producers of a medical television series. Before ER, medical series were written by non-doctors, and then um consultants sprinkled the medicine on top, like confection sugar. Um that all changed with John Well higher John Wells hiring me and Lance Genteel to start as staff writers on ER. So we weren't consultants, we were actually in the writer's room writing from the very beginning and working our way up the ladder from staff writer to show to story editor to co-producer, supervisor producer, co-EP, EP. So I by the time I had done ER for seven years, I was the executive producer of ER and then went off to do SVU. So while I was doing ER, we worked a lot with the CDC, and they ultimately, through the generous funding of Norman Lear, did what's called Hollywood Health and Society at USC. And that's an organization that's now been around for over 20 years that provides accurate information free to any TV or movie writer in Hollywood. And they've had a huge impact. They've done a lot of studies. We did the first study in 2000, 2001, published in a journal called Health Affairs, which is the the uh I think most acclaimed uh health journal about policy, and we looked at what people learned from our show, and they learned a lot. We did an episode with Juliana Margulis about human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, and we queried over a thousand viewers before the show aired. The treatment was the show. We didn't tell people to watch, they were viewers of the show, and then we re-querried them after the show aired, a random sample, and we were stunned. Nine percent knew that HPV causes cervical cancer, human papillomavirus. After the show aired, it was like four times as many. When we had 40 million viewers, that's a lot of people getting information. So that's why we think it's so important to give accurate information on television, and we know it has a huge impact. How do we know? Because we surveyed people and found out that half the people who watched DR talked about it with their friends or family. One out of seven actually went to a physician, we found out, after they saw something on the show. So that's when there really was, you know, social media at its birth. Um, and so now there's all this disinformation, misinformation about health on the internet that one has to kind of go through. But we thought it was very important to provide accurate information because people thought that what we were saying was true and we didn't want to mislead them. Yes, we got labs back more quickly and things like that, but we never um put out information that wasn't um actually vetted by doctors. And when I did Law and Order Special Victims Unit and I did episodes about various health issues, I would show standards and practices, which is the part of the network that oversees accuracy, um, this the studies to show them that what I was saying was actually true. So that gets us to today and COVID and telling stories. And there are a lot of shows on right now that integrate um getting vaccinated into their shows or being uh wearing masks, lots of shows from blackish to um Gray's Anatomy. And there's shows that are medical series. Some have made the choice to really embrace a COVID storyline that would be Gray's Anatomy, the most popular medical series on right now. And some have decided not to do that, but maybe do it with one episode, and that would be The Resident. So there's been there's a real range. I think New Amsterdam is doing very, you know, reflecting what's going on today. There's an antecedent for this, and that's HIV. So when we did ER in 1994, there really was no treatment for HIV. It was literally a death sentence. By 1996, everything had changed with anti-retrovirals, and we still told that story through Gloria Rubin's character Jeannie Boulay and how she struggled. We went through the misinformation about HIV, how you could contract it, needles, whether a health care provider, when you look back at these shows, you'll see, you know, what people thought then is not true now. And that really is reflective on COVID. So the problem with COVID is that there's lots of sources for stories now. It's not just medical shows like ER or Chicago Hope or those kinds of shows. It's all kinds of things on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and a lot of it is incorrect according to the science. But what makes COVID so difficult, just like HIV in many ways, is that it's not definitive what we know. We keep learning more things, and people want answers. They want it to be definitive, like COVID does this, you know. We don't know. So right now in dealing with the delta variant, we know that there are breakthrough cases. We know scientifically, because we've looked at large numbers of the population, we know that they pretty much do not go to the hospital. We know that 97 to 99 percent of those in the hospital now have not been vaccinated. Um, but we don't know what the long-term consequences are of someone getting a breakthrough COVID virus. We know it's inflammatory, we know that it probably has some consequences. It's like what we're learning right now with HIV is that people who are who have HIV, even though they are undetectable because they're taking their medications, so we can't detect the virus in their blood, they have a much higher rate of atherosclerosis or heart disease. And so that just came out, that information was a large scientific study where they studied a group of people with a control group, and they found that these people had higher rates of heart disease, and it's likely because HIV is an inflammatory disease. So it can take years before we know, you know, more definitively about a disease. Like if we were gonna talk about measles, we're pretty definitive about how long it takes to get to get it, the exposure, the consequences, long-term effects, things like that, because we have experience. That's why we call COVID a novel coronavirus. It's new. So uh it's really important for television shows to depict COVID uh accurately, because people get their information from TV still, and to not just do a COVID episode, but to integrate it into the series, which many do, particularly comedies, as a part of everyday life. So it's a real struggle because people don't pay attention. So you'd think possibly that if 97 to 99 percent of folks who are hospitalized now and really sick with COVID are those who aren't vaccinated, people would be running to get COVID vaccinations, but they're not. So we need to really study how to tell stories that are effective, and people are doing that at the University of Michigan and Yale. And what we're what we're telling writers through the Writers Guild is that what works is to do an approach called be a protector. So instead of trying to shame people, blame people, and say, hey, you're gonna like you know, infect people in the community or you're going to cause uh variants through mutations, we we help people think about their own community, their own home, their apartment building, and people they care about who might get infected because they aren't protecting themselves. And that seems to work better, and then we can translate that into stories. So we have a number of organizations that do that kind of work that work with writers to tell them what works and what doesn't. So it's a real challenge because there's no one size fits all story. People have different reasons for not getting vaccinated from QAnon approaches to uh historical reasons to mistrust and you know, or not having access. So one size doesn't fit all.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

