Writers (As Portrayed on TV): Just a Bunch of Jerks?

I was recently watching the show Younger, in which a familiar TV character trope appeared: a writer who is a self-absorbed, ruthlessly ambitious jerk.

The show is set at a fictional New York publishing house, and many of the portrayals of the authors are fun caricatures — a grotesque take on a George R.R. Martin type as a lecherous creep obsessed with his own character “Princess Tam Tam” is particularly cringe.

The writer as a boyfriend “don’t” is something we see pretty often. The Younger character (he is only in it for a few episodes) is initially charming and wittier than most of the heroine's suitors but quickly reveals himself to be using her for her career-boosting potential.

I was reminded of Jack Berger, Carrie from Sex and the City’s writer boyfriend. He infamously dumps her via a post-it note after becoming a progressively more insecure jerk during their relationship.

Their main relationship problem revolves around him believing his writing is more intellectually worthy than Carrie’s more financially successful dating column.

I think this stereotype of writers as self-absorbed monsters is very common (whereas in films writers are more likely to end up in a crime mystery or something more nuanced? Correct me if I’m wrong!).

The actor who played Berger so well, Ron Livingston, has gone on in recent years to star in a show called Loudermilk, in which he plays a washed-up former music writer who torments everyone around him with a scathing wit that, while often hilarious, would probably be better channelled into his creative outlets.

Loudermilk does grow as a character, but he has sworn off writing (I admit I haven’t seen the third season as it’s not available in the UK, it’s possible he has a comeback as a writer, but it seems unlikely as he is a Gen X dude who hates anything that has happened since the 90s!).

In Californication, David Duchovny’s middle-aged enfant terrible Hank Moody is a former serious novelist turned Hollywood writer who has sex with virtually every woman he meets.

It’s heavily reliant on Duchovny’s charm that the character doesn’t become a (total) skeeve fest. The trope of him being a tortured artist is explored in a fairly shallow fashion, but largely the show expects the viewer to accept that being a problematic man is the price of great art.

In The Affair, Noah Solloway, played by Dominic West, is a failed writer. His father-in-law is a very successful genre fiction writer, which Noah both envies and scorns from his “serious writer” perch.

Noah meets a mysterious woman, and they have a passionate affair. This and her tragic backstory are something he uses to craft a bestselling thriller novel. Success quickly turns him into an egomaniac and even more of a self-absorbed douche than he was before.

Women writers are generally not given such harsh treatment by television writers. Could it be that there are fewer women writers in the room/thus they are painted as less interesting/three-dimensional? That is, if we even see women writers on screen, because trying to think of examples I came up with only a few.

Carrie Bradshaw was annoying, sure, but she had a stable friend group and no vices besides chain-smoking.

In Girls, created by Lena Dunham, the main character Hannah Horvath is (improbably) able to support herself in NYC writing navel-gazing memoir for an online press. She does have a creepy encounter with a successful older writer (played to perfection by Matthew Rhys), who fulfils the TV trope of male writers being terrible humans.

Liz Lemon in 30 Rock is the head comedy writer at a thinly veiled Saturday Night Live type show where she fulfils the cliche of the woman in charge being underappreciated at every turn and unlucky in love. She is good at her job though, the only thing steering the catastrophic ship away from disaster at every turn.

In The Gilmore Girls, both Rory Gilmore and her on/off boyfriend Jess are young aspiring writers. They bond over a shared love of books, but Jess, when we first meet him, is the oft-seen angry young guy who doesn’t feel at home in the world.

In later seasons we see Jess working for a small independent press he starts which of course has published his book. The show expects us to fill in the blanks that Jess must be a good writer because of what a troubled soul (*cough* a-hole) he has been in all past encounters with him.

Rory’s own writing coasts effortlessly from prep school paper to Yale Daily News to an op/ed in The New Yorker, which she has perplexingly failed to follow up with much when we catch up with her in the four reunion episodes Gilmore Girls: A Year in The Life. She is (depressingly!) ageing out of the freelance market when we see her struggling to impress a younger web magazine editor at a job interview.

Her youthful optimism has all but disappeared, which is maybe why many found the reunion a bit bleak compared to the feel-good whimsy of the original series. Star’s Hollow is a place where nothing bad ever happens/the real world doesn’t tarnish it, and for whatever reason, the creators decided to let the shine come off of its biggest hope, Rory Gilmore.

Was becoming a successful writer out in the big bad world really that much of a bridge too far for a privileged, albeit highly intelligent white girl? Seemingly the answer is yes.

So writing either turns us into insecure ego monsters, sex addicts, or frazzled failures according to most TV shows. While I know it’s one of the hardest things to succeed at professionally, it seems particularly gloomy in its depiction, even by the standards of the life of a tortured artist!

It’s easy enough to pillory the self-absorbed nature and fragile ego of some (ahem 😉) writers, in many instances it’s perhaps writers’ rooms having fun with their own weaknesses. But it does pan out to an overall negative and loser-ish portrayal of writers in TV that is (arguably?) a tiny bit overexaggerated.

But it would be nice to occasionally see something a bit more nuanced than the "writer as egotistical jerk" we have come to know and expect, especially whenever a ruffle haired/bespectacled/laptop-attached character appears in a show.

It’s good for a cheap laugh, but maybe writers don’t quite deserve the bad rap they get in most TV shows. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just nitpicking?

*This article was originally published by the author on Medium