‘Nobody Wants This’ Showrunner on the Pete Davidson and Glenn Close Rom-Com That Never Was

In 2017, Bruce Eric Kaplan—New Yorker cartoonist, screenwriter, producer (Girls, Six Feet Under), and showrunner for season two of Nobody Wants This—wrote a pilot for Sony about a woman who falls in love with an incarcerated man half her age. When he’s unexpectedly released, they grapple with how to actually be together. It was Harold and Maude meets Moonstruck, as Kaplan describes it. Sony did not move forward with the project, but some years later, Glenn Close read the script and signed on. This seemed promising—but by January 2022, Kaplan was no closer to getting the pilot made. And so, “to keep from going mad,” as he writes, he began obsessively chronicling the next six months of false starts and backslides, the promised Zooms, the canceled Zooms, the meetings and pre-meetings. (A representative for Close didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

In February, Pete Davidson entered the chat—Close’s “friend,” whom she had “great chemistry with,” as she apparently described in an email to Kaplan. (When VF reached out to a representative, Davidson was not available to comment for this story.) Unfortunately, this only prompted further scheduling chaos. “At one point,” Kaplan writes, “Glenn pitched out doing an entirely different show that was about her and Pete working together at a Target in Staten Island, then traveling around the middle of the country having ‘kooky’ adventures with people.” With some despair, Kaplan writes, “It was like being in a writers’ room on the first day of a season, but sadly, the two people making all the pitches were not writers.”

In other hands, the book might have read like an extended exercise in sour grapes. Instead, it’s an idiosyncratic meditation on creativity, success and failure, self discovery via frustration—and, because Kaplan includes dispatches on his home life, it’s about the ecosystem of a family, too. A fellow writer can also recognize it as a writer’s revenge. After hours of unpaid labor, Kaplan wielded his weapon (his keyboard) and reaped his reward (a book deal). Kaplan sums up the project as “a portrait of the fever dream that is my brain.”

On a call with VF before a day in the Nobody Wants This writers room, Kaplan talks shop.

Vanity Fair: It’s very meta to be in a Zoom with you after reading about all these Zooms with you. I’m surprised that we didn’t have to reschedule this, although I think throughout the whole book you weren’t ever the cause of a rescheduling.

Bruce Eric Kaplan: Literally, not once. When someone says “here are the five days [I’m available],” I take the first one. If someone gives me five times in one day, I take the first time.

You’ve been in TV for over 25 years. Was this experience particularly Sisyphean, or was it just the first time you wrote it all down?

When I started out, there were three networks. You would have an idea; you didn’t even need a producer. Your agent would say, I have meetings set up for you on Thursday and Friday with ABC, NBC, CBS. You would have them on Friday at five o’clock. Your agent would say, like, All right, no one’s interested; all three are interested; one is interested. And then it was over. It was a 72-hour experience, basically.

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And then things evolved. There became more networks. I had a deal with HBO, and they were always a dream to develop with. You may not get something made, but they were always very old school. They were interested in a world and people, but never once did I ever hear: What is the second season? But around the time of Netflix I heard like, oh, Netflix wants to hear the whole season. And then somewhere along the way it became, they want to know what season two and season three are. Combined with that, it all became more layers, more producers involved. You weren’t just pitching to the network; you would pitch first to producers, then to the studio. Then to the network.

I’ve been on Zooms with, say, a dozen people, and 11 of the people on the Zoom are getting a salary. I’m the only person on the Zoom who’s just coming up with all this stuff and not getting paid a cent for it.

You write in the memoir that the book was partially inspired by John Gregory Dunne’s Monster. Why do you love the book so much?

It’s such a pure document of the experience. It’s very unusual, I love all things like that. There’s two books that I love so much and reread a lot. One [called The Seesaw Log] is about Two for the Seesaw, a play in the fifties that Henry Fonda and Ann Bancroft were in. And the writer does a diary from writing it, to first reading, to rehearsal, to opening. Similarly, there’s a book called Son of Any Wednesday[: The Making of a Broadway Hit], which was this movie, it was on TV when I was a kid, a Jane Fonda sex comedy based on a play. And Muriel Resnik, the playwright, did the same thing—from writing it, reading, rehearsal. It’s very sort of like, this is how something gets made.

Sadly, in my case, this is how something doesn’t get made.

In the book, you’re writing about Glenn Close and Pete Davidson, and also a lot of people who I imagine you will continue to work with or run into at various events. You wrote this in real time over a year, a couple of years ago. How do you feel, now that it’s actually going to be in the world?

It was never my goal to write this book. I literally just sat down and was like, I’m going to start this journal to keep from going mad. As I did it, I understood that I was trying to get to some answers that were greater than the project, as to how I’m frustrated and not having a good time, and I need to learn how to appreciate what I have. Which is all to say it wasn’t a well thought out decision. It’s just sort of like, oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, and I will do it because there’s some source higher than me that is calling to me to do this.

Glenn and Pete, I don’t live with them. They’re not my best friends. They’re not my family. I didn’t grow up with them. They’re just people who I’m meeting in a work context. And my thoughts about anyone in the book, they’re just my thoughts. I get frustrated with the process with Glenn, but by the end of the book I’m like, I don’t have any feelings towards her. I wish her the best. What I hope everyone who reads it gets is, I really do believe that we’re all each other’s teachers. And it’s up to me to learn something from it or to sort of take away whatever I want to take away from it.