So I I I a couple of things resonated with with with me with that, all with that that you said. I I used to work with HHS a lot too. I actually worked on uh Gray's Anatomy and Private Practice, and one of the struggles that we had as writers, and one of those points I was a medical researcher there as well, was the um, you know, trying to balance accurate stories with the need for dramatic storytelling. That, you know, there's a lot of things that we had to compress. And I I come from a medical family, but I wasn't a doctor. And so the struggle wasn't all on my shoulders or the blame wasn't all on my shoulders yet, you know, in the middle of that tension. So I want to go all the way back to the beginning of your career. I want to know a little bit about why you wanted to segue from, you know, being a pediatrician and a doctor who was actively practicing to becoming a writer on ER and then the struggle you faced as a doctor on a show that was setting a brand new paradigm about we want to be accurate, but of course, you can't be a hundred percent accurate and still tell a story that takes place over 42 minutes, getting people in and out of the hospital, compressing timelines. So, how did that struggle reflect in your experience and how did you deal with it?

SPEAKER_02 12:28

Well, I was a writer before I went to medical school. So I had gone to AFI, I had made documentaries, I'd gone to AFI, the American Film Institute, as a directing fellow. I wrote and directed uh what was called an ABC after school special about a girl who gets gonorrhea from her boyfriend and another girl, it had two storylines. So it was it was unique. Another girl who sees her father having an affair, inspired by actual story I saw when I was growing up in Denver. So I did that as a writer and director and then worked on China Beach and then um decided to go to medical school. And my um goal was to be a pediatrician and go to do my residency in Boston, and John Wells showed up again. And I, you know, people ask me, how do you get a job in Hollywood? And I say, grow up with John Wells, because we went to Holly Hills Elementary School in Denver together, and we've known each other since we were nine years old. So we lived about six blocks away from each other. So I've known John, you know, since I was nine and he moved to Denver, and we literally bumped into each other years later in a grocery store, and that's when he hired me on China Beach. And then he knew I was going to medical school, so he sent me Michael Crichton's script that Michael wrote in 1969 or so for ER that Steven Spielberg owned, because Steven was going to make it as a movie. And when it was rediscovered in 1994, literally in like a trunk, um, John thought of me because I was experiencing everything that goes on in the pilot through Noah Wiley's character, Carter's eyes. I was a fourth-year medical student, Noah's character was a third-year medical student. So we wanted the veracity and asked me if I would read the script. And I said, it's like my life, only it's outdated. We don't use those antibiotics anymore, glass IV bottles, but it really reflects what it's like to be a medical student, an intern, a resident, and an attending. And so he asked me to come for a couple of months to sit in the room and break stories, and I loved it so much. I said to him, Can I stay? And he said, Yeah, if the show's a hit. And we had no idea. We were predicted to come in third after primetime live on ABC in Chicago Hope. And it was one of the biggest premieres ever. At one point in year or two, I did a show with George Clooney where he saves a kit in a tunnel that I wrote, and um it had 48 million viewers. So that will never happen again because of the way television is is watched now. But it was uh uh elated and electrifying to do that. So I didn't plan to do it, but I came back and I loved it so much that I integrated my um medical knowledge with the show, and I did my internship at Children's Hospital Los Angeles over about six years while I was on ER, and then when I was showrunning SVU, used to hide in the linen closet and give notes. And the nurse would open the door and she said, Oh, he's giving his notes for the other other other job. So um, so the challenge was to be accurate, but what was helpful was that the CDC was sending me all kinds of information on topics that the writers wouldn't even understand and reading these articles, and so we needed a way to translate that information, and that's how Hollywood Health and Society was formed, and I was very much involved in the beginnings of it. And the challenge was to help writers on other shows because John was