Take 52 - Craig Thomas, showrunner How I Met Your Mother

SPEAKER_03 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 sure, dozens of unproduced scripts literature.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

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

SPEAKER_04 0:20

For every success, there is sometimes even years. Failure.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default. That's the default to be able to persevere. Like everything in our business, you're gonna have to be out.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

I was being told by my manager that it's yours to lose. And I probably lost it. 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_04 0:59

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss. So here we are on the second episode of the new series. And I'd like to think there's more of you listening to this than usual because we had such a incredible response to our Rob Thomas episode last week, both in terms of listener numbers and social media. So thank you very much, everyone. Um Noah, you had quite a lot of correspondence around it and excitement around.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

I I I think I have a theory that distance makes the heart grow fonder. So our little break, uh, some people got caught up. And no, we got a ton of nice DMs and emails from people who responded to Rob's stories and is a you know willingness to open up with us and and tell some good tales. So we are we're really happy coming into this new season that that we're getting a response and that we're you know we're getting a whole slew of of good new guests for you.

SPEAKER_04 1:47

Yeah, so thank you everyone for listening. And I think we mentioned Hart Hansen seemed to have provided us with most of the guests, but this week's guests, this was a classic piece of Noah sliding around in people's DMs on Twitter and finding somebody and bringing them on.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

I think I think uh this person we have next is Craig Thomas, and I think he made the mistake of laughing or even maybe just liking, or maybe even just clicking on one of my and uh I thought that gave me the opportunity because I've been a longtime fan of uh how I met your mother to reach into his DM and ask if he would come onto our show. And and nicely, thankfully, he he hadn't heard of it yet. I mean, he heard of it, hadn't listened to it, and then he listened to some and luckily he liked what he heard and agreed to come on. And I'm actually, you know, I'm gonna pass this back to you in a second, Dan, but I'm still buzzing. We just did that interview and it was really good. He went really deep in places that we haven't gone before, and uh, you know, it was kind of enlightening. And, you know, I'm in the industry, and he still kind of told things that shocked and surprised me.

SPEAKER_04 2:49

Yeah, it was great. I mean, I think that we're very clear on what this podcast is meant to be and what it isn't meant to be. And Craig somehow read the brief, he'd listened to some episodes as part of his prep, which we always appreciate, the effort he made. And then he came on and he's straight in, just dumping one rejection story after another, but with enough comedy in there to make it very entertaining. So I think this will be a really good episode. But again, in the way this works out, some cracking stories of failure, but some really interesting pieces of advice given throughout the podcast, not just at the advice question at the end. So um, yeah, I thought it was a great episode, and I'm sure you're all going to agree. Welcome back to Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. As ever, I'm your English non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rutstein.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

And I'm your industry co-host, Noah Evelsn. Today we have Craig Thomas on our podcast. Craig is best known for playing Fake Paramedic in How I Met Your Mother, uh, which he also co-created uh with his longtime writing partner. He also co-created the Goodwin games, How I Met Your Father, on top of 20 other credits, including American Dad and Late Night with David Letterman. Welcome, Craig.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Thanks for having me, guys. I'm a fan of the podcast. Good to be here. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I was trying to I I hope you guys aren't too starstruck talking to fake paramedic number one, by the way. Just I'm I'm just a normal guy like anybody else.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

That was my attempt at humor, Craig, because we have a comedy writer on.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

So I put on my fake paramedic pants one leg at a time, like anybody else.

SPEAKER_04 4:25

So um I was trying to work out the way in to this one. After 50-something episodes, just starting with, you know, you're really successful, why are you on our podcast, which is what I've been doing recently, is lazy. So I'm gonna be actually even lazier and not even really ask a proper question. I'm gonna ask you to give me the first question. So you know what this podcast is about. What is the question you least wanted to start with about some dark moment of failure in your podcast? What should I be asking you to really kick this off in the way that we our listeners would want?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

