I still have three spots available in this class, and if you’ve waited this long, you’re in luck. Starting at Midnight tonight (4/9/24) EST, the class will be 25% off, for 48 hours until midnight Thursday (or until those spots are gone). So where I was charging $325, the class is now only $243.75- an incredible deal.

Here is a description of the class:

OUTLINE YOUR SITCOM PILOT- write an outline for a TV sitcom pilot in 5 weeks.

In this class students will write a detailed outline for a sitcom pilot script based on their own original idea. All aspects of the process will be covered: inventing a world, developing the characters, breaking the original story, rewriting based on feedback, pitching a pilot episode idea, and creating an outline for the pilot. The class will be run as closely to a real writers' room as possible, with feedback from all students encouraged, as this is part of the actual sitcom writing process. Students will walk away with a full outline.

This is the last step before actually writing the full script for the pilot (or as I like to call it, “the easy part”) (it’s not).

Students will be expected to participate extensively in class discussions. This class will be conducted remotely; internet access required.

In addition to 4 group meetings, the class also includes a half-hour one-on-one session with the instructor at the conclusion of 4 weeks to go over the entire outline, so the student can tackle the daunting but definitely achievable task of writing the script.

Details: CLASS MEETS ON ZOOM

TIME:Sundays- 12-3 PM PST

DATES:

Sundays April 14, 21, 28, May 5, 12 (THIS SUNDAY!!)

I will add a button here to sign up, beginning at Midnight EST tonight (4.9.24). Don’t miss out.

In the winter of 1999, I took a sitcom writing class. I had just gotten back from Morocco (I travel, at times). One of the things I remember most from that class is that the teacher relentlessly made fun of my Moroccan hat.

It was a huge shapeless knit wool toque with a tassel and a balaclava-type facemask that you could roll up into a sort of brim. I thought it was cool (because it was Moroccan). He did not (because it was absurd).

He had been a writer and producer on one of the cultural juggernaut sitcoms of the 90’s (you’d recognize it), and he knew a ton about the writing process, and sitcom structure, and generating ideas, and jokes, and characters, and dialogue, and voice. He knew it, and could explain it in a way that made sense to me (two very different things). I learned. And wrote. And learned.

The class ended. I went to a party at his and his girlfriend’s apartment once, and met a woman I found very attractive, and she clearly found me attractive (I was not wearing my hat), and then at some point we were in the kitchen and somebody had brought flowers and my teacher’s girlfriend was putting them in a vase and she and the woman I had been doing so well with disagreed about how short to cut the stems and how much water to put in the vase and the argument got more heated and I was perceived as taking the side of the woman I had been talking to (by both of them, as I recall (“Right, Sean?” “How the hell would he know?”). 

We didn’t keep in touch. But I wrote more, and learned more. For years.

And eventually I got hired to write for a network sitcom (a cultural limp damp zephyr sitcom  of the Aughts, you wouldn’t know it). And the first episode I wrote was set to air on November 24, 2005. Thanksgiving.

So that Wednesday evening I Googled him. Or maybe asked Jeeves. I hadn’t seen him in five years. 

I found an office number at a university where he was teaching. It was too late in the day to get him directly, so I dialed the number hoping to leave him a voicemail thanking him for everything he had taught me (I wasn’t gonna bring up the flowers thing). 

“Hello?”

We talked for a while that night. I had lunch with him when I went back to New York for Christmas, and have almost every year since. When I was hired to run a writers’ room for the first time, I sent him an email that basically said “WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?” 

He sent me back an email that was pages and pages long, filled with both practical advice and spiritual encouragement.

I still have it. I still refer to it regularly.

I no longer have the hat.