very, very much caring about being accurate, and when we did this study, it was pretty alarming how much people paid attention to things, and so um we had four doctors working on the show, and that was a model that Grays took. Um, we had people on the on the set who were doctors, I think you all had nurses, and we had emergency physicians because we wanted it to look accurate, and we had two doctors on the writing staff, and that's changed medical series. There are no medical series now that don't have doctors on the show. Every show, my good friend David Foster from medical school, um, I helped get on house. So he was the writer doctor of house, and now he's on New Amsterdam. So every medical series, Joanne Clack has been on Grays for a gajillion years, you know, since the beginning. So there are doctors. So it is a challenge because some showrunners take it more seriously than others and say it's entertainment. But what we've tried to do is talk about how your entertainment and your stories have an impact and what is your responsibility. And that comes through today, certainly with misinformation and disinformation on the web. What's our responsibility and putting out things that are just definitely not true? The good thing is that the standards and practices folks on all the networks are really attuned to this and won't allow for the most part, as far as I know, um, writers to put on their network shows that are incorrect or inaccurate. So, yes, we have, you know, in the episode that we did the study on on human papillomavirus, Laura Innes says, get a get a stat pap smear. Well, those don't exist, but one could get one. You could call pathology and say, do this fast. Um, and you know, we always are compressing time because television and movies compress time. So I don't think that that's ever been a problem for people. We used to joke, but it really was true, that if it had been done somewhere in some ER, it was fair game for us. So babies had been delivered in the ER. So Tony Edwards delivers a baby in year one. It was inspired by some awful stories I had heard about um that, you know, through the hubris of the emergency physician thinking that they could do this on their own had bad outcomes. And that's the show Hell Um Love's Labor Loss that scared people for years and still does when they watch the show. So, you know, some shows are, I think, more uh focused on accuracy than others, but for the most part, they don't put out. I know, like there was an ABC show some years ago that kind of was equivocal about vaccinations and autism, and they got, you know, lambasted for that. Um, and I think that made ABC kind of get a little bit more focused on what they were, you know, allowing uh to be put on the show because we have to have some standard, and these were scientific papers published in reputable, renowned peer review journals. And yet, you know, I'm sure there are writers who want to tell stories about, you know, anti-vaxxers, you know, in a positive way. I don't think that's gonna happen, but it could. But there is a challenge because it is this this struggle of wanting to quote entertain. So I never talked about entertainment or teaching or that horrible portmanteau edutainment. Um, I hate that term because for me, what's really critical is telling a great story. And if you tell a really good story, you will captivate the audience and they will learn things. And I don't want to preach and have somebody like stand in front of a board and tell you the data, and people don't pay attention to that. We know that from studies, and I don't want it to be so incorrect that it sends bad messages to people. Um, you know, we know, for instance, there's a guy named Jay Winston who's at Harvard, and he created the um idea of uh designated driver, and it had a huge impact. He literally went around to TV shows and said, Hey, you know, could you show this? And Cheers put up a poster, and it had an amazing impact. Now, designate a driver is Uber or Lyft, but that, you know, and there was some controversy because it was saying, well, you know, everybody's gonna drink that, you know, and get loaded, but one person won't. But you know what? We're thinking about the community as well. And if people are choosing to get loaded, that might not be the best thing. But as long as somebody doesn't drink and is draw is the designated driver, then they'll be safe. And that's what Jay created, and now he's doing something called distracted driver. So that's of course about texting while you're driving. So, how do we how do we that's a public health problem as well.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

