I didn’t write for about three years before I wrote the pilot for “Nobody Wants This.” Not a single page of anything. When I met my now-husband, Simon, I was about to turn 36 and I had just finished working on a pilot that I wrote for Fox called “Daddy Issues.” It had been a big project for me, and after it got shot, and then not picked up to series, I needed a little break. In that time, my sister and I started some other business ventures. We worked for the dating app Bumble, we started investing in companies, and writing got further away from me. So when I met Simon and we fell in love and started our relationship, I didn’t feel emotionally ready to dive back into my writing brain, where I usually dissected everything tragic and comedic about my dating life. This relationship felt different. I wanted to protect it. Also, I didn’t really know what to write about. There was nothing funny about being in the first healthy and dependable relationship of my life. There was nothing entertaining about our successful dates or my family loving him. I wondered if maybe the tap had run dry, if the saying was true: being happy is not inspiring.
When people asked what I did for a living, I would tell them “I’m a writer,” because that’s what I always wanted to be, and I had been a writer in the past, and my health insurance was through the Writers Guild. That made it feel very official. But when I said it, I felt like a fraud. I most certainly wasn’t writing anything. I would wake up in the middle of the night with terrifying thoughts that can only come to you in your sleep — that I had done nothing with my life professionally. That I was officially a loser with a wonderful boyfriend.
So my wonderful boyfriend proposed to me in August 2018, and I said, “Yes, of course.” We decided to throw a New Year’s Eve wedding, which meant we had four months to plan. This meant that I didn’t have a lot of time to convert to Judaism before the wedding. This was something that came up casually the first time Simon and I ever hung out. He stated clearly that he would need to marry someone Jewish, and I made a mental note: Let him know, also very casually, that I am available to convert. All my friends growing up in L.A. were Jewish. They make great husbands, I knew all about it. Sign me up. I’m 36 years old in L.A., and a great guy with a full head of hair and no selfies in front of private planes wants to marry me. So I found a temple that had an eight-week course. I was hooked at the first meeting, where the rabbi told us that he expected us to take the class together. He said that these classes weren’t for me to learn how to be Jewish for Simon. They were for us to take together to decide how we wanted our marriage to look and how we wanted our household to feel. To decide what we cared about and what we disagreed on. Once again, sign me up.
It was in the middle of conversion classes when I was telling my manager and producing partner, Oly Obst, about the fascinating people I was meeting there and how different everyone’s stories were. Then he looked at me and said, “That’s a show.” I totally agreed with him but wondered who would write it, since I had forgotten how to write. We cobbled together a rough pitch for 20th Century Fox, a studio I had worked with before that had always supported my ideas. They bought it in the room. Every time I talked about the idea, people seemed to click into it very easily. Falling in love later in life, two people from different worlds trying to make it work. Jewish, non-Jewish. It seemed clean.
When I finally sat down to start writing it, I was so nervous. I was positive I had lost my touch. No chance I still know how to do this. But after a few dusty runs at a few scenes, it started to come to me. I wanted to create a male lead who was warm and funny and honest and romantic, someone who could handle a strong and complicated woman. A couple who we would really believe could be together in the real world. I wanted to tell the story of all the interesting things that happen in a good relationship and how hard it can be to be with someone who wants to be with you too. It became so clear who these two people were and what connected them.
Once the pilot was finally written (and it wasn’t fast), we took it out to sell it. Every. Single. Network. Passed. Every one of them! Pass. Pass. Pass. Pass. “We don’t see where it goes.” “There’s not enough conflict.” “It feels small.” I was about to head back to Loserville. Time to brush up on the recipes I had learned during COVID. We just had one last pitch to Netflix. A pipe dream. I was so dejected by that point, I didn’t even let myself get nervous about the response, because I was ready for the last and final rejection. But … spoiler alert, they bought it! I was officially a real writer.
The post Erin Foster nearly gave up writing. How ‘Nobody Wants This’ brought her back appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