I was I was thinking of this a little bit. I would I was trying to sort of group a few of my failures. And when I say my failures, I share some of them with Carter Bays. I want to be sure to rope him into the failure. Uh, who's my writing partner on a lot of stuff? I was trying to sort of like come up with like what's a what's a unifying theme of some of these failures? And I would say that one that one big overarching theme that we just kept getting wrong at certain moments was taking our eye off of one ball that was a perfectly hard enough ball to hit, uh namely running How I Met Your Mother, uh, especially at first when we were we were really young when we launched that show. We were 29. We had never even been freaking staff writers on a proper sitcom. We'd written for David Letterman for like four and a half years and late and late night. We'd worked on like a couple of like very short-lived, like a single camera short-lived show called Oliver Bean when we first moved to LA after Letterman. But we had like, we had no experience at this. Like we should not have gotten our own TV show at that age. We should not have been running a major network TV show 24 episodes a year. And I'd say a bunch of the failures that happened during that time were when we would try to do something else, when we should have absolutely just been saying no to shit, because you think you think, oh, I've got something going, I've got a successful thing going. And just being in Hollywood and being in that world, you have this feeling like I now I should be doing more. We have this one thing. So let's reach for these other things. Let's there's there's this constant feeling of having to strive for something else. You know, you sign the overall deal when you're running the show, and you say, now I also have to write two pilots or three pilots a year on top of running this TV show. And I that accounts for a bunch of the failure stories I'll likely tell on on this show is when whenever we tried to leave or stray from the thing that was clearly working and clearly demanded all of our bandwidth, even with two of us, though that led to a series of uh embarrassing and frustrating failures over several years. I'd say that's the big theme uh that that's hard to talk about and make and we did not learn that lesson all the right up until the end. We did nine years of how I met your mother. As we finished How I Met Your Mother, we were doing, we were fucking that up in the same way by by trying to do a pilot for what was then called How I Met Your Dad, which was really hard to do on top of also ending How Met Your Mother and ended in disaster. Uh and I could talk about that at some point uh along the way. But that's that's sort of the embarrassing theme of just like getting it wrong over and over again under that heading.

SPEAKER_04 7:37

So well, thank you for helping me, because that that would have been a really good question for me to ask about that. But I think I will stay on that theme, I guess. Is part of the reason that you did that, but also actually was a problem presented to you in your career because you actually had too much success too quickly. You didn't put in the hard yards and you just suddenly became successful and sort of messed it up a bit because of that.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, I th we were we were so new. We I, you know, I look back every now and again, I'll come across an old photo of me and Carter from when we were first launching How I Met Your Mother, and we were in charge of this multi-million dollar operation. And I see like a photo from season one of How Met Your Mother, and it looks like an ultrasound of babies in utero. It's just these two little fucking kids who don't know what they're doing. And uh the fact that we were given the reins of this giant machine, I should say we we weren't at first, we were sort of paired. You've probably heard this story on the show before. We were paired with like grown-ups. The the network in the studio were like, these guys look like they just asked girls out to prom and got rejected. We need to pair them with adults, and so we got paired with grown-ups uh at the beginning of How I Met Your Mother. And like one of those relationships really didn't work. And we ended up actually firing those people. And uh, it was just a bad fit, it just no bad blood, but it just didn't work. And that's so sort of halfway through season one, we really started running that show. And once it became successful after a couple of years, you start getting people whispering to you, hey, now's the time to go, you're hot. You got you gotta get out there, gotta pound the pavement and be selling pilots, and you got to be like this showrunner who sets up a franchise of this, you gotta have multiple things, missiles in the air. And it just it never fucking worked for us. I know there are lots of showrunners who do it beautifully and do not regret taking those shots, but for us, we just how I met your mother was our baby, and we were babies running it. And that's where that's where our attention belonged. And we should we should have learned that lesson sooner than we did.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

I love that. And unlike Dan, I did have some great questions teed up, but I can't ask them right now because you you you've you've set this up and I cannot let it go. You said at some point you're gonna talk about how you fucked it all up, and I we we're gonna have to hear those stories, you know, sooner rather than later. So I want to hear about the end and what went wrong and and maybe where you ended up writing the ship or wronging the ship or tipping the ship.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

