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Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson's Creek, and Other Adventures inTV Writing
When Jeffrey Stepakoff was graduating with an MFA in playwriting, he imagined a life in the New York theater, wearing a beret and smoking clove cigarettes. Writing for the "boob tube" didn’t even cross his mind. But he ended up in L.A. in the late 80’s, when television writers were experiencing their equivalent of a gold rush. After the billion- dollar syndication of Seinfeld, when studios were paying astronomical amounts of money to writers to create the next Friends or ER, the sudden mania for scripted entertainment made the TV writer a hot commodity. He found himself meeting with big agents, inside primetime story rooms, pitch meetings, and on the set of some of TVs most popular shows, and making more money than he’d ever thought possible.Weaving his personal story with television’s, Stepakoff takes us behind the scenes to show what it’s like to have a story idea one week and see it come to life and be seen by millions of people just a week later. Stepakoff also takes us inside the industry to explain what we’re watching and why by exploring the growing problems of media consolidation, the effects of interference from executives, the lack of diversity, and what reality television is doing to quality scripted television.When the market crashed and the dust settled, TV executives and the media conglomerates they worked for were sitting on a broken business model. Slowly, a new programming idea began to take hold—what if the writer and their salaries were removed from the equation? Reality TV was born and the TV writer suddenly became obsolete— at least temporarily.
338 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2007
15 people are currently reading
365 people want to read
About the author
Jeffrey Stepakoff
18 books88 followersJeffrey Stepakoff was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received a BA in Journalism. In 1988, the day after getting his MFA in Playwriting from Carnegie Mellon, he drove to Hollywood where he began writing for film and television.
Jeffrey has “written by” or “story by” credits on thirty-six television episodes, has written for fourteen different series and has worked on seven primetime staffs, producing hundreds of hours of internationally-recognized television, including the Emmy-winning THE WONDER YEARS, SISTERS, and DAWSON’S CREEK where he was Co-Executive Producer.
Stepakoff has also created and developed pilots for many of the major studios and networks, including 20th Century, Paramount, MTM, Fox and ABC. And he has developed and written major motion pictures, including Disney’s TARZAN and BROTHER BEAR, and EM Entertainment’s LAPITCH, THE LITTLE SHOEMAKER, Croatia’s selection for the 1998 Academy Awards.
A few years ago, Stepakoff returned to Atlanta, where he lives with his wife and three young children, and began pursuing his long-held dream of writing fiction. FIREWORKS OVER TOCCOA, published by St. Martin’s Press is his first novel. A SIBA Okra Pick and an Indie Next List Notable, FIREWORKS is available in hardback, paperback, large print, audio and digital forms. Stepakoff’s second novel, THE ORCHARD, comes out in July 2011. His fiction is available now in six languages.
Presently, Stepakoff speaks around the country, teaches dramatic writing at Kennesaw State University, and is hard at work on his third novel for St. Martin’s Press. In his spare time, he builds forts in living room with sofa cushions.
Jeffrey has “written by” or “story by” credits on thirty-six television episodes, has written for fourteen different series and has worked on seven primetime staffs, producing hundreds of hours of internationally-recognized television, including the Emmy-winning THE WONDER YEARS, SISTERS, and DAWSON’S CREEK where he was Co-Executive Producer.
Stepakoff has also created and developed pilots for many of the major studios and networks, including 20th Century, Paramount, MTM, Fox and ABC. And he has developed and written major motion pictures, including Disney’s TARZAN and BROTHER BEAR, and EM Entertainment’s LAPITCH, THE LITTLE SHOEMAKER, Croatia’s selection for the 1998 Academy Awards.
A few years ago, Stepakoff returned to Atlanta, where he lives with his wife and three young children, and began pursuing his long-held dream of writing fiction. FIREWORKS OVER TOCCOA, published by St. Martin’s Press is his first novel. A SIBA Okra Pick and an Indie Next List Notable, FIREWORKS is available in hardback, paperback, large print, audio and digital forms. Stepakoff’s second novel, THE ORCHARD, comes out in July 2011. His fiction is available now in six languages.
Presently, Stepakoff speaks around the country, teaches dramatic writing at Kennesaw State University, and is hard at work on his third novel for St. Martin’s Press. In his spare time, he builds forts in living room with sofa cushions.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
July 14, 2009
Part memoir, part insider’s view of TV writing, Billion Dollar Kiss is an entertaining read – particularly for those of us who grew up watching Dawson’s Creek. The book opens in the late 1980s, when quality US TV drama was just beginning to take hold – and Jeffrey Stepakoff was a young playwriting graduate who’d come to Hollywood on a whim. Guiding the reader through writers’ strikes and eras of crazy-lucrative studio deals, Billion Dollar Kiss is filled with little insights that will fascinate TV fans.