So I think we've heard some amazing stories on this podcast of Studio Execs giving notes and uh writers and showrunners knowing when to fight and when not to fight. Are there any times when you were on ER when this was still relatively new, this way of doing things where you know a note came down saying, you know, can't you just uh make this uh skin infection look different, or can you do something to shortcut the science to tell a better story? Are there any sort of key examples of where you had to fight to make sure that that didn't happen?

SPEAKER_02 22:00

You know, when you have a hit show like SVU or ER, you can do a lot of things like gun violence. Gun violence is a public health issue. You can do a lot of things that you might not be able to do on other shows as long as you can back it up with the data. So only one time on ER. And that was a story about, based on a true story, about some nurses who were talking about a terrible case where somebody came in pregnant by their brother, and they had tried to commit suicide, and the father was in the elevator and had heard all of this. That's why it always says, do not discuss patients in the elevator. Bad thing. So he heard this and it was crazy. Now, the way that this young woman had attempted suicide was using um overdosing on Tylenol, acetaminiphen. So a lot of people didn't know that Tylenol as a, you know, they think it's just uh, you know, for headaches or fever, but it's it's benign. And it is it is typically if you take the you know required doses, but if you OD, if you take a bottle of Tylenol, you're going to kill your liver and you're gonna need a liver transplant, and it's really bad. And so, and people didn't know that. And in fact, on the bottle, it didn't really state the consequences as clearly as it does now, which says if you drink more than two drinks a day, I think, two out, because your liver processes the acetaminophen. So the network was like, oh my God, you've given us three taboos suicide, incest, and Tylenol. And it was like, so they came back and they said, you can um do the story about the suicide if you make it look really like realistic, and she gets what's called a lavage with charcoal and she's vomiting up charcoal and all that. It was not pretty, and you can do the incest, they didn't care, but you can't say Tylenol. And Tony Edwards said, Really? And so he said Tylenol and they bleeped it. And so, um, you know, I don't know if it's still bleeped these days on that episode. That's the only time, and that was for advertising reasons. So, and you know, I think we did a good real public health service to make people aware that Tylenol is not a benign drug, and they wanted us to say acetaminophine. I understand why, because that's what it is, that's the generic term, but nobody would know that that's Tylenol. People don't know acetaminophen in general, it's tylenol. A lot of people do, many people don't. So that was, in my recollection, the only time. You know, one time I did an episode with Clooney in year three, where he takes care of a kid who wants to be allowed to die who has cystic fibrosis, and I wanted the kid to flip Tony off. I mean, uh George off. It starred um a guy named Chad Lindbergh, Clea Duvall played his girlfriend, she's a wonderful director now, and um Veronica Cartwright was nominated for the Emmy for it, as was George. So um they said we negotiated like if he does it little and kind of flips him off just a little bit. And so I said to the director and the actor, do it really big and then do it normally, and we'll put in the really big version of it. And then when they come back and say, Oh, do you have anything smaller? We'll go, yes, and then we'll put in the regular thing. So that's how we maneuvered that. Um, but they let us do, I mean, we did like pathbreaking things. We had Rebecca DeMorneon playing a woman with breast cancer, and we superimposed um the body of a woman who had had a mastectomy onto Rebecca and showed it. And that was before the networks would ever allow you to do that. So we did that. I think we