We, I mean, we kept getting tempted by by something or another. Uh, what maybe it was money, maybe it was like, maybe it was that sense of like your your Hollywood career is short, you know, the moment that you're quote unquote hot is short. But just every time. So, so okay, so like in the last couple of years of How I Met Your Mother, when we were perfectly happy running that show, we were very aware that show was creatively our shot, that show was financially our shot, it was going the distance, it started off kind of on the bubble and it became a hit. It's it makes me sound ancient to say this, but like Netflix became a thing during How I Met Your Mother. And uh we wrote this pretty serialized show for a sitcom, certainly for a CBS sitcom. I like, I we were probably the most serialized comedy ever on CBS. And so some people have felt like they missed the boat or couldn't catch up. Netflix came on like season three or four of our show, and everyone caught up, and all of a sudden the numbers jumped, and it was like all of a sudden we didn't feel like we were getting canceled every week. And then people start telling you to do all this shit. And so we did, and you get very spoiled when you have a show that works because after a while, you you have to sort of crawl through that Shawshank sewer tunnel of the first season or two of getting it to become a hit and get people to stop like noting you to death. Once you've gotten that and you're in the middle, it's a pretty sweet place to be. We, you know, we still pitched to the network, we got notes, but like we pretty much did what we want. And then you then you go to go, you go to do a pilot, and all of a sudden you're just back to square one. You know, people kind of like you because you have a hit show, but it's you know, we did this, we we would do pilot sometimes for other networks than CBS. We did this pilot for Fox uh called the Goodwin Games that did get picked up to series, but it's one of the it's one of our biggest and most frustrating um failures, I would say, because we came in, we were in the middle of running how much mother, like late middle. We were kind of spoiled because we were not getting noted to death. We had a cast that liked each other, we had an amazing director, we were sitting in a good place, but we had to contractually write a pilot and go pitch something. So we go to pitch the show The Goodwin Games. Um, and we go in and we had this pitch meeting at Fox, and Fox bought it, I'll say. But we had this pitch meeting that is one of my favorite Hollywood stories when I try to tell people how just every cliche is is true and really happens. We were in this pitch meeting, and because we had some like acclaim from How Met Your Mother, the the then president of Fox came to the pitch meeting, like with the executives, which I didn't even think we know was going to happen, but he was like, You guys, I love how I met your mother, I'm I need to hear this. And he comes in all guns ablazing. He's like, All right, go. We start pitching the show, and it it was a show with a big premise. It had, I don't know if no one knows the show, but I'll just quickly say what it was. It's these three adult siblings who are estranged. Their dad is this kooky professor, their dad dies, they go back to their hometown and they realize two things. One, their dad is actually a multi-multi-millionaire and they didn't know it. And he's left this series of challenges for them to have to solve, and the winner gets his massive inheritance. It's called the Goodwin games, right? These series of games. But because it was high concept, we were we were told by like the studio, like, hey, hide, hide the high concept. They might get freaked out by the big concept. So just start with the characters of the pitch. So we're like, okay, all right, we'll hide the concept. And we pitch, we get in this pitch, it's the president, a few executives, and we start just listing out who the characters are. And it was like, you know, it it got picked up. It was this great cast. So we had TJ Miller, uh, Becky Newton, Scott Foley, were the three siblings, and Gerard Carmichael and Bo Bridges. Like it ended up having this great cast for a gigantic failure that it was. And we start pitching in this meeting all the characters, and we build, we get through all the characters and we say, okay, here's the big idea. The president of Fox, I won't name names to seem like a dick. Uh, someone can look up and do the math and see who it was if they want to find out. The president of Fox stops us, he goes, No, guys, I have another meeting. I love these characters, I'm sure we're gonna buy this, and leaves before we can tell the entire high concept of the show. And he just literally leaves in the middle of the meeting, and we're like, is he gonna come back? And they were like, No, no, no, that was it. That was it for them. And we're like, So he's gonna buy it based on the characters? There's this huge twist of what the whole show is about. Is are we sure we don't want him? No, no, no, he he loves you guys, he he loves the characters, it's all gonna be great. We finish our pitch like really awkwardly and talk about like sort of the high concept of the show. And the executives are like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, that sounds kind of fun, sure. They buy it, and we spend then months developing it, writing a pilot, writing episode ideas. They pick up the pilot, we shoot the pilot. The pilot is this enormous high concept idea. I should say this. We also card on I co-created it with this amazing writer, Chris Harris, who was like our all-star how I'm at your mother writer and the best guy ever, and a brilliant mind that could devise all of these intricate sort of aspects of this, you know, series of games these siblings were gonna have to compete in. And so we got we'd shot the pilot, and it was a good cast, and it got picked up. And then we get we start writing, you know, well, I guess we got ordered for seven