Conversely, if you’re not a fan of TV (specifically, 90s American TV), it will probably bore you to tears. Even I found my eyes glazing over at some of the lengthly industry-history segments. There’s also no getting around the fact that Stepakoff is a bit of a sideline player – he’s not a Greg Berlanti or a JJ Abrams – and that’s the reason he’s living in Georgia, writing about his experiences, not producing amazing TV.
Conversely, if you’re not a fan of TV (specifically, 90s American TV), it will probably bore you to tears. Even I found my eyes glazing over at some of the lengthly industry-history segments. There’s also no getting around the fact that Stepakoff is a bit of a sideline player – he’s not a Greg Berlanti or a JJ Abrams – and that’s the reason he’s living in Georgia, writing about his experiences, not producing amazing TV.
January 23, 2019
I thought I was gonna read an insider's account of the making of Dawson's Creek and ended up mostly with a history lesson on the business of being a TV writer. An unexpected yet so timely lesson that was fascinating, engrossing and entertaining. I do wish there was just a little bit more about that billion-dollar kiss as promised in the title and I gotta take off a star for the rather tone-deaf declaration that TV's lack of diversity isn't about racism, but purely about money. Other than that, highly recommend this book, especially for my fellow rather clueless and naive baby writers.
May 12, 2010
'Screw you' is an improvement from 'Go fuck yourself' but it is still deemed inappropriate.
This is just one of the many lines from this book that I loved. When I picked up this book, it sounded mildly interesting. That, combined with the fact that it only cost me $1.95, made me buy it. It would have been worth it if I had paid full price. This is a classic example of a book where the summary does not do it the justice that it deserves and, therefore, the book frequently gets overlooked. If I had seen this book in the book store and not at a discount book sale, the summary would never have convinced me to buy it.
Stepakoff is, very obviously, a writer. And he's not a writer restricted to scripts. He starts off talking about his decision to write for television shows. Most writers start off just like the rest of us: go to college, get a job out of college you don't really like, decide what you want to do with your life, go BACK to college and then get a job making no money but at least doing what you want.
I also liked that he gave SO much information about Hollywood and how it works but did it in a way that I didn't feel burdened with information. His writing was engaging and witty which made the facts that he was telling me interesting. He told me about searching for an agent and how, his agent Beth, was a woman who knew everyone, everything and most of her clients were a little scared of her (Stepakoff certainly was.) But she took care of her clients.
The book really illustrates what a face-paced, high-roller world Hollywood was for writers in the '90s. There were writers getting paid six figures, minimum, to sit in a room and think up TV shows. Not write them, no, THINK them up. And these weren't experienced writers; they were kids right out of college. Stepakoff tells us that his first script, for just one episode of one show, made him ten grand right off the bat and, as the show went into syndication, he would subsequently be paid for every time his episode was played.
His explanation of syndication was also mind blowing. Money is not made in the initial airing of the show. Every time that show showed up ANYWHERE, someone had to pay for it. So when a network picked it up and plays repeats, a writer gets paid; when an episode is played on airplane, money changes hands; that commercial that has a five second clip from a TV show? You guessed it; everyone gets a paycheck for that too. Money is made when it goes to foreign markets, when certain lines from the script is made. It's AFTER the show airs that all the money is really made. It was easy to see how writers would make upwards of a million dollars a year.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, however. Since he started writing for television in 1988, writers have gone on strike twice and came dangerously close a third time. In fact, writers were on strike when he first started working. It was a strike that had a profound effect on the television business. Because writers were on strike for so long, people stopped watching TV. A lot of people never came back to watching. In fact, the strike changed television drastically. When the stock market took a dive in the late '90s, production companies did everything in their power to cut costs. This was also around the time that Survivor and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire became huge hits. Reality shows, while they do employ writers, they would employ freelance writers. These writers worked upwards of 12 hours a day, six days a week for minimum wage. Making reality TV was cheap and was a great way to cut costs. Suddenly, scripted TV shows were getting cut right and left and reality TV was being made right and left. Though reality TV is always a big hit the first season or two, interest in it dies out quickly and doesn't bring in any money from syndication or DVDs.
Inevitably, the market for writers died down, as these things always do. The bubble burst on the market and has evened out. Writers are still making millions, but they actually earn their keep and experience is worth something.
