But it’s easier too, because the internet gives you more ways to get your material out there, more venues and more people to connect with.Īt the end of the day, if you want to write, you just have to keep writing – and keep submitting your work. It’s harder because there are fewer shows coming out and they have smaller writers’ rooms. What advice would you give young women, struggling to “make it after all,” à la Mary Tyler Moore, when writers’ rooms and C-suites still skew overwhelmingly male? The people who say otherwise are probably men with a bad sense of humor. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling all have their own shows now. Some people, unfortunately, still claim that women aren’t funny. By the end of the show, there were many, many more.Įven today, women – of all ages – still tell me how much the show has influenced them. When I got my start, in 1971, there were about three other women in the business, period. They made a conscious decision to hire female writers because they wanted the show to reflect real women’s experiences. It was unlike every other show I worked on. What was it like working on The Mary Tyler Moore Show? So I used to write in my office over my lunch hour, working on scripts. I wanted to write, but they wouldn’t let women write for the show. And within five weeks everyone further up the chain had been fired and I was suddenly a producer. Then I took a job as the assistant to the associate producer of a talk show, The Mort Sahl Show. I got a job working at a small television station, working in their PR department. In those days we could get jobs from the newspapers, if you can believe it. Milwaukee is a great place to be born and a great place to get a dose of those good Midwestern values, which came in handy when I moved to Hollywood. What was your move from Wisconsin to California like? The cover of Susan Silver’s book Milwaukee is many miles away, geographically and culturally, from Los Angeles. We spoke with her to find out what readers should expect from the book, and the event at Boswell. On Tuesday, June 20, Silver visits Boswell Book Company to read from her memoir, Hot Pants in Hollywood: Sex, Secrets & Sitcoms. And she currently teaches comedy writing at the Television Academy and the New School, in New York City. The Milwaukee native then went on to write for many other TV shows, including The Bob Newhart Show and The Partridge Family. One of the original writers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Susan Silver charted a course through the Hollywood Hills at a time when many women were struggling to gain ground in the workplace.
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