said shit one or two times because they let us do that, which you know, we didn't do it often. I think if I were to do designated again, uh which I did on Netflix, I Netflix, I may pull would would pull back on some of the uh F bombs that we use because you know it had been on ABC, where you can't say that, and then suddenly, you know, it's like you're in a candy store and you can say fuck this, fuck that. So I would definitely pull that back from Designated Survivor. People on Twitter would be like, I thought this was a family show. And then I watched this and I was so shocked, and I didn't write back, but I thought, you know, this is how people talk, but I get your point. I take your point. So um, you know, when it was really critical to the story, and NBC was wonderful. Both, you know, I spent 18 years, seven on ER, 11 on SVU, and it was really ideal. I mean, there were no, sorry, but they let us do what we wanted. They trusted us, we trusted them. We showed them the data on anything we were saying. Like I did an episode about kids exposed to gunfire, were twice as three times as likely to commit a violent act, and we use that as a defense because he'd been exposed to gunfire, so he became violent. And that was a study published in science. And MBC was like, whoa, this is really like going far, but go ahead. And we did, and that stars that episode stars the really wonderful Annie Potts as the defense attorney, and it was so ahead of its time when I look back on it because she's making a public health argument. She says, just as when you're in the in the subway and someone sneezes on you and you contract a cold, it's not your fault. Nathan was exposed to a virus, and that's gun violence, and he contracted the disease and became violent. And that's a public health model for violence that just wasn't talked about then, but based on an article in science with data. So NBC was like, go ahead. Would they do it now? I don't know. Times are different. Everybody's struggling for eyeballs. The broadcast networks don't have the luxury of streamers like Netflix to be able to target audiences in in very specific ways. So they just have to captivate and capture as many eyes and hearts as possible. And I think that that in some ways has a diluting effect on broadcast television. I mean, it's as violent as ever. I watched the equalizer and I thought it was just like outrageously violent and silly, but um personally, but um, but that didn't seem to bother, you know, Queen Latifa, not hasn't that doesn't have one gun, she has two, and it's so it's so violent in an ugly way. Like people are about to like doubt, they douse two people tied up with gasoline and they're about to strike a match, it's really ugly. And then she comes in and blows them away. That's very broadcasty for years and years. But if we if does broadcast do really like shows about abortion, or would they do this gun violence show now? I don't know. I don't know. We did a show about abortion on SVU and on ER. We did a show where Carrie Green, who is the star of Lucas and Goonies, plays a Mormon mother with five kids. She gets pregnant, she tells Mauratierni, she wants an abortion, she gets an abortion, her husband finds out, he beats the hell out of her and Mauriny. Can you imagine? That was like in 1998. I don't know that they would do that now on broadcast television.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

We I I'm working on broadcast television and we definitely fight some of those battles. But you're making me think of the notes back that we got on on private practice and Gray's Anatomy, where more I was actually more actively on the private practice side where I see these notes, which was um they would often say bloody it up, like for the net medical stuff. Blood, just we need more blood. It needs to feel more medical, would be one of their standard notes you get in every uh episode, which is like, you know, it's a medical show. Let's just have some beeping and coding, and even if it didn't really fit.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