or ten of them or something, and we start writing them and we were feeling pretty good about it. And we go to the like first table read for like episode two after the pilot. And this is the first time that like the president of Fox has kind of floated back in to the to the mix. And he comes to that table read. And keep in mind, we're running how I met your mother during this. So Carter has gone with Chris Harris and gone one floor above our writer's room floor. They're on like the third floor of this building at the Fox lot. We're on the second floor. Even though we're one floor apart, we never see each other. Because I'm running how I met your mother by myself. The the two other most valuable How I Met Your Mother writers are up there, like right, you know, breaking 10 stories of the Goodwin Games or whatever. And we're just like massively overextended, we're losing our minds, we're tearing our hair out, we're doing two shows at once. And the Goodwin Games is a single camera show with locations, it's more expensive, it's more involved. We go to the second table read, which kind of you know extends and elaborates upon the game concept and finish the table read, thought it went pretty well. Everyone leaves except the president and the executives, and the president basically goes, What's up with all this game shit? And we're like, what do you mean? It's like, what is all these games? They're playing games to get money. This is why what why are they playing all these stupid games? Could we like lose the games part? This is a picked up series that is that is about to start shooting. I think it was seven of them. Maybe we're shooting seven or eight of them. Uh and we go, well, that's the idea of the show. There's three words in the title, one of them's games, and one of them's the so the doesn't even count. There's two actionable, there's two actionable words that were in the you like Goodwin, but you don't like games. And what proceeds to happen is something that I just advise if you sniff this out happening sooner than we did. We should have sniffed this out when the guy left the fucking pitch halfway through. We should have not sold it to that network. But like if you if you're in this situation, anyone listening to this, and you can get out of it or steer it earlier to somewhere else anyway, because what ended up happening was we were already, we had broken most of the stories in some way, right? Like this was like the script for I think episode two. We had a few other scripts written, we had outlines for other episodes. There was no taking the games out of the Goodwin games. That was baked into the cake. And what ended up happening was okay, well, just tone it down, tone down everything that has to do with the games and the competition and vying for the money and all of the cool, intricate kind of things that that was the entire drive of the show. And so we wound up kind of taking all the scripts and outlines and like sanding down the edges, taking out all the kind of fun stuff. And that's what was what was so fun about the show is there were these hints and all these Easter eggs, and we were building these elaborate things and tricks, and maybe the dad's not really dead, maybe the dad's alive in a disguise, living in the small town with this big fake beard, and you like all this crazy shit and mysteries. And we just start like one by one, kind of like horse trading out like how, okay, yeah, he's not gonna like that. That's too much games. We'll we'll episode four. Well, there won't be a game aspect. It'll just be like about the siblings relationship. You start sanding down everything that's interesting about the idea, um, which thank God we didn't have to do on how I much your mother. I will say one, what it reminds me of that we were smart about. I'll I'll I'll meet a dumb story with a smart story on how I much mother. When we were pitching it, we pitched it to NBC at that time, and the executives were like, I don't know about this whole future narrator looking back on this life thing. That seems gimmicky. And we're like, we're out. We are not going to them. We were so young and dumb, and we weren't, we had nothing to lose at that point. We were nobody, and we're just like, not them. And the studio was like, but they might make an offer. We're like, no, it can't, it has to be a guy in 2030 looking back on his life. That's the show. We did not protect this one in the same way, which you think we should have. We were older and wiser, but we didn't. And then we were told after finishing, I think, I think it was seven or eight, or maybe we're supposed to do 13, and they pulled the plug after seven of them. I can't even remember. I know we ended up with seven of them. They said, we'll put it on mid-season because it's a good cast and we'll give it a chance. We said, You do you swear? Because we've taken all your notes, we've sanded down the edges, we've made it more about the relationships. Do you swear to God it'll air this TV season? We swear to God it'll air this TV season. Noah, where am I going with this? They burned it off. They burned it, they didn't air it that TV season, and they burned it off that summer, week by week, just summer burn-off, getting like a 0.96, 18 to 49, and just nothing. This awesome fucking cast, really cool show, really cool idea for a show that ended up like an A idea for a show that ended up like a C because of all these notes, and and even taking all those notes and trying to fit it into what they want it to be. You just never my advice to anyone listening: don't ever do that. Go down fucking swinging. Go down swinging, make it the most it thing it can be. Make the show what the show wants to be, the thing in your head. Never sand it down. Get canceled doing it your way. Because when you sand it down and it's worse and it still doesn't go anywhere, no one apologizes to you later. No one says, Hey, our notes made it worse. Sorry about that.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

