For six months in 2022, Bruce Eric Kaplan (I Was a Child) was trying to bring his idea for a television show to fruition, but he kept getting the runaround, so he ended up doing a lot of nothing. Using a journal format, Kaplan lays out what happened--and what didn't--carefully, fretfully, and hilariously in They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir.
With Glenn Close and Pete Davidson on board as the leads in Kaplan's intended show, he and his people started shopping the idea. Meetings--with his team, with studio honchos--were scheduled and then, as often as not, pushed back or canceled. In these pages, Kaplan reports on progress and setbacks, and because he has so much downtime while in waiting mode, he intersperses childhood memories, current events bulletins, home-repair updates, and news of the dead animals he keeps finding on his Los Angeles, Calif., property.
Kaplan, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons, writes with the candor of one of his put-upon characters. In fact, many of his blunt, woeful sentences would work perfectly well as captions ("Is there any way my life could be turned into a musical about nothing ever happening and nothing ever getting fixed?"). His observational humor may conjure Seinfeld--no surprise, as Kaplan wrote for that show's final season--but he also evinces a devotion to his family that turns They Went Another Way into something more than a book about nothing. And yes, it would make a good television show. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer