“Those writers make a lot of money”: 12 works of unpublished or unproduced TV fiction

Like many wannabe creative types stuck in a thankless service-industry job, New Girl’s Nick Miller isn’t a bartender—he’s an author, forever laboring on an undead epic titled Z Is For Zombie. Well, “laboring” is a relative term: Up until the second-season episode “Eggs,” Nick hasn’t actually done much work on the novel, instead using the concept of Z Is For Zombie as a defense against his innate shiftlessness. Nick has good reason to be scared of the amount of work it’ll take to complete the novel, a trial made more daunting when it’s revealed he unknowingly lifted its premise, setting, and supporting cast of lycanthropes from the Twilight franchise. Another reason to procrastinate: The first draft of Z Is For Zombie—excerpted at the end of “”—is terrible, fraught with misspellings of the word “rhythm,” transparent shots at the author’s deadbeat father, and non-literary filler like a word search that contains no words.

While many writerly efforts by Simpsons characters have real-world analogs (for instance, Marge’s seafaring bodice ripper, The Harpooned Heart), only Seymour Skinner’s brief foray into the realm of cautionary speculative fiction is such a blatant rip-off that it reduces a relatively reasonable fellow like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon to denounce it in no uncertain, extremely unkind terms. It’s not just because Skinner’s novel about “a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advance cloning techniques” so closely resembles a Michael Crichton bestseller and its Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation—it’s also because the title Billy And The Cloneasaurus carries none of the fleet, catchy mystique of Jurassic