So don't do that. I I I've heard I've heard a lot of stories um on this podcast and in with my friends who are writers and on social media about people adding engines to shows that don't have it. I've never actually heard of a story where they've they took the engine out of a show that was already on the tracks. But that's not my question. But it does tee up my question to you, which is which is something we've been wanting to ask for a while. In fact, a showrunner emailed us and asked us to ask this question, and your stories are perfect for it, which is you're 29 years old, you create a hit show, right? You don't know what you're doing, you know, as you say, but it's working. Then you then you have an overall deal, you got to write pilots, maybe some of them aren't going, then one does go and it doesn't go well for you guys.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

Are this is a kind of a two part question because you have a writing partner? What is imposter syndrome like for somebody like? you and does having a writing partner make it easier or harder to to live you know in this world of imposter syndrome assuming you have it uh because some writers do not we massively had and continue to have imposter syndrome that's for sure i think having a writing partner helps that immensely because you have somebody that makes you feel less crazy when people are questioning you because i'll say this i it it's funny it's almost like we were we were too dumb to know any better so we just were very tenacious in guarding the idea and the soul of how I met your mother in a way that when I look back on it, it's like the fearlessness of youth.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

You know, we were like fuck it what do we have to lose because at the end of C this is another kind of failure and getting the shit kicked out of you story. I I I'll pause for one second and just say I think this podcast is a great idea. I think it is a great public service for people to hear these stories because there's such an illusion right and we're all doing this all the time we're all on social media being little ads for ourselves right and like the kind of putting yourself out there and creating a certain image and I people forget how much failure there is along the way even for people who've had success. Um and I think that's that's we were too young in season one of How Met Your Mother to realize even what the stakes were. Neither of us had children. There wasn't like the financial thing of like I've got to pay for other humans' lives. So at the end of season one of How Mit Your Mother this is another get the shit kicked out of you story we were really proud of season one of How Met Your Mother it was very serialized. It was very emotional we I like to think it was funny but we were very much trying to also be kind of a drama kind of like this secret stealth Trojan horse half hour dramedy on on uh uh CBS in 2005 sandwiched by King of Queens and two and a half men. So we were we were the sore thumb of that Monday night juggernaut lineup and we just didn't try to be anything but what we wanted to be meaning we did this big serialized arc of season one. We had this whole thing for our main characters where week to week things mattered. Each episode remembered the episode that happened before you you kind of had to watch certain episodes to know what certain payoffs were about. And we ended the season with kind of the guy got the main guy gets the girl and his best friend loses the girl. You know he uh Jason Siegel's character gets his engagement ring returned. There's like this really sad moment. There's this this cliffhanger moment where it seems like this couple we've made you fall in love with for 22 episodes is breaking up right as Ted is landing Robin. And so we end and the last image of that season is Ted comes home all excited from having hooked up with Robin and he comes home the next morning and he it's raining he walks out of the cab and he sees Marshall sitting on the front steps of their apartment building crying with an engagement ring that's been returned to him. And it's the worst moment of his life and this huge high euphoric moment collides against this earth crushing horrible moment and you just end on the two of them in the rain and the camera pulls back and you end on this down bittersweet Empire strikes back ending. And we loved it. We fucking loved it. It's still one of my favorite things we ever did on the whole show. But here's another story about getting the shit kicked out of you especially when your your heart is in it we finished that episode we were literally sound mixing that episode to conclude season one of How I Metro Mother and we left the sound mix to go to a meeting we'd been called to with the presidents of the studio and the president of CBS we thought it was like a season two early you know a concept meeting about launching it maybe we get a few notes about what we wanted to be better about season what they wanted to be better about season one. But we we walked in just thinking this is a meeting it's not a big deal. We walk in and there's like 30 people in the room. It's this gigantic corporate behemoth room at CBS both presidents of the studio were there, which I didn't know was going to happen and the president of the network and all the higher ups and we get seated at the end of this long table all the way at the other end is the president of CBS. It's the moment I would equate this to is when in Goodfellas when Jill Pesci thinks he's going to be a made man and he walks in and he looks down and he sees the plastic tarp on the ground and he's like oh I'm about to get my fucking brains blown out and it sort of just hit us right as the the president started literally yelling at us. What was she yelling at us? And when I say yelling I mean yelling uh God bless her she is a friend to this day she later after this meeting became a real champion of the show I really do love her. But in this moment our numbers had dipped due to a little show called Deal or no deal where Howie Mandel was opening briefcases full of money. And we started losing we had been beating that show that show became this massive like flash in the panda hit where literally we're losing to like a guy opening a briefcase full of money or not and I we had nothing to offer that we're like yeah that fucking sucks. That makes us feel bad too what are we going to do? But we we're like it's not gonna last forever. There's only so many briefcases how he can open before that gets old but in that moment a lot of their fears about how I met your mother came out at us in that moment of being yelled at in front of this huge room of people and their fears were and what they were yelling at us was you've made the show too emotional. You've made it too serialized. You're asking people to invest in these long arcs keep in mind this is before Netflix came along and people were binging these shows. You're making people think too much week to week you're asking them to have this emotional memory through the show no one wants to watch that and your lead in is king of queens your lead out is two and a half men be more like that. What the fuck are you guys doing? You've got this great cast and you're fucking it up by being too serialized. And uh the this is the part where I I say something good about ourselves but I think it's just because we were so dumb we said yes we nodded we sat there and took the hit we left the meeting we went to the smokehouse in the valley got super drunk. I'm sure we're not the first two writers in Hollywood to go to the smokehouse and get super drunk after getting yelled at and we decided at that meeting at that meeting meeting we got drunk that's not a meeting that was getting drunk we decided at that getting drunk that we weren't going to change a fucking thing about the show and that season two was going to be if anything more serialized and that people would catch on and that we would go down with the fucking ship if it if if it came to it but we'd know we had done our show. We had this great um this was the other older adult who was paired with us in season one of How Met Your Mother uh this guy Rob Greenberg who's a brilliant and funny writer and director um he said to us that thing of like no one will ever take the blame if you if you change your show and it errs and it's the less good shitty B minus version of your show and it gets canceled, no one apologizes to you. No one sends you a fucking fruit basket. No one goes our notes made it worse and now it's gone. So he's like just keep doing the show you want to do and go down with that. And I I will say we did we did it we did do that. And I think that's why How much mother worked in the end. I think that's what was special about our show. And I'm I looking back I think we were just too dumb to know any better and we it was the the youthful bravado helped us in in that in that instance so that was that was a win that was that was a an enormous gut punch that story I just told but uh in the end it was good because it actually made us double down on what we wanted to do.