Stepakoff also wrote for Disney at one point in time. It was nice to see the huge contrast between television and movies. Television is fast paced and things get done in a week or two. It doesn't take months to make one episode; it takes weeks. When working for Disney in the early '90s, he was asked to help conceive a movie about a bear. That's the only real restriction that he was given. They would spend days talking about the littlest details. Things were very laid back and slow paced; very different from the television world. The movie he helped work on for a few years came out about ten years later: Brother Bear. It's crazy to see that what Disney took ten years to do, the television industry does in a matter of a few months.
The thing about this book that got a little annoying (and I mean minor) is that sometimes, when he would give examples of things, he would give a few too many. He would tell you something and then list off writers and the shows that they worked for as an example. Before you knew it, you had just read a paragraph worth of people and what they did. Sometimes it was fine. Other times you just didn't need a list of that many names.
This is one of those books that there was just so much that was good about it, I couldn't begin to explain it all to you here. It was funny, engaging, interesting and a quick read. I recommend it to... well everyone. Really, just go out and buy this book.
This is just one of the many lines from this book that I loved. When I picked up this book, it sounded mildly interesting. That, combined with the fact that it only cost me $1.95, made me buy it. It would have been worth it if I had paid full price. This is a classic example of a book where the summary does not do it the justice that it deserves and, therefore, the book frequently gets overlooked. If I had seen this book in the book store and not at a discount book sale, the summary would never have convinced me to buy it.
Stepakoff is, very obviously, a writer. And he's not a writer restricted to scripts. He starts off talking about his decision to write for television shows. Most writers start off just like the rest of us: go to college, get a job out of college you don't really like, decide what you want to do with your life, go BACK to college and then get a job making no money but at least doing what you want.
I also liked that he gave SO much information about Hollywood and how it works but did it in a way that I didn't feel burdened with information. His writing was engaging and witty which made the facts that he was telling me interesting. He told me about searching for an agent and how, his agent Beth, was a woman who knew everyone, everything and most of her clients were a little scared of her (Stepakoff certainly was.) But she took care of her clients.
The book really illustrates what a face-paced, high-roller world Hollywood was for writers in the '90s. There were writers getting paid six figures, minimum, to sit in a room and think up TV shows. Not write them, no, THINK them up. And these weren't experienced writers; they were kids right out of college. Stepakoff tells us that his first script, for just one episode of one show, made him ten grand right off the bat and, as the show went into syndication, he would subsequently be paid for every time his episode was played.
His explanation of syndication was also mind blowing. Money is not made in the initial airing of the show. Every time that show showed up ANYWHERE, someone had to pay for it. So when a network picked it up and plays repeats, a writer gets paid; when an episode is played on airplane, money changes hands; that commercial that has a five second clip from a TV show? You guessed it; everyone gets a paycheck for that too. Money is made when it goes to foreign markets, when certain lines from the script is made. It's AFTER the show airs that all the money is really made. It was easy to see how writers would make upwards of a million dollars a year.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, however. Since he started writing for television in 1988, writers have gone on strike twice and came dangerously close a third time. In fact, writers were on strike when he first started working. It was a strike that had a profound effect on the television business. Because writers were on strike for so long, people stopped watching TV. A lot of people never came back to watching. In fact, the strike changed television drastically. When the stock market took a dive in the late '90s, production companies did everything in their power to cut costs. This was also around the time that Survivor and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire became huge hits. Reality shows, while they do employ writers, they would employ freelance writers. These writers worked upwards of 12 hours a day, six days a week for minimum wage. Making reality TV was cheap and was a great way to cut costs. Suddenly, scripted TV shows were getting cut right and left and reality TV was being made right and left. Though reality TV is always a big hit the first season or two, interest in it dies out quickly and doesn't bring in any money from syndication or DVDs.
Inevitably, the market for writers died down, as these things always do. The bubble burst on the market and has evened out. Writers are still making millions, but they actually earn their keep and experience is worth something.
Stepakoff also wrote for Disney at one point in time. It was nice to see the huge contrast between television and movies. Television is fast paced and things get done in a week or two. It doesn't take months to make one episode; it takes weeks. When working for Disney in the early '90s, he was asked to help conceive a movie about a bear. That's the only real restriction that he was given. They would spend days talking about the littlest details. Things were very laid back and slow paced; very different from the television world. The movie he helped work on for a few years came out about ten years later: Brother Bear. It's crazy to see that what Disney took ten years to do, the television industry does in a matter of a few months.