That's the ER effect. Oh, for I mean, yeah, everything on ER was bloody and real because we had two, we had Joe Sachs and we had John Fong and Mark Morocco, and uh on set great doctors who made it look real, and we set the the stage for that for forevermore, making it look real, blood spurting. You don't understand what the words are, and it did really well, and people like the very similitude of it. So I think we never got quite we never got make it bloodier or whatever because we were setting the standard for it.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, ER, ER was a game changer, and the other shows, no, obviously Gray's Anatomy is a game changer in its own way. The other shows did great, but ER was what really and by the way, I also love China Beach, was a game changer in its own way. But I do have a question now. We've talked about the medical side of your career a lot. Uh, and I'm not gonna say you were pigeonholed, but you were a doctor, and then you worked on these amazing medical shows. So it doesn't, it's no surprise that this was gonna be a big part of your career. And then you can even argue that Law and Order SVU has medicine in it, so therefore they need they need someone like you. But did did when you move from SVU to designated survivor, I'm sorry, under the dome, and then designated survivor, was there a conscious choice to be in? Like, I want to, for a second or years, or the next phase of my career, I don't want to be always the writer that does medical stuff, I want to do something else.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

Right. So between SVU, which did have a lot of medicine in it, um, and Under the Dome was another medical show called A Gifted Man with Patrick Wilson. So it was on CBS, and it was about a neurosurgeon, Colcier's neurosurgeon, who inherits his his deceased wife's um family medicine practice. So it's upstairs, downstairs with a doctor. So again, another medical series, but looking at the inequities in medicine. And then after that, and I love doing that, and Patrick was wonderful, and Eric Lasalle was on that show. And then I took Under the Dome because one, I wanted to work with Stephen King, and two, I wanted to do something completely different, even though it has some medical elements in it, like Samantha Mathis dies of diabetes because she can't get her insulin in it, and that kind of thing. Like it's informed by my experience as a physician. And then I took um Designated because I wanted to do a political show, but it has medicine in it too. It's really the first show that explores the consequences of being undetectable and untransmissible, and sharing that with a boyfriend and and or not, and what does that mean? And so we did that storyline, and we also did a conspiracy story about CRISPR technology. So there's still medicine always in my all my shows, and um that probably will always be because medicine is such a and health is such a huge part of our lives that I can't just like stop it. Um, but I do documentaries and I do have a show I that I cannot talk about that will be on for sure in the fall. That's my first unscripted show that has nothing to do with medicine. So stay tuned.

SPEAKER_03 33:33

So this might I I was thinking about this question. It may sound like a silly question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Obviously, given I edit the podcast, if it really is silly, I'll just take it out and no one will know I asked it. Do you think you have saved more lives in your writing than you uh probably would have done if you just had a linear uh career uh just as a physician?

SPEAKER_02 33:57

Yes. Particularly when I look back on the HIV storyline with Gloria Rubin and how that, you know, that was when we did this these studies, people like that storyline more than the Hathaway um Doug Ross, that came in second, the Clooney Juliana storyline. So I think saving lives, I don't know exactly how to critique or measure that, but certainly informing people about their health and changing attitudes, um, and certainly about HPV, if people learned you you can't change behavior if you don't have the information. So if you don't know that HPV is caused by having sex and it causes cervical cancer, then you're not going to maybe get a pep smear, you're not going to get checked, and so, or you're not going to use protection. So it's pretty immeasurable, I think. We've done it in certain ways to look at it, as I as I mentioned, but I think telling stories that can have this impact and change the way people view their own health. I did get, you know, letters where somebody would say, Oh, I watched your show and it was this rare anti-phospholipid antibodies, and I kept having tests and nobody knew what to do. And I told them to do that because Noah did it, and that's what I have. But you know, that's pretty unusual and not really the issue. It's really more about policy. Like Ming Na did an episode with with uh um other cast members, uh Paul McCrane, where um a kid comes in with um uh median median chain acetyl-CoA deficiency, which is a genetic disorder where you're fine unless you get like the flu or something, and you use up all the glucose, the glucogen or the glycogen in your liver, then you're supposed to go through what's called the Krebs cycle and use fat, which is what how keto diets work, because you're you're not eating carbs. So these kids can't digest their fat, and they their blood sugar drops precipitously and they can have seizures and brain damage. So this was a whole discussion about whether every hospital in the night states should should um test children for these these babies for these rare metabolic disorders. She gets into a huge fight with Paul McCrane about that, and he's like, it's not cost effective, we won't pick up many. And she said, tell the parents upstairs they're waiting to see if their baby has brain damage. Well, over time, that has changed, and everybody gets that because the federal government passed laws saying you have to be tested for all these things. It used to be like at one state you'd get it, another state you wouldn't. So I can't measure the impact, but certainly by telling the stories, it puts it out there into the, you know, zeitgeist. We certainly did a story that I loved on SVU about a kid who was 14 who just wanted to have a friend, and he had the psychopathic kid as his friend who was 12, who told him to get a knife, and he gave the kid the knife. He killed somebody, and that kid went to juvenile prison for or juvenile uh juvie for a couple years, and the 14-year-old went to prison for life because it was first-degree felony by handing the knife. And this kid didn't do anything really, and that was being discussed on the Supreme Court at that time about whether we can incarcerate kids for life. And I had sent the video off to those folks because it really showed the injustice of what happened to a lot of kids who were sent to prison for life for things that they really actually hadn't done.

