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TV Writer Nell Scovell on Why Getting Professionally Rejected Was the Best Thing That’s Ever Happened to Her

- Nell Scovell

At 26, I was single, living in Manhattan, and working as a journalist at Vanity Fair. I was Carrie Bradshaw … in sensible shoes. Then a chance encounter sent me on a different trajectory.

One day I bumped into a friend on the street. She had seen some of my oddball humor pieces and said to me, “Nell, I don’t mean this as an insult, but I think you could write for television.” The notion had never occurred to me. I’d grown up on the East Coast and knew nothing about the entertainment business. Intrigued, I reached out to a friend of a friend who wrote for TV. He told me to do a script on spec for a show that’s already on.

Now, the popular shows at the time were The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls, but my favorite was It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. The comedy was absurdist, and the concept broke the fourth wall. Genius stand-up Garry Shandling played a guy named Garry, who addressed the audience directly. I got a few examples of scripts and wrote one. Sometimes not knowing what you’re doing allows you to do things you never knew you could do.