Take 66 - Showrunner and show creator Jan Nash, NCIS: Hawaii, Without a Trace

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 littering the floor.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

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

SPEAKER_01 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. That's the norm.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

You would have to be able to persevere. Like everything in our business, your demands get council and it all bounces off you.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

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_01 1:00

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss of podcasts about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. As ever, I am your non-industry co-host, Dan Rutstein.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

And I'm your industry co-host, Noah Evslin. Today I'm delighted to introduce TV writer, director, showrunner, and show creator Jan Nash. Jan started her career as a TV network executive before seguing over to writing. She started on the sitcom Ellen, then moved over to hour-long dramas on such shows as uh Without a Trace and many, many more, before eventually becoming the EP and showrunner of Without a Trace, Memphis Beat, Rosolian Isles, NCIS New Orleans. And most recently, she co-created and is the co-showrunner of a series that's very close to my heart, NCIS Hawaii. Dan, please do your best to not get me fired today. Welcome, Jen.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

So it's always very difficult. This is now the second time one of Noah's bosses is on the show. So I have to be on best behavior. So we'll start with an adversity question if we can. Is working with Noah the biggest challenge you've faced in your career?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Again, now because you're clearly just trying to get me to say things bad about Noah, I'm just gonna say nice things about Noah. And it could go on for the whole of the 30 minutes. Is that what you want? Is that really what you're looking for?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

No, I do.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Noah is delightful and hardworking and um uh just a wonderful person to have on staff. I have nothing bad to say about Noah. And I don't have anything bad to say about you either.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Not yet. Not yet. Um so okay, let's do a real question then. So you have an extraordinary body of work behind you. Um the fact actually, when Noah was preparing the intro for this, you know, both he and you were struggling to remember all of the different shows that you have show ran, which is an incredible feat in an industry which is obviously so hard. But like everyone with success, there must have been some difficult, hard times and failures. Can you tell us? I imagine some of these would be have been much earlier in your career, but can you tell us about some of the really difficult stuff that you've had to battle through to get to the place you're in today?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

You you know, I I do I feel compelled to start by saying that in fact I've been really, really lucky for the most part, and I've worked, I do have, as no one knows, I have a uh uh a no asshole policy that I've brought into how I run my shows and hire people, but it also applied to how I, for the most part, dealt with the early part of my career because I also wouldn't work for assholes. And so, you know, there were plenty of jobs that I got called and people asked if I would interview for things, but I knew enough to say no. And so I avoided uh falling into a lot of um, I think situations that would have made me miserable. Um, you know, the the biggest challenge uh, you know, that that I I think I've faced, or the the two biggest challenges that come to mind are one that I started in the comedy world. I started as after I was a development executive, I went to work in comedies, and my biggest challenge was that I just wasn't funny enough to be a comedy writer. Um, you know, I was I was um delightful to have on staff, I was hardworking, you know, my scripts were solid, they just weren't that funny. Um, and you know, after I sort of had a number, I was lucky enough to be on Ellen the the year that she came out, which was super exciting, and then I ended up having a couple of jobs after that that sort of flowed naturally out of that experience because I worked with people who worked with me or people who knew what I had to offer. But then sort of when I launched out into the world, I couldn't I couldn't get hired. I mean, people were just not interested in in what I had to offer to a comedy. Um, and then my um my mother uh got sick and and ultimately died, and I uh took some time off in the middle of that, and then when I thought about coming back, I realized I didn't find that comedies were that interesting to me. I think comedies are very good right now. I want to put in a plug for Abbott Elementary and and for Ghosts, both of which I think are fantastic shows, but I just wasn't that interested in comedies, and so I found myself out of work and wondering what I was gonna do. And so when I was watching TV, I started watching what was on and started watching dramas, which is not something I'd really ever watched before, and um realized that that was gonna be a better path for me. And so I essentially had to start over after, again, three years of being, you know, fairly successful, and then a year of being unemployed. I I wrote a bunch of what were then what you did. You know, you wrote specs of TV shows as a way of proving that you could write on a TV show, and I wrote something called a Now and Again, which was a show I loved with Dennis Haysbert and and Eric uh close, that promptly got canceled the minute minute I finished my spec. Um, and then I wrote uh a West Wing, and then I got hired on my first drama job off of that by oddly enough, uh drama that was looking for somebody who'd been a comedy writer. And I was at that point in my career one of the first people to have made that transition from comedy to drama, and subsequently a bunch of people have done it.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