SPEAKER_03 37:48

Extraordinary. Extraordinary. Now, this has been uh very different to all normal episodes and absolutely fascinating. But uh there'll be some regular listeners who are thinking, okay, this is great, but what about uh what happened to him in his career and when did things go wrong? So I can't not ask you one of our traditional questions, which is obviously, you know, the fact that you you have worked on some of these shows and many of them have been long running. Please tell me, otherwise you were probably the wrong guest to invite. But in between, you had shows that got cancelled or jobs you didn't get. Give us give us some of that, Neil. You can't all be successful.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

No, no. And you know, the nice thing was I was on two shows for 18 years, so that's pretty much unheard of. But I did have a pilot called The Edge. I had dinner twice with Helen Miran, she was attached, Josh Brolin, Alfred Molina, um who else? Um I think those three wanted to do it, and it didn't go. And it's because of politics, I think, where there was somebody who had a commitment that they had to fulfill, and they put that medical series on, and it lasted like eight weeks. And so, and so that was a disappointment because I had this incredible cast, like I met with all three of them and met with them numerous times to get their commitment to the sh to doing it, but it never went.

SPEAKER_03 39:15

So, given you had so much success when something didn't work, did you take that maybe worse than somebody like Noah who's had lots of failures all the way along?

SPEAKER_02 39:28

Well, yeah, I think back then, but now when I look at it, it's like you know, there are so many, I know of so many pilots that have major, major movie stars that didn't go and they were attached, and it's like Beverly Hills Cop, you know, everybody's gonna do that as a TV series. It's the the vagaries, the whimsies, the testing of folks who uh are going to the casinos in Las Vegas and turning the dials and all of that that you have no control over. So my attitude now is trying to do projects that really engage me, and I you know what I don't have control over, I shouldn't like worry about. So I have no control over what the network does. They have their own reasons for doing all these things, but I'm not the first who had Oscar winners, Oscar nominees, uh storing, you know, attached to their pilots. I mean, I had a pilot recently with um an incredible director, Stephen Hopkins, who did the pilot of Californication, the pilot of uh the Don Cheadle, um House of Lies, I think. Just incredible. He did the movie uh Life and Death of Peter Sellers with Charlie Steron and Greg uh Jeffrey Rush. So you can't do better. And we wanted to use an actor who's now kind of really getting attention. But this was like five years ago, and the network was like, mm-mm, no, we can't have, we don't want that that person. So you fight, and then you know, you either do it, you do it with who they want, or you just move on. And so I'm I'm much more sort of circumspect, and it's like, I you know, I can't control that. So you just want to have fun, but I'm lucky because I'm at that point in my career where I don't have to be on something that doesn't interest me. And I took designated because one, I wanted to work with Kiefer, and two, I wanted to work with Anthony Edwards again and was hoping I could bring him on opposite Kiefer, which I did do. So that was like really fun. And so, and I wanted to explore political issues and work with people I hadn't worked with before. But I've had tons of pilots not go, tons, probably 20. I think they're all really good. But but it's you know, I don't know what the network's needs, quote, needs are. And I don't know, you know, I'm there usually for the testing. Um, and then you see like people love it, and they're like turning, and then one person in the room says, and then everybody's like and it goes like now the big difference was ER was like this this show that tested through the roof, and it was like people are like, whoa, because there had never been anything like it. It has to do with, I think, the steady cam, too. West Wing was not the first show to use the steady cam. It was ER because it had just been invented and it was used on a uh a TV movie called State of Emergency with um Joe Montena. And so we had the steady cam so we could run through the hallways and through the trauma rooms and make it like pace and pathos, we used to say. And Tommy Schlami, who's a phenomenal director, he directed one of my ERs. He directed a lot of our shows, and guess what? He did the pilot of West Wing. So all those walk and talks with Alice and Janney and everyone else, that's inspired by the work that Tommy did on ER. Which we now everyone It's not a coincidence that John Wells was the executive producer and knew at that point how to make a set so that you could move people through it in that way.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