SPEAKER_04 30:00

Oh fascinating story. So obviously Noah's in the business so he's probably heard versions of stories like that before but for somebody from the outside it's extraordinary that they can have this meeting with so many people there and you can do that.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

And then dare I say they didn't notice so you know like as somebody who works in a traditional what happened is people became the viewing public became somewhat less interested in seeing how I Mandel opened those briefcases and people kind of caught up with our show over the summer reruns and people got into it. And then like I said like a couple years a year or two later Netflix kind of saved our show I think I think some combination of like Netflix and Britney Spears appearing on our show really helped our show and then got got the numbers up and uh we we stuck by it and and I I'm very glad that we did.

SPEAKER_04 30:52

But but it it was we really we thought we were dead we thought we're gonna be fired off our own show we thought we're gonna be uh replaced or something or the show would just be canceled and we'd be to blame but but uh it it worked out it worked out we found an audience by telling the story we wanted to tell so I want to I want to go somewhere we've actually not really been before so obviously a lot of Hollywood coverage in podcasts and TV shows whatever they they talk when they talk to writers they often ask them questions you know tell us an anecdote about working with this big star or that big star and because we're not anecdotes in that sense we don't do that but one I guess one thing we've never really asked somebody is obviously on that show there were some not insubstantial performers uh who have gone on to do extraordinary things as writers when you've helped build somebody I mean obviously some of them came to your show already famous but when you've built something like that and it's done incredibly well everyone's made lots of money and people are getting the talent are getting shows elsewhere off the back of what you've done when you're what's your relationship like going forward not so much with them directly but a sort of you know if you go and pitch a show and it doesn't go anywhere but somebody who was a star of your last show then becomes a star of another show how do you feel all about that do you start sort of getting upset that people didn't realize it was you who did it and you should be getting the same success and equally when you do well and stars of yours go off and fail elsewhere just how does that relationship with talent work from a writer's point of view I have a very sanguine uh view of this question because I I've I've now done this enough that I realize how lucky we were to have the cast that we did.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

And and I should say too um we had this wonderful future narrator in Bob Sagitt who we who we just lost and there was this wonderful family feeling to how I met your mother Pam Freyman directed almost every episode of that show. She's the best director in comedy um so for for the most part I just look at it when when stars of our show go off and do well with stuff I just look at it as I'm happy for them and that and then because I'm a writer and I'm a selfish little dick like all writers are I also think oh that's good for us because the more success anyone has the more how I met your mother stays in the conversation and and it's you know it reminds you of great they did that other show and let's go let's go watch how I met your mother again. So I I mostly I'm there's a real kind of camaraderie and teen feeling to that to that show. And and I'll admit I don't I think it's very I think it's very rare um the more stuff I do and the more I encounter other actors the more I realize we were we were just so lucky. We were just so lucky on that show. But no I you look you know I'm in my 40s now I'm well aware of just how rare the alchemy is the chemical equation that makes something work or not work how much it's the cast how much it's timing how much it's who is the president of the network at a given moment that show the Goodwin games could have been a big old hit under some other network president. And to bring it back to another failure uh because that's the theme here we did the show How I Met Your Dad before could which is confusing because how I met your father is now a show on Hulu with uh Hillary Duff that's happening right now. But in 2014 we did the first attempt at spinning that off and doing the female perspective version of that show. And I really look at that one like we were in the wrong place at the wrong time because the head of that network at that time was Les Moonvez. And um he his you know his downfall a few years later due to a very troubling track record with women and I I won't get into it because I don't know I I I don't know the specifics of everything that happened there. But when I look back on us trying to do this female centric version of how I met your father that we called the how I met your dad at that point, starring Greta Gerwig. And it was this female perspective version of this show. And I just think we served that up to this guy who was not looking for it. In 2014, Les Moonbez I just think he was like I don't want to do that. And we and we went to all this trouble. We got Greta Gerwig. She's gone on to get Oscar nominations. We had this awesome cast for that show it's like Greta Gerwig, the future narrator like the Bob Sagitt was Meg Ryan. Drew Tarver was in that show like just a really cool cast and you know it's just buried under the sands of time because I think we just were we were presenting it to someone who just didn't want it. And that's all a long way of saying I just think the tough the part if anyone comes on here and doesn't say timing and luck are such a huge part of what happens when something works or doesn't work like it's very humbling to think about that. We worked really hard on that pilot. It was good. I love I love Greta Gerwig. I'm such a fan of hers and uh yet it you know it's it's it's nowhere it's buried under the sands of time. And I I think it's just timing. So I I don't want to detract from the very important point you're making about luck and timing and also the also very important point about that person not wanting female led stories for I mean that's that's just my speculation we were never told that I'm just thinking probably that wasn't the target audience for the pilot that we made that's just my sense.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

A slightly penicety question possibly is why did you not call it how I met your father why change the it to dad I can't even explain it.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

I don't even know why maybe it failed because of that maybe things may maybe it is like just the a butterfly flaps its wings and something fails. I don't know we just thought oh it's differentiated enough or make it a little more conversational feeling I don't know now it's how I'm at your father it's on Hulu and uh and that that's you know it's when I listen to your guys' podcast I think of that and and just thinking about these stories I'm telling I think of that kid's book that's good that's bad. Do you know that kids book it's where like something happens and you're like oh that's good. It's like no that's actually bad because that seemingly good thing spun into this thing and some end it ends in disaster and you go that's bad and they go no that's actually good because that bad thing led to this other good thing. That's every TV career that's every film career because in the end you know that went away and felt like a big fail at the time and we were killing ourselves like I said earlier to do that on top of running how I met your mother and doing that show the Goodwin games was kind of all at once for those those two years of our life when we were we were dying how hard we were working. And in the end, you know there's another shot at doing a show called How I Met Your Father Hillary Duff's in it other people wrote it and are running it and we help and consult on it. And now there's another life for that so maybe that's good instead of bad.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

You know making me think all these stories, you know, you guys being so young and and idealistic really and and able to do the show you wanted to do and it probably taking a lot of pride in that right that this thing this creation is yours and it was beloved what does that do you know in regards to pressure when you come out because you're playing at the A game I mean whether or not you realize it at the time right you are on a network television station primetime TV people are watching you're on for nine years and you're changing quietly changing the paradigm right a lot of people do hidden dramaties these days most comedies are hidden dramedies but you were like one one of you know sort of archetypal that way. And now you come out you want to you want to refresh renew reinvent maybe you know what does it feel like coming out of the gate outside of you know the Goodwin games which already you know kind of the the how you met your mother is over and you got to come up with something new that works uh is what kind of pressure is on on you and your partner at this point um a lot of pressure and uh and not fun i would say that it it's kind of similar to what I was saying of like the thing that I've come to not like doing and I'm trying to not do anymore is putting the cart before the horse creatively.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

I'll explain what I mean. We came out of this long deal with 20th where we did how much mother and the good win games and all those other things and we signed a new deal with Sony coming off of that um after how much mother ended and it was like you're supposed to sign a big deal after your hit show ends right probably at a new place because maybe the new place is going to give you more money and you know you'll you know stuff about the old place and you're like ah there's maybe there'll be something new and great about this new place. And I would say that we signed a three year deal with Sony no TV series came out of that. There are several failure stories I could tell you in under that deal uh a couple of which also involve serving up female centric pilots to CBS and its then leadership that went nowhere which again led to my theory that perhaps that was a factor. Again, that's only my theory I've never been told that um but I actually left that deal early and gave them money back because I was so disillusioned. I was so the pressure of the pressure of trying to sort of recapture how I met your mother which is definitely what Sony wanted us to do and I don't blame them for that we wanted to do anything but how I met your mother we had also tried to do this spin-off show that had gotten killed by CBS so we we were trying to write stuff that was different and they're like yeah this different stuff for streamers and cable is okay we kind of paid you a lot of money to give us how I met your mother so where's that? So each of the years under that deal it was like we had to earn our weird cable streaming pitch by also writing at least one if not two big attempts at recapturing how I met your mother that didn't work because I'm sure you hear a theme on this show of people saying you don't fucking recapture the thing you did. It just doesn't happen. It has to be a new thing it has to be a new thing and I think in our guts and our in our souls we knew that and we were trying these other swings that were different that Sony was not as crazy about. And we so each year of that Sony deal we made like a big multi-camera pilot or two for CBS the exact network that did how I met your mother and we were just kind of steered that way because we signed up for the big paycheck. We signed up kind of sold ourselves a little bit essentially tethered ourselves to putting the cart before the horse like you're not writing an idea you love you're trying to fill that cart that's in front of you that you said you would fill up with the big multicam shows that make millions of dollars. And boy, it was not fun. It was not fun it was not creatively inspiring. It was not how we wrote how I met your mother how I met your mother was us writing about our lives it was just us and our friends and our lives and our relationships and our heartbreaks and we brought in everything hard that happened in our lives in our 20s and 30s losing people breakups death disillusionment career and we that show worked because it was really our blood and guts put into that show trying to calculate another kind of facsimile of that show for a couple years after how much mother ended was no fun for anybody and yielded nothing. So that was a couple years of legit failure um which I suppose is boy I there is something gutting about this show. I love this podcast but there is I'm getting exhausted here guys I think I need to lie down for a second. But uh but we we racked up we racked up a bunch of failed pilots a few of which I really liked that were like weird swings that also didn't go anywhere sadly. And I would say that it steered me towards in the last few years trying to do some more stuff in in features and even writing some prose pieces and stuff because I really got burned out on TV and trying to kind of still play that game and still be in those rooms and having those meetings and and going through that process like it it gets very wearying and you start losing sight of why anything even worked in the first place, which is because it was a story you had to tell you were going to write that script no matter what. And if you don't feel that way when you're writing a script it's probably not going to be great.