I I still think it's uh relatively rare, and people don't realize who's coming from the outside, how how rare it is for people to jump from the 30-minute world to the hour-long world and back, and I think there is a little bit more of that going on now as a dramedy is created and streaming has created a platform for people, but it is like if you were in one side, they kept you on one side and they really there wasn't a wall you had to jump over. So I do want to come back to the sort of fallow period of the transitional place for you. But I wanted to go back even further. I've had the pleasure, obviously, of listening to a lot of your stories and and spending a lot of time in a room with you. But and I knew I know you were a high-level network executive. What I don't, but the story I never heard was why did you change paths? Obviously, you were doing really well, better than most on that side. Why did you decide I'm gonna start over fundamentally and go into the world of being a writer and all of the you know, trials and tribulations that that you knew existed on that side because you were on the other side?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

You know, I I started over a bunch of times. I mean, that's I think that makes it easier, right? I mean, I I started my career as an investment banker. I was uh in mergers and acquisitions. I worked in New York and in Chicago. I went to business school in the middle of being a junior investment banker and then a slightly more senior investment banker, and then realized that I was miserable. And so I'd always said I wanted to be in the entertainment business. And so weirdly, one of my business school classmates called me one day and asked me if I wanted to interview for a job in Disney's strategic planning department. I was like, oh, good, I'm gonna be in the entertainment business. And so I interviewed for that job and got that job because they were looking for an investment banker. I did that for a very short period of time because that was not an excellent job for me. Um, and so I started again and had happened to have met uh Dean Valentine, who ran um Touchstone Television at the time when I was doing a strategic planning assignment after I'd been unemployed for a few months. He was nice enough to offer me a job where I sat in an office. I am not kidding, I don't know what size room you are each sitting in right now because I can't see it. But if it's bigger than, say, 10 by 5, it is dramatically larger than the office that I sat in for uh a year reading scripts. I did coverage on scripts and worked for this wonderful woman who ran the New Writers Fellowship Program for Disney TV. And I would read these scripts from new writers and I would I would look for ones that I liked. I did coverage on all of them. I did uh 600 bits of coverage in the space of like eight months, and I would take find scripts I liked and I took them to her, and she'd say, Okay, tell me what you like about it. And I I don't I didn't know. I was an investment banker, and so she would, we would run through it. We'd talk about characters and and drama drama structure and things like that, and you know, we'd meet with these people and meet these fantastic, interesting writers. And but the important part of that job was that of those 600 odd scripts, most of them were not very good. And they were a lot of them from people who were working and had successful careers, and so I'm not gonna lie, I honestly said, well, if the bar is not very good, I can jump over that. And so I started writing scripts. I wrote some really, really bad scripts because that's what I was seeing was not people's best work, but they're a work in progress. And if you practice, you get better, right? So I wrote some really bad scripts and was lucky enough to give them to people who were like, you should keep doing this, you should keep writing scripts, and you'll get better. And here's what's wrong with this one, and try to do better next time. And so I just kept writing these spec scripts, and um also at the same time kept getting promotions in Disney television, and in the space of like two and a half or three years, I got promoted quite a few times, and then one day I was on a hike in Sullivan Canyon, and I came around the bend in Sullivan Canyon. You get to the backside and you can see all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and I had one of those moments that you have sometimes in life where I realized that if I stayed in this job, it was gonna kill me. And so I went home. I called my or I sent an email to my boss or whatever the method of communication was back in the late 1790s, and um I told him I needed to have uh breakfast with him. He did, he agreed to do it fairly quickly, and I told him I had to leave my job. I was the senior vice president and in charge of Touchstone Television because he'd gotten a promotion. And he said, Okay, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to be a writer. And he asked me a question that I had literally never thought about or had an answer to. He said, Well, what show do you want to work on? And I sat there for a very what must have seemed like a very stupid moment, and he in and I said, Well, I guess if I had to pick one, I would want to work on the Ellen show because I helped develop it, I knew her, I knew what I thought the show needed and what worked on it. And God bless him, Dean Valentine looked at me and he said, if it's okay with her, it's okay with me.

