The varieties of show-business experience
Recently, I had a conversation with a rabbi who runs a synagogue in Southern California. The language and idiom of show business permeates that part of the country — everyone in the Los Angeles area, it sometimes seems, has a connection to the entertainment industry — so it didn’t surprise me when he told me that he thinks of himself as the “showrunner” of his synagogue.
I’m two-thirds of the way through a Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary, on my way — God willing and the people consenting — to ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church. And the more time I spend in this new vocation, the more I think my rabbi friend has it exactly right. The overlap between clergyman and executive producer is considerable.
I spent 35 years in the television business as a writer, producer, and showrunner — the person responsible for the creative direction of a series, the hiring and firing of key personnel, and the one everyone credits when the show is a hit and blames when it isn’t. A showrunner is the boss the way a medieval baron was: not nearly as powerful as expected, with a lot of warring and unpredictable constituencies to placate, and always worried about seditious plots and treasonous whispers.
In both, there is the burden of authority — you are responsible for everything, and when something goes wrong, it is emphatically your problem to solve. The phone rings for you. The buck stops with you. In both, there is the matter of consensus-building: you have constituencies with competing interests and strong opinions, and your job is to keep all of them moving in roughly the same direction without letting any of them notice that you’re doing it. If you do both jobs right, it looks effortless and even slightly mysterious. It all comes down to this: in both jobs, you are trying to put on the best possible show for the least possible money.
There is, however, one significant difference between being a showrunner and being a parish priest. At least, I hope there is. I’m fairly confident that in my future career as an Episcopal priest, I will not be called upon to solve any murders.
I say “fairly confident” because if you spend any time watching British mystery programs — the kind that live on PBS and BritBox and have been running continuously until they all blur together — you could be forgiven for concluding that an essential duty of an Anglican priest is to be able to solve the murder of the kindly old eccentric who, it turns out, was secretly living off of Nazi gold he smuggled home after the war. Or, you know, something like that.
The local vicar, in this particular fictional universe, turns out to be an indispensable expert in every criminal investigation. He rides his bicycle around a picturesque English village — inevitably named something like Little-Cheddar-on-the-Biscuit or Blowing Piddle — and he ferrets out murderers with a clockwork efficiency that allows him to make it to the pulpit in time to deliver a thematically appropriate sermon.
A sermon, by the way, that you never see him write. And that’s really why I hope my rabbi friend is wrong, and the jobs really aren’t similar.
When I was running television shows, my days were consumed by the 10,000 things that were not writing. Budget meetings. Network calls. Casting sessions. Human resources situations of the type that occasionally end up with everyone hiring a lawyer. What drew me to show business in the first place — actually writing comedy scripts — was reliably the last item on the day’s agenda. You know how it is. Sometimes the job swallows the vocation.
So I have made myself a small private promise. I plan to be a focused and dedicated member of the clergy. I plan to preach, and pray, and visit the sick, and celebrate the sacraments, and do the thing I actually came here to do. I will keep the annual rummage sale to a manageable level of drama. I will try to make a happy peace among the squabbling members of the Altar Guild. But if there are any mysterious parish murders, I’ll let someone else handle those.
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