How Alex Berger Broke into Hollywood

What makes television a hard industry to crack is the fact that it’s a winner-take-all market. There’s only one type of career capital here, the quality of your writing, and there are thousands of hopefuls trying to gain enough of this capital to impress a very small group of buyers.

In this respect, however, Alex had an advantage. At Dartmouth College he had been a debater, and a damn good one at that: In 2002 his two-man team arrived at the National Debate Tournament with the country’s highest rank; Alex then went on to win the Best Speaker prize at the tournament. In debate, as in television writing, there’s no mystery about what separates good from bad: The scoring system is specific and known. To become the country’s best debater, therefore, Alex had to master the art of continual improvement. Hearing the story of how he then went on to succeed in Hollywood convinced me that it was exactly this skill that fueled his fast rise.

When Alex made the decision to move to Hollywood, his logic, in typical debater fashion, was airtight: “I figured I could always apply to law school,” he recalled thinking, “but realistically this would be my only chance to try out writing.” Alex admits that when he first moved west he wasn’t even sure what his goals were: “I had a number of things I wanted to do, but didn’t know what they meant. I thought I wanted to be a network executive, for example, but had no idea what that involved. I thought I might be a TV writer, but didn’t know what that meant either.” This was not a classic case of the young man building the courage to follow his unmistakable passion.

When Alex first arrived in LA, he took a job as website editor for the National Lampoon. Once there, he discovered that the Lampoon was also interested in television production. Drawing from the adage “write what you know,” Alex pitched them Master Debaters, a show that required comedians to debate humorous topics in front of a panel of judges. He was given a modest amount of money to film a pilot, which he did, in a Border’s bookstore in Westwood. But making television shows is a tough game, and the National Lampoon’s tentative effort didn’t go anywhere.

What I like about Alex’s story is what he does next: He quit his job at the National Lampoon and took a position as an assistant to a development executive at NBC. It’s here that I see Alex’s debater instincts stir back to life. The National Lampoon was too far to the periphery of the industry to teach him what it takes to succeed. By accepting an assistant position he threw himself into the center of the action, where he could find out how things actually work.

It didn’t take long for Alex to discover what allows some writers to succeed in catching the attention of a network while so many others fail: They write good scripts—a task that’s more difficult than many imagine. Spurred by this insight, Alex turned his attention to writing. Lots of writing. During the eight months he spent as an assistant he dedicated his nights to working on a trio of different writing projects. First, before Alex left the National Lampoon, they had optioned his Master Debaters idea to VH1—while an assistant Alex was still polishing the script for the VH1 version of the pilot. (In the end, like most pilots, nothing ever came of the VH1 option.) At the same time, he was working on a pilot for an unrelated show along with a producer he had met at the Lampoon. And on his own, he was writing a screenplay about his life growing up in Washington, D.C. “I might finish writing at two or three A.M., then have to leave at eight the next morning to get back to my job at NBC on time,” Alex recalls. It was a busy period.

After eight months as an assistant, Alex heard about a job opening for a script assistant on Commander in Chief, a West Wing copycat helmed by Geena Davis. He jumped at the chance to observe professional TV writers up close, even though it was still a low-level position. On the side, he also added to his portfolio a spec script-in-progress for the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, aggressively seeking feedback on his early drafts. “I thought I needed more samples to get work,” he recalls.

While working as a script assistant for Commander in Chief, Alex started to pitch episode ideas to the room: One of the privileges of being a script assistant is that you can always get a (quick) consideration of your pitch. Not long before the show was canceled, he finally caught the attention of the room with an episode idea about lost missiles from a plane crash in Pakistan and the political fallout of a gay commitment ceremony. Working with Cynthia Cohen, one of the staff writers on the show, he produced a draft of the episode.

“For those with free TiVo space, I recommend giving the ‘thumbs up’ to a groundbreaking episode of Commander in Chief, this Thursday at ten,” Alex wrote in an e-mail to friends around this time. “Why groundbreaking, you ask? Because, within the first ten minutes, for the first time in the history of network television, the words ‘Alex’ and ‘Berger’ will appear—in succession, mind you—just underneath the words ‘written by.’ ”

With his first produced television script now in hand, things began to move quickly for Alex. After Commander in Chief was canceled, he took another low-level job, this time working with the producer Jonathan Lisco in the run-up for his new show, K-Ville, a post-Katrina New Orleans drama being developed for Fox. Given his writing credit, however, and a collection of increasingly polished spec scripts, this job became an informal tryout for Alex: He was given the chance to impress Lisco—which he did. When a spot opened on the writing staff for K-Ville, it was given to Alex: his first official position as a staff writer. He went on to write and air two episodes before the show was canceled.

After K-Ville, a mutual friend set up a meeting between Alex and Michael Eisner, who, fresh from leaving Disney, was looking to create a television comedy as his first project as an independent producer. Alex got the meeting because he was a former staff writer for a network show, but it was his Curb Your Enthusiasm script that convinced Eisner to ask him to write a pilot for his new idea. Eisner liked the pilot draft, and Alex went on to help him cocreate the show, Glenn Martin, DDS, which aired for two seasons as a flagship program for Nickelodeon’s “Nick at Night” block.

It was as Glenn Martin was winding down that Alex sold his pilot to USA and was staffed on one of their hit shows, Covert Affairs—the setting where I first introduced him to you.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
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