SPEAKER_02 12:19

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

So I called Ellen's manager that afternoon. He called her, and by the next morning I had a new job.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

I is that is that why I noticed uh this wasn't actually my original question, but I noticed that you it seems to be, and again, you know, when you look at someone's resume, you don't always get the whole picture, but that you started fairly high on Ellen. Is that because of your network experience was coming into play?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Or I mean, at the point that I became a TV writer, I had been in the world doing, I don't know, for some people really interesting things and for other people really boring things for, you know, 10 years. I've been an investment banker. I ran, you know, billion-dollar transactions, I've been a development exec, you know, I've been in strategic planning at Disney. Um, I knew most of the senior executives at Disney. And then I went into this, you know, development job where I'd been for a while. And, you know, Dean actually asked me what title I wanted when I which when I told him that Ellen had said I could go on the show. And he had suggested a higher title. And I said, Oh no, if I go in at that title, everyone will hate me. And so I said, just I'll be fine, just make it lower. And then I stayed at the same title for my next three jobs. Again, I I which is fine. I always tell young writers when they come to me, you know, don't don't care about the title. Don't don't focus on the money, don't focus on the title. Take the best job you can get, work with the best people you can work with. And then if you're if you're if you're being offered a title versus money, take the money. The title doesn't matter. And so I didn't know that at the time, but I I did um, you know, I took the title I had um and I stayed there, you know, for three seasons and didn't move. And ultimately the amount of time I'd been in the business matched my title because when I moved into dramas, my title dropped again. Um, so it all it all worked out in the end.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

I I find that personally fascinating because I think you know, one of the biggest agonizing decisions I had to make too was realize when I was a non-writing producer at a really safe job, was realizing I was climbing the wrong ladder and having to tell your wife and get the support, I'm gonna actually make a big leap of faith at some point here because this isn't the path that we were supposed to be on. But this does lead me to my, you know, this this follow-up question. And normally Dan, who, you know, who's a uh he he's a he works in different a different industry, but he's high level, does management work, and he always asks the leadership questions. But I I'm I'm curious about we have a lot, we had a lot of uh showrunners on here who say the hardest part of being a showrunner is there's no training to be a showrunner. You just get thrown in this job, you have all these people, we have no idea what we're doing, and we just sort of fake it till we make it, or variations of that theme for the last 60 so uh episodes. You actually, to some degree, were trained to be an executive. You were trained, maybe not to do the writing side of showrunning, but to do at least the managing side of showrunning. Did you find that useful? And did the execs who are hiring you as showrunner say, well, she has all of this managerial experience. I think it's kind of a no-brainer, or or I, or no?

SPEAKER_00 15:35

I sadly think that executives don't care. I think they think that, um, and I'm a big fan of executives. I used to be one. I think the executives at CBS, the ones that we work with, are fantastic. But I don't know that they necessarily put the premium on the ability to lead this giant organization that I would if I were in their shoes. Um, you know, there are there are sort of two parts to this job. There are many parts, but you can break them down into two pieces. One is the creative part of it, you know, telling interesting stories, creating interesting characters, making sure scripts have whatever that particular show's script needs, you know, working with actors. Then there's the the management side of it, there's the running of the business side, the keeping the trains running on time, making sure that your scripts are ready, making sure you're not wasting money, making sure that you hire the right people, making sure, you know, that that you can help people with the challenges that they're facing. And to be honest, there's no reason that those two sets of skills should exist in the same person, which is why I'm a big fan of splitting, of sharing the job with somebody. Because as much as I can run a show by myself, there's certain parts of the show I like more than other parts of the show. And it's always nice to have somebody else who will take some of that load. And the truth is, is, you know, I'm a Jan Nash type because literally nobody in the world has had my career. Nobody has been an investment banker for five years, then been a strategic planner, been to business school. Actually, business school was earlier, been a development executive before they became a writer. And all of those things that went before it made me a better writer because I have more life experience, and showrunner because, in fact, I've managed things before. I understand what a budget looks like. I understand why budgets matter to studios and networks, and I understand why I have to be sensitive to that, but I also understand what I believe to be important about television shows and when I should fight for something that they may not understand. And so all of the pieces that all of the things that I have been through are vital to me having the skills I had when I started as a showrunner, but they're also vital for me being like, you know, Jan Nash Junior writer on Without a Trace.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