SPEAKER_04 43:27

So you've done a very good job of uh fulfilling the requests that we've made of you in terms of the rejection stories and the depth but you you will get a chance to lie down in a second because we are on to our final question. Now you've actually been given quite a lot of advice in between all the stories uh inadvertently but now is the advice question which is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody looking to enter the industry, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 43:54

Um if I had I mean because I said a lot of uh you know, heartbreaking uh failure stories, which which is what you ask. I would just say that my biggest piece of advice to someone at any point in their career, but especially towards the beginning, is just remember that at its best, this is the best job in the world. This is a fucking great job. You get to tell stories and people pay you money to tell the stories. If you can keep that part of you that is just like, holy shit, I can't believe I'm getting away with this. And you can keep that kind of like mischievous like kid in the candy store feeling that same thing that I think in season one of How I Met Your Mother, which like steered us towards saying fuck it, we're just going to keep doing what we want to do. Whatever that voice is in you that that is a little bit like I don't know fool fool it foolishly optimistic, brave and confident based on nothing, just the part of you that's excited to tell a story. If you can hold on to that feeling throughout your career, I think it's it it officially makes this the best job in the world. And I have times where I'm not there and can't hold on to that. But um I've been working on a couple of things recently that may or may not go anywhere that are just stories I have to tell before I die. I don't want to die and not have and not have tried to tell this story. There's especially one thing this this movie I've been writing for literally seven and a half years literally since I met your mother ended like the first new idea file I opened was basically the beginning of the idea of this movie. And that's a whole fucking saga too that's I there'd be a whole other episode if I told you what's been going on with that. I was right about to maybe shoot that movie and through a casting fiasco it got scattered to the wind and now we're trying to recapture it and recast a role to kind basically I got so close to telling my other kind of dream story other than how I met your mother and now it's like maybe not happening. But I will fight till the day I die to tell that one because it just gives me that feeling. It gives me that feeling like this is why I do this and uh this is the best job in the world to even have a chance at telling that kind of story. So I just say hold on to that like the the precious little Jack London match the little match you strike in the middle of the tundra and just hold on to that because if you can it's it really is the best job in the world.

SPEAKER_04 46:21

Fantastic. A magnificently inspiring answer.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

So Craig Thomas co-creator of the Goodwin games thank you very much for being that's by the way that's the most famous and known the Goodwin games will ever be you're a plug just now so thank you for that. It's all worth it now.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

Thank you Craig Cool. And that's a wrap on this episode of Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss as always we want to thank James Launch for the amazing theme music.

SPEAKER_04 46:52

Do you before we sort of thank our wives and stuff do you think anyone actually listens this far or do they stop when the music comes back in I think they normally stop after you mention your second and third podcast volume I guess.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

I haven't mentioned them yet though have I uh if you do want to reach out with us to us for criticisms, complaints or praise, uh you can either reach out to us through the website or I am at NEBslin on Twitter.

SPEAKER_04 47:16

And Dan, you have an account not that anyone really cares about. So if you've got complaints about the show go to NEbslin and feel free to air those. If you have praise or you want to pay us in some way for something come to at Dan Rutstein and have a great day