I think underneath what you’re asking is, sometimes I say things that are sort of not the political thing to say about people, not the most…I dunno. I say my thoughts about something, and they’re sort of like, wow, people don’t usually say that. I understand that, but they’re just my thoughts and they don’t mean that much. And I’m grateful, literally grateful to every single person in this book.

There’s something very liberating in reading it, because you’re not trashing people. You’re having thoughts that everyone has about people in their lives; we just don’t often get to see such an unvarnished depiction of that.

I’ll see what happens. We’ll see how much I suffer. One of my agents was like, God, are you sure you want to do this? You don’t want to make this a novel? The book picked me, and the book wanted to be a document. This is a document. This is what happened. This is who I talked to, this is what I saw. This is what I thought about. This is what was happening in the world.

Anyhow, when my agent was upset about it and was talking to my lawyer about it behind my back, trying to get my lawyer to make me not do it, my lawyer Patty was like, who cares? No one’s going to read it.

The news is out that you’ve signed on as a showrunner with Jenni Konner for the second season of Nobody Wants This. How many meetings did it take for that to happen?

That’s different than development. My agent called me and that was, say, a Thursday. I had to make a decision on a Friday, and I passed on it. It was too logistically challenging. And then a friend of mine called, a mutual person said, you should reconsider this. Just watch an episode. So then on, say, Saturday I watched an episode and 10 minutes into it, my wife was like, you’ve got to take this job. I think I called Jenni that day, or maybe Sunday.

I have a good sense now of what it looks like when you’re trying to get excited about a project, but not able to. In the book, you actually become very physically ill over a similar scenario with Amy Schumer’s show Life & Beth. So what about Nobody Wants This made you know, ten minutes in?

I just loved the characters, loved the execution. I think the intentions of this piece are so unique and special.

What do you think those are?

There’s something so pure about the intentions of this show, which are like, I know it’s a cliche and banal, but it’s that love is all that matters. We lose sight of that. It’s the most obvious thing. And yet it’s not usually what a television show is about.

I love the heroine in that she’s imperfect but amazing. And I love watching this other person celebrate her exactly as she is. A lot of times shows feel like they come from other TV shows, and this doesn’t feel like that. It comes from the creator’s life, and you can really feel that. It’s like, oh, this is a personal expression.

There has been some criticism by Jewish women about not feeling like they’re seeing themselves represented in the characters. Is that something that you’ll take into account when writing the next season?

I’ve heard it, but it feels not relevant to what is going to be season two—meaning that all the characters are being layered and deepened, and I love all the storylines for all the characters in season two.

You sent The New Yorker a packet of cartoons every week for years before they accepted one. Where do you think that tenacity comes from?

I know it sounds like tenacity, and maybe it was, but in my experience of it, it was really like, I did that first group of cartoons and put in my self-addressed envelope, and I sent off the first group and then was like, I love doing this. This is who I am. I’m sure they’re going to buy one. So I’ll just start working on the second group. And I got my self-addressed envelope back maybe the following week, but it’s like, now I’m working on the third one.

I didn’t go to art school or anything like that, so I needed some time to hone my skills as an artist, but I was really getting something out of it. Lemme put it this way: I was upset that they weren’t buying it, but it was also very meaningful to me, even if I was just putting them all in a drawer or a box or something. I just felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. And at some point they would figure that out.

You have this line in the memoir about a script Liana Finck wrote: “It’s so beautiful and hilarious and unique that I’m sure no one will want it.” You’re still writing shows, you’re still pitching projects, you’re still working in TV. Why are you still in it, if you have a feeling like that?

It doesn’t make sense. It’s crazy. It’s like a form of insanity, in a way. But it all comes back to what we talked about initially. I don’t feel like I have a choice. That’s what it feels like, and I’m just doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And if the world at some point feels that I can do something that’s original and beautiful and unique or whatever, then great. But I’m not the world. I’m not in charge of that aspect of it. I’m just in charge of expressing myself. There’s this quote—it was meaningful to me in my twenties, and of course I have no idea what the actual quote is now. But Agnes De Mille, the choreographer, she has some quote about how our job is just to express whatever we need to express. It’s like, look, I’m just supposed to send this out, send this out, send this out, and then hope the world can do what it wants with it.

You meditate, you do morning pages. How do those practices inform your creative work?

I spent many years without doing meditation and without doing morning pages. And I was a creative person. So it’s not like I can’t exist without them creatively, but I love doing them now. The meditation helps me observe my thoughts, which is helpful for the creative process. And the morning pages gets me in touch with my unconscious thoughts in a way that, again, really makes it easier to access things that are bothering me or making me happy.

You had a cover of The New Yorker a few years ago, for the fiction issue, that was a couple in bed and two very tall stacks of books on their night tables. What’s on your reading stack right now?

Okay, I resisted the Griffin Dunne book for months upon months, and now I’m deep into it.

Why did you resist it?

I don’t know. I don’t know why I resisted. Sometimes I get jealous, so maybe I was jealous in some way.

That’s usually where my resistance comes from.

I’m perverse! I don’t make sense to myself a lot of the time, so I really don’t know why, but I’m enjoying it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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