So this is absolutely fascinating. So I think we had uh Sam Ernst was on our podcast, and he ran a chain of restaurants before he became a writer because him and his woods going-to-be writing partner agreed that they needed to have lived a little bit before they started trying to be writers, because otherwise, what are they going to write about? Um, and as somebody who's on their fourth different career, um, I quite like the idea of moving crews. And interestingly, when you were talking about bad bad scripts written by people who are doing other things, I'm I was a diplomat for 10 years and I wrote a script about diplomatic life, which I imagine was probably at the level of the scripts you were seeing, probably a bit lower of people who think they're writers, but they've got a different life. So there's there's definitely something that I guess what I'd be fascinated in is a little bit more detail. So you're right, no one's had a career like you. So what did you take from those different things that when you're running your rooms or when you're running your shows now, what like actually specifically are some of the elements that you learned from investment banking or being a vendor that you you put you put to use when you're running what you're running now?

SPEAKER_00 19:24

You know, I think investment banking honestly was a really of all of the jobs that I've had that I didn't want to do forever was my favorite. And and it it was just really fun and exciting. And I I I I remember a long time ago I was flying somewhere selling something. I no longer remember the specifics, but I was sitting in first class because back in the day that's where they put investment bankers on planes. And I was sitting there with my, I always bought a giant stack of magazines, and I had, you know, whatever it was I was supposed to be working on, which I could never read if somebody was next to me, if they looked like they were paying attention. And I was sitting there, whatever, and I started talking to the guy next to me, just chatting. He was he was seemed lovely, an older gentleman. And after about an hour and a half, and we were just making small talk, he turned to me and he said, Young lady, what are you doing up here in the front of this plane? And it was Eli Brode. And Eli Brode and I had the most lovely conversation as I flew to LA, and he asked me why what I had done in my life to get to the front of this plane, and and and I asked him probably really stupid questions because I don't think I knew at the time who Eli Brode was. And you know, I think what investment banking gave me was an enormous amount of confidence and a sense that I understood financially how things were put together. I understand when I look at a budget, I understand, again, I would never pretend that I know as much about it as the people who do it every day, but I know enough to ask questions that will help me make good decisions. So that's one thing. I think strategic planning uh helped me deal with adversity. It helped me deal with uh I had a I had a really good boss, a guy I to this day I think is the smartest per one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. But there was a person above both of us who was um hard to work for and made a lot of people feel smaller than they deserve to feel. And I think I learned a lot from that about how not to be. Um I think when I was in network television was because of this woman that I worked for, Janet Blake, was when I learned a lot about what made good stories. Not just good television, what made good stories? What made things interesting? How do you connect with people? How do you make scripts interesting and emotional? And how do you help people give a crap, right? And working as a comedy writer, I learned how to make dialogue a little bit maybe funnier than it might have been otherwise. You know, in between there, I've actually written two books also. And I think that the books were super important for helping me not to just skim across the surface of things. I do think that, you know, my guess is again, and I say this, my first script is absolutely horrible. And I'm not saying that because I'm trying to be like, oh, I'm so modest. No, it is legit terrible. I still have it. And I sometimes pull it out and look at the first page, and it is so bad because I didn't know what I was doing. My guess is your diplomat script lacks some things, but there's something in it that's probably great because it's real and it's yours. And I think that that's what you know the book writing and you know the life experiences have taught me is that in fact I only have to offer to these shows what I've lived and what I'm willing to share and what I care about.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

You mentioned your turn of phrase is brilliant, by the way. You should be you should have been a diplomat, you probably would have been a better one than me. Um but the way you you talked about the your boss's boss not being necessarily easy to work with. Um you talked uh earlier on about your no arseholes policy. Um talking to Noah, I know that obviously the work environment that you guys have created on this particular show is very sort of warm and nurturing and positive, um, not least given Noah's experience of the previous year and the way you were treated. And we we joked about the fact that you know, should he risk telling his bosses that he's got cancer because they might fire him? Because that would feel like the sort of thing that would happen in Hollywood. So you you obviously have you've seen things, you care about this stuff. Can you just talk about that side of the business, the sort of culture and leadership side in terms of how you approach that the looking after people part of it and keeping it a good work environment?