The thing about this book that got a little annoying (and I mean minor) is that sometimes, when he would give examples of things, he would give a few too many. He would tell you something and then list off writers and the shows that they worked for as an example. Before you knew it, you had just read a paragraph worth of people and what they did. Sometimes it was fine. Other times you just didn't need a list of that many names.
This is one of those books that there was just so much that was good about it, I couldn't begin to explain it all to you here. It was funny, engaging, interesting and a quick read. I recommend it to... well everyone. Really, just go out and buy this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 2, 2020
I love TV and always have. This means that this book was fascinating to me. Stepakoff (a TV writer) walks us through what it takes to make not only TV, but good TV. I devoured this book. It was published in 2005/2006 (I believe) right when Netflix and the like came to be. I’d love a follow up book from Stepakoff on the way this new format fit into the game for writers. This book was great.
April 22, 2024
Went into it because i was curious about the title, only for the title to not even be a fraction of what this book is actually about . Though I will say that it was fun being informed about things that went on during television's prime and how much of a drastic difference it was in the late 90s-early 00s in comparison to present day.
July 26, 2020
Definitely dated — not only in that it doesn’t cover the seismic changes wrought by streaming (understandable given when the book was published), but also in the author’s discussion of race, gender, and sexuality — but still an essential read for television lovers.
May 16, 2023
Part memoir, part history of TV writing and the Writer's Guild of America (and relevant to today's current WGA strike). All fascinating and worth a read, especially if you remember and enjoyed the TV landscape of the early 2000's. Also a worthwhile read for writers in general.
January 20, 2020
The tv writing industry tea is quite hot in the book.
March 8, 2023
Entertaining history of TV writing. Like many, I was in it for the Dawson's Creek hook. While I do wish there was more about The Creek experience, this book was pretty fascinating.
Read
August 30, 2025L
June 10, 2007
I just finished Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved DAWSON'S CREEK and Other Adventures in TV Writing by Jeffrey Stepakoff and was intrigued by his account of how television writing--and quality--waxed and waned through several decades, and how it transformed incredibly during his own heyday on the late-90s/early 00s. Since I read this directly after Hollywood Car Wash, it sort of came off to me as a more realistic and comprehensive perspective on the TV writing/producing industry. Sure, they are different books -- one is non-fiction and written by an MFA in Playwriting-trained person; the other comes off as more of a shallow-though-entertaining-on-that-level chick-lit lark -- but they both have protagonists that started with a certain set of "artistic, non-Establishment values" and got swallowed up by the money and big business and youth-obsession of Hollywood industry. And since Stepokoff makes it very clear he is talking about Hollywood LA, and not necessarily all of LA, he got a pass for me on the generalizations head.
In fact, his specifics are what enthralled me, and his recounting of his journey through the shifting vagaries and priorities of the Industry. From the 1960s, when networks were deflected from creating their own cookie-cutter shows, to the rise of quality programming from writer-centered independent production companies like MTM that thrived into the late 80s, and then the impact of writers' strikes, the consolidation of media after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (which also diluted music and radio and hip-hop, as well as TV programming), and the transformation of networks into youth-obsessed "branding" sites, where the networks wanting to make a buck--not the writers wanting to create diverse stories--became the first and last say on everything, that long and winding road was fascinating, somewhat disheartening, and certainly illuminating.
In fact, his specifics are what enthralled me, and his recounting of his journey through the shifting vagaries and priorities of the Industry. From the 1960s, when networks were deflected from creating their own cookie-cutter shows, to the rise of quality programming from writer-centered independent production companies like MTM that thrived into the late 80s, and then the impact of writers' strikes, the consolidation of media after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (which also diluted music and radio and hip-hop, as well as TV programming), and the transformation of networks into youth-obsessed "branding" sites, where the networks wanting to make a buck--not the writers wanting to create diverse stories--became the first and last say on everything, that long and winding road was fascinating, somewhat disheartening, and certainly illuminating.
July 4, 2010
Honestly, I spent the first 2/3 of this book YAWNING, because it reads like more of a Television History textbook than a TV writer's memoir. But I would just attribute that to bad marketing--looking at the cover, my expectations were a little off. The early chapters of the book, while full of facts & figures, deserve thorough reading because they explain important aspects of the Television industry such as industry hierarchies, average salaries, Nielsen ratings, ad revenues, etc.
