[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Your first writing credit is on one of my favorite comedy TV shows of all time, Taxi.
How did this happen?
Ken Estin, Showrunner/Screenwriter: Well, Taxi happened…it’s kind of flukeishbecause, in the days when I broke in the business, you could still write a spec script and send it to a production company and they would read it.
I just wrote a Bob Newhart show episode. It the only thing I ever…I majored in English and my emphasis was creative writing, but I was writing short stories.
I wanted to be a short story writer for magazines and I didn’t even think about television.
When I got to LA, I couldn’t find…the magazines were all drying up and disappearing.
There’s only the New Yorker anymore.
I think that does that really publishes short stories, maybe a couple others, but somebody said, “Listen, if you’re really interested in short stories, you should write half-hour comedies or even hour dramas for TV.”
I had never considered that.
I didn’t even know they made good money.
I thought, well, I guess it’d be a job.
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And so I wrote a spec, Bob Newhart script, but the way I wrote it was I liked all the MTM shows.
Remember Mary Tyler Moore’s company?
And she had a lot of really good Rhoda and the Mary Tyler Moore Show and a number of others.
They did several others.
I wrote to them and said, “Will you send me a script?”
I mean, these days people were helping young potential writers.
I wrote to them said, “We can you send me a script so I know what one looks like?”
I had no idea what a TV script looked like…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Ken Estin began his career as a freelance writer whose first professional script was a Taxi episode that earned him the Writers Guild Award for the best episodic comedy script of the year. Ken became a staff writer on Taxi and then the showrunner (head writer producer) within two years and won his first Emmy when he was twenty-seven. After Taxi, Ken became the showrunner of Cheers and ran the series until leaving to create and run The Tracey Ullman Show, which earned Ken another Emmy. He developed short animation segments for the show with an aspiring cartoonist, Matt Groening. Those segments evolved into the spinoff series, The Simpsons, which became television’s longest running, most profitable comedy. Ken took a brief hiatus from TV to transform a troubled Sylvester Stallone project into Eddie Murphy’s blockbuster movie, Beverly Hills Cop. Ken created seven network pilots, five of which became prime time series. He ran several award-winning series, earning him eleven Emmy nominations, two Emmys, nine Writers Guild Award nominations, and a Writers Guild Award. He took a break from Hollywood to create and teach television writing courses for a decade at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco before irresistible TV projects brought him back to Los Angeles to resume series production.
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