SPEAKER_00 24:37

You know, the the when I when you asked initially about adversity, Noah, you know, I I I talked about the transition from being a comedy writer to a drama writer, but you know, there was also the other part of this that that is also true is that in fact at the early part of my, specifically my drama career, not necessarily my comedy career, there were definitely moments where I perceived that being a woman was detrimental to me. That in fact people treated me in a way that was different than they were treating comparable male colleagues. Um, I would uh and and I'm not gonna mention any names just because people have subsequently apologized to me and I accepted their apologies, so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get into the specifics, but there were there were moments, there was one moment where in fact I said to a person, I said, you would not treat my male colleague the way you are treating me. And he he went, huh? He went away, came back the next day, and he goes, I thought about it, which I took as being a good sign. He goes, You're right. And I said, Well, that, thank you. And I hope this will create a foundation for us to move forward in a constructive way. And he said, Oh no, it's not gonna change anything. And I was like, Okay, well, there we have it. At least, at least it's all on the table now, right? I mean, we we know where we stand. Um, but the truth of the matter is, is that I say this to my kids all the time. The only thing that matters in life, the only thing that matters in life is the relationships we have. It's all the rest of it's just it's just what we do with our days, and God willing, make it as interesting as possible. But the relationships we have and whether we're making the world a better place or not through those relationships is at the end of the day the only thing that matters. And so people can, and it's how I try to encourage my children to do active work on themselves, which given their ages, is not always successful. Um, but you can either make a nice environment that you want to be in, or you can be an asshole and try to make yourself feel better by making other people feel miserable, and it's not gonna work. I know it's not gonna work. I it took me a long time. I was I was very old when I far finally started doing the work that my life required. And I was unhappy before, but I didn't take my unhappiness out on other people. And what I've worked really hard to do is find peace and not get in the way, get in the way of anybody else finding peace. And so it's really important to me. It's why I I won't, I have no tolerance for people who are gonna make other people miserable. I have I have a lot of tolerance for people who don't, who can't do their lives, can't do their jobs as well as they would like to. And if I can help them, I am gonna work really, really hard to try to help them improve. I have zero tolerance for people who are gonna make other people miserable, whether they're doing their jobs well or not.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

You you've you've been through a lot of different Hollywood sort of changes, both the way you know, we're talking now about the no assholes policies and that the showrunners. There was an old version of a showrunner where they felt maybe they had to be more abrasive or they had to be this thing, and that thing really is toxic, right? And that thing is they're getting called out now for these behaviors that were accepted one, two, 10 years ago aren't not necessarily, you know, being tolerated anymore by the media, HR, different things, communication, social media. What do you, you know, then then we have going into like just current events news today of like Netflix, the the contraction of and the and the fall of that stock. And what do you think? Like, what have you seen the changes from both sides of the desk? What sort of what what keeps you up at night about Hollywood and the future that we're all, you know, the job that we all we're all doing?

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Nothing. I mean, nothing. I mean, it's not, I mean, Noah, nothing that we're doing is as important as what you've been through in the last year, right? Nothing is as important as what I've been through in the last five years. Right? I mean, it's I like my job a lot. I like it a lot. It's it's it's a great job. These are great jobs, which is why the environments that we try to create should be really satisfying, because we are lucky to have these jobs. At the end of the day, I do have tremendous compassion for people who are starting out now because I think it is much harder to make a living in this environment than it was when I started. When I started any a show that failed, made, you know, 18 episodes its first season. You know, it may not get it, it may not get picked up for a second season, but you were still gonna make 18 episodes, you're gonna make a good living, you're gonna hopefully work with nice people and learn a lot, and then you'd go and hopefully find a new job. Um, but now I think you have to people, if you're not on a network television show, you're not on one of those cable shows that's making, you know, call it 13 to 18 episodes, you gotta sort of patch things together. You gotta figure out how to make a career while you're trying to figure out how you're gonna do that thing that you really care about. Um, and I do think that that's much harder. I I in really dislike looking for work. I don't in I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy going out and schlepping around and and and trying to get people to hire me. You know, I have been very lucky over the last um number of years because I do have something to offer. I do, if you hire me, you're you I know that you're getting something and there will always be people who need that specific skill. But starting out, I think people don't know. And so I think it's harder. And so I do have tremendous compassion for people who are starting out now. Um and and you know, the only thing I have to say is I, you know, it's it's easy to get discouraged, and I hope for people who have something that they're really desperate to say, I hope that they don't get so discouraged before they get a chance to say it.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

On that vein, can can as somebody who hires people and has been hiring people for a long time, and as a podcast that caters to people that are breaking, mostly people that are breaking into this industry, often I'll see tweets of people going, I'm now 25 and I'm too old, I'm now 30 and I haven't had my break, I'm now 40 and I'm petrified to pick up a pen because I'm too old. Can you? And then we talked about in the beginning of this podcast about the importance of having another career, having life experience. And you really can't do both. You can't be an obsessive writer from age 20 and then also have another career and those, you know, without time creeping by. And eventually you're gonna be 30, you're gonna be 35. What do you feel about? Is there an age that's too old to start in this business? Or can or would you hire anybody, you know, from you know, from the staff writer level on up, or even assistant who is just wants the job and is good at it?

SPEAKER_00 32:07

I would. I mean, but I can't speak for everybody. I mean, and I feel like I feel like there must again, I think the hardest, the hardest part is is gaining the access, right? I mean, it's it's getting somebody to just read you. But the other hard part, which is, you know, just as hard is when you get access, you have to be able to present something that makes them think that you have something to offer. And I think that it's hard. We, you know, I I have said this to other people, so I will certainly say it now. I think this thing that exists now where people are supposed to write a pilot that they use as a writing sample has really hurt people. I think it has hurt entry-level writers because I think while it is true that people knowing what people care about, which is usually reflected in you know a pilot more than it would be in what we used to do, which is write a spec of some show on TV, I think your pilot doesn't tell me what you can do on my television show. And usually your pilot is going to suffer some very fatal flaws because you haven't done what I and lots of people who started when I started did, which is before I wrote a single script, I watched television shows and I would watch a scene and I would pause it and I would write down scene one, location, here's what happens in the scene. And I would go through and I would do that for multiple episodes of any show so I could understand what made them work. And then when I wanted to write a spec, I would do it for multiple episodes of what that show was, so I understood that show before I started writing a spec. And so that my spec would mirror what that show was, and then I had to find a way to make my spec interesting in the context of that show that already existed. And now, again, it's it's hard to get all of these pilots because people are trying, I'm sure they're being told by very well-meaning representatives make sure you do something in there that that sets your pilot apart. You have to make it set it apart. And so they just become more and more, you know, baroque for lack of a better term. That you then it becomes disconnected from reality. And you know, and I've I've said this in the room, Noah, again, I I hope at some point in the next year or two, NCIS Hawaii does an episode where there's no crime. And I hope no one notices. I hope that we can make them laugh and we make them cry, and they get to the end of it and they're like, I I what was the Navy crime in that episode? And I don't I don't remember because there wasn't one. Who cares? Now again, I know we're in the Navy crime Navy crime business, and we probably won't do that. But if we can make people feel, we can make people laugh, we can give people an emotional roller coaster, I think that's I think that's fantastic. And I I yeah it's a long-winded way of not answering your question. But the answer to your question is no, it's never too late if you have something to say when you get the opportunity to talk to somebody.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Extraordinary. Extraordinary answer. So here's a question. So given that you have had multiple careers and you've run so many shows that you can't always remember the names of them immediately, what does a Jan Nash type want to do next? Another career again?