The last 1/3 of the book was surprisingly breezy and full of fun insider accounts from the set of "Dawson's Creek." Finally, the novel began to live up to its title, "Billion Dollar Kiss," referring to the game-changing kiss between Pacey & Joey (Josh Jackson & Katie Holmes). That said, I think it takes a lot of guts for someone to claim responsibility for the WORST seasons (aka everything after 2) of the laughably bad WB melodrama. The book works because Stepakoff is well aware that he was aboard a rapidly sinking ship and he admits that the success of the show was due entirely to the WB's whitewashed advertising campaign as opposed to the actual writing.
Up until I reached the first-person tales of working on "Dawson's Creek," this book review was stuck at 2 stars, but the extensive accounts of TV industry politics were well worth the price of admission.
The last 1/3 of the book was surprisingly breezy and full of fun insider accounts from the set of "Dawson's Creek." Finally, the novel began to live up to its title, "Billion Dollar Kiss," referring to the game-changing kiss between Pacey & Joey (Josh Jackson & Katie Holmes). That said, I think it takes a lot of guts for someone to claim responsibility for the WORST seasons (aka everything after 2) of the laughably bad WB melodrama. The book works because Stepakoff is well aware that he was aboard a rapidly sinking ship and he admits that the success of the show was due entirely to the WB's whitewashed advertising campaign as opposed to the actual writing.
Up until I reached the first-person tales of working on "Dawson's Creek," this book review was stuck at 2 stars, but the extensive accounts of TV industry politics were well worth the price of admission.
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January 3, 2013The title is clearly meant to grab attention, and ends up being somewhat misleading. The book is not more about Dawson's Creek than it is about all the other shows Stepakoff has worked on, and that means it is very little about any of them. I expected more -- he talks about what a mess production on Dawson's was when he joined in, but not that much about how it changed. Fair enough.
The real story is the evolving business of screenwriting for tv, starting right before the 1988 WGA strike and ending immediately before the 2007 repeat. It's good enought at that, if at times it needed to be more concise. My main problem was with the chapter where the book whitesplains racism on the staffing of tv shows and ends up excusing most if it because business is business and it's not racism-racism. Not really necessary.
The real story is the evolving business of screenwriting for tv, starting right before the 1988 WGA strike and ending immediately before the 2007 repeat. It's good enought at that, if at times it needed to be more concise. My main problem was with the chapter where the book whitesplains racism on the staffing of tv shows and ends up excusing most if it because business is business and it's not racism-racism. Not really necessary.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 7, 2008
This is a quick, easy and entertaining read, and I chose it because it was on the new non-fiction shelf of my library, and also because I love *good* TV. This book is part memoir, part expose on the TV writing industry, which I find fascinating, particularly admist the current writer's strike. If you've ever wanted to write for a TV show, or if you just really love to watch well-written TV shows, this book is a good pick. I really appreciated the small bits when the author, who is from the eastern U.S., describes what it's like to move to California, because I can totally relate to the weird idiosnycrazies of Californians.
February 17, 2008
Billion Dollar Kiss is Stepakoff's account of his career as a TV writer, starting from 1988, when he went to Hollywood, up through a couple of years ago. The subtitle has caused some dumbasses on Amazon to give it bad reviews because they bought it thinking it's a book all about Dawson's Creek. There's some material about Dawson's Creek because Stepakoff worked on the show for several years, but he also discusses his time on the writing staffs of Major Dad, Sisters, The Wonder Years and a couple of other shows that got canceled pretty fast. This book was an enlightening look at the economics behind the TV industry, especially in light of the recent WGA strike.
May 20, 2013
Since I still harbor a dream of professionally writing for TV, this book was fascinating. Stepakoff doesn't hold back anything, even elaborating on his exorbitant salaries over the years.
It feels very honest, very true, and my only complaint is that there are numerous occasions in which he talks about some change in the industry as having changed everything forever. It's not unreasonable, of course, to think of the industry as constantly changing, and his assurances that things would never be the same seemed unnecessary.
That being said, it's certainly the most honest book about TV writing that I've read. Definitely recommended.
It feels very honest, very true, and my only complaint is that there are numerous occasions in which he talks about some change in the industry as having changed everything forever. It's not unreasonable, of course, to think of the industry as constantly changing, and his assurances that things would never be the same seemed unnecessary.
That being said, it's certainly the most honest book about TV writing that I've read. Definitely recommended.
March 13, 2012
3.5 stars
I don't know if this was what I was expecting when I picked it up, but I ended up enjoying what it was a lot. I appreciated the honesty about certain things, like how overwhelmingly white and male television writers are, and the more general whitewashing of televisions shows. I loved the look at Dawson's in particular the lead up to THE kiss, because I forget sometimes how bad a lot of the beginning of season three was, because the end was so uniformly excellent.\
I would definitely recommend this.