For sure. I was gonna say, yeah, for sure, they're now building long hallways into every set so you can have the walk and talk and create some movement and episodes that otherwise might be really static. Now, unfortunately, we're coming to you know to the end of this podcast, and it brings us to what is always our final question. And now your career spans a lot of like amazing shows. You've been on all of these shows, you've seen a lot of change in Hollywood, I'm guessing. What would be your one piece of advice today to an aspiring writer who's trying to get into this business?

SPEAKER_02 43:50

Um, work as a writer's assistant. If you're doing drama, comedy, I don't really know. So, but for drama, every writer's assistant I've worked with, and my assistants have all gotten scripts, and many of them are showrunners now, like Michelle Fazekas and Tara Butters and Barbie Kliggman and Linda Gase and uh Dan Truly and Adam Style, I mean Peter Noah, they're all um writers, and they've all come through. Um, they either were staff on the show, and then all of my assistants are on shows unless they decided not to be writers, like one is doing post-production. So um that is really the way is being an assistant to a showrunner and or being the writer's assistant in the room and then just working your ass off, doing as much as possible to um capture all the conversations going on in the room, and that, and then also working diligently on your um specs to really find your voice. Because I really, really feel that if you have a great voice, you will work. I mean, I've read tons and tons and tons of scripts in my career that are good, but they're not special. And when the special ones pop out, you just go, whoa! And you really want to hire that person.

SPEAKER_01 45:20

Well, thank you, Neil. That was that was fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

It's great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_03 45:25

Thank you, Neil. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 45:28

Take care.

SPEAKER_03 45:30

Thank you for listening to another one of our fantastic episodes. Yet again, I think you'll find that I ask better questions than Noah. Noah, have you got anything to say?

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Um, as always, uh, since you've done most of the talking, I'm just gonna sit here quietly again.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

Surely there's some people to thank.

SPEAKER_01 45:48

Oh, right, right, right, right. Uh, I would love to thank James Launch for doing all of our outro music. Um, as always, I think we owe a big thank you to both of our wives who support us through this endeavor that started in our basement and seems to be ever growing. And if you want to reach out to either Dan or I, I am at at Nebsilin on Twitter. I'm not sure Dan has a Twitter account. Dan, do you have a Twitter account?

SPEAKER_03 46:13

I mean, I I do, but no one cares. All I care about is being on Noah's podcast. So well done, Noah, for conceiving, producing, editing, writing, and asking the best questions of the two of us because you've done all this work and well done you.

SPEAKER_01 46:27

I do think it's worth pointing out after 33 or so episodes that I do both voices. There actually is no damn resting. Wanka!