SPEAKER_00 35:56

It's it's a really it's a really good question. I mean, it's a really quick, it's a really good question, and I'm at the point in my career when I am uh, you know, I I used to have a list of things I wanted to accomplish, and the truth of the matter is, from a career perspective, I've crossed most of those things off. NCIS Hawaii, frankly, is the icing on the cake because I didn't actually think I would ever create a television show because I'm not good at the development part. There are some people, like Chris Silver, he's a genius. I mean, he's a genius in many ways, but he's really good at selling that thing that you didn't even know you wanted, and he creates that sense of excitement. I'm terrible at it. I'm terrible at it. I know what I like and I know what I'm good at, but then I'm kind of like, you're asking me questions and I don't want to answer them. And and so I never had that opportunity. And so NCIS Hawaii is just this like bonus thing in my career that I'm really happy for. And it's not like I didn't work hard to get there and didn't work hard over the last 16 months doing it, but I've accomplished my professional goals. I'm grateful, I'm full of gratitude, but I have accomplished those professional goals. I do want NCIS Hawaii to continue to be a show that pushes the edge of what this particular kind of show can be. And I do want it to be emotional and heart-wrenching and funny and all of those things. I want it to continue to do that, and I think it can get better and better and better, and I want it to do that. Um, but after this, it's a great question. I liked, I liked writing a book. I did enjoy writing a book. It took forever, and they're long, and they have so many words in them, um, that it it was hard, but I do have an idea for a book that I think if I when I decide that I'm I'm I've I've had enough of you know Zoom meetings that I might do that, but I don't know. It's a great question. I think about it a lot, and I don't have a good answer right now.

SPEAKER_02 38:14

I don't think and and and knock on wood that you're not gonna be jumping out to write that book anytime soon because we're gonna need you for a bit longer. Uh the the I would you know ask you questions for another two hours, but unfortunately we don't have another two hours. So that's gonna lead us to our uh last question. And this is the question that we ask everybody that comes on this show uh if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring writer uh coming into TV, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 38:50

How long can I be silent before you decide that I'm not gonna answer? Um again. You know, I don't know. I have a lot of pieces of advice, but I'll I'll try to narrow it down. I think I'm gonna give two, even though you asked for one. One is make sure you like TV. Make sure you like TV. There are a lot of people who don't, and they they they're they're in the business of of TV because they want to have their own show, which is a perfectly good goal, but there are a lot of steps where you might get there. Or they're in it because that's where somebody told them they could make they could make the best living and they really want to do something else. They want to do movies or they want to whatever it is. But TV is it it it's it's incredibly gratifying because you get to see what you wrote made. I mean, that's amazing. It's like, you know, when I was standing on the field and they landed that helicopter for the opening of of uh of NCIS Hawaii, and I I made my thank you speech, and I said, you know, when we started this, you know, we only had a we had a few scenes. We had plane crashes into a mountain, helicopter lands on a soccer field, tenant jumps off a cliff. That's what we had when we first started talking about it. I said, and you say those things, but you don't actually think they're gonna happen. And here we are, a helicopter just landed on a soccer field, and it's amazing to have something that you thought of in the privacy of your own office or car or wherever actually be on the screen, and and that makes TV amazing, but make sure that that having your work be on TV matters to you because otherwise it's really it's hard work, it's really hard work. Um and the other thing I guess I would say is don't be afraid to put what is uniquely you into the work you're doing. If you're trying to be someone else, you're trying to uh you know just say what's you know, try just write what somebody else wants, it will always feel inauthentic. But if you have something to offer that is uniquely you, your you know, personess, your childhood, your relationship, your whatever, and you can bring that to whatever show you are on, you will be contributing in a way that nobody else can contribute, and that will make you invaluable.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

Jan Nash, it has been genuinely an honor and a privilege to have you on our podcast. Thank you very much for your candor and your words of advice. It's been amazing.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Really fun. I didn't I know I love you, Noah, but I didn't actually think it was gonna be this much fun, so thanks.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

We'll do it every week.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Can you imagine how boring that would be for the audience if it was just me every week?

SPEAKER_01 41:52

I'm not sure that's true, actually. I think they'd find it fascinating. So thank you very much, Jen.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Pleasure. Have a great day, guys.

SPEAKER_02 42:05

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_01 42:14

Before we sort of think of words and stuff, do you think anyone actually listens this far, or do they stop when the music comes back in?

SPEAKER_02 42:20

I think they normally stop after you mention your second and third podcast. We haven't mentioned them yet on that one. 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 nevslin on Twitter. And Dan, do you have an account?

SPEAKER_01 42:39

Not that anyone really cares about. So if you've got complaints about the show, go to NEVslin 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.