I don't know if this was what I was expecting when I picked it up, but I ended up enjoying what it was a lot. I appreciated the honesty about certain things, like how overwhelmingly white and male television writers are, and the more general whitewashing of televisions shows. I loved the look at Dawson's in particular the lead up to THE kiss, because I forget sometimes how bad a lot of the beginning of season three was, because the end was so uniformly excellent.\
I would definitely recommend this.
May 18, 2013
Decent read by a former tv staff writer. Half of it explores the business side of the last 20 years of TV, which was less interesting. The other half followed the writer as he goes from being a playwriting major in college to making shit tons of money as a writer for Dawson's Creek and other shows (that he thinks pretty highly of but really, come on, aren't exactly the top of the tv heap). Still, it's interesting to see the economics (crazy money) and the behind the scenes workload (crazy hours) behind the tv world. Oh, and if you liked DC you'll like the gossip.
June 15, 2008
This quite a good book:
1. a memoir of a TV writer who worked on everything from "Simon & Simon" to "Dawson's Creek" with a Disney animated feature in between;
2. a glimpse into the life of a major Los Angeles subculture;
3. a crash course in how the TV business works; and
4. an inside history of TV from the demise of independent studios like MTM thru the 90s boom-bust cycle to the rise of reality TV.
1. a memoir of a TV writer who worked on everything from "Simon & Simon" to "Dawson's Creek" with a Disney animated feature in between;
2. a glimpse into the life of a major Los Angeles subculture;
3. a crash course in how the TV business works; and
4. an inside history of TV from the demise of independent studios like MTM thru the 90s boom-bust cycle to the rise of reality TV.
September 24, 2011
While the title was a bit misleading, I really did like this book. I feel like I have learned about "adventures in tv writing" - how the business cycle is and a little bit of the history. While the material could have been dry, it wasn't so much because (unsurprisingly) the author has a talent for writing, haha. I'm glad I read it!
August 7, 2018
Pretty clickbaity.
The Billion-Dollar Kiss is some is some kiss between two characters on Dawson's Creek.
I never watched that show and even after reading this book I didn't quite get how that kiss could be so important.
Still, you do learn what it's like to be a writer on a TV show so that's kind of interesting.
The Billion-Dollar Kiss is some is some kiss between two characters on Dawson's Creek.
I never watched that show and even after reading this book I didn't quite get how that kiss could be so important.
Still, you do learn what it's like to be a writer on a TV show so that's kind of interesting.
July 24, 2007
Fairly interesting book about the life of a tv writer. Has a lot of detail about how shows are made, written staffed, etc. Only drawback would be how seriously he takes Dawsons Creek, and I say this as a fan (to the extent that is possible).
October 6, 2014
This was alright, but the author is a little too impressed with himself and with the TV industry. He's too close to the system to really see the many, many problems. Or maybe he just can't talk about it because he wants to keep working in TV.
October 21, 2008
Not sure what prompted me to read this one. Perhaps my schoolgirl penchant for Dawson's Creek, long ago? In any case, it's an interesting look into what it's like to be a television writer. It sounds occasionally fun, but after reading this, I don't want to be one.
May 15, 2010
Very enjoyable and honest - I think I might have liked it even more if I'd read it before the TV writers' strike. I feel like during the strike a lot of this information and these stories came into the public eye, making this book seem less fresh and insider-y. But that's not Stepakoff's fault.
December 19, 2010
As an aspiring TV writer, I recommend this book as a MUST-READ! Jeffrey takes the reader through his own personal journey in television, and takes the time to walk through the history of Television for the writer in Hollywood. I could not put it down!
February 5, 2011
I thought this book would be interesting. A behind the scenes look at what goes on in the mind of a TV writer and how it relates to the screen. I got a boring, tedious, history lesson that I did not sign up for. If I could give it zero stars I would.
November 9, 2012
I read most of the book but skipped many sections in the beginning. It didn't really start getting interesting for me until he started talking about DC. Loved getting inside track on what made one of my favorite shows work.
January 4, 2013
I bought this book in a whim, but I was totally fascinated by it! I had no idea what TV writing was really like. Those writers are hardcore. It was also fun reading an insider account of DAWSON'S CREEK, which, I admit, I STILL adore.
October 2, 2007
written by a tv writer, this book explain the raise of the the 90's sitcom, and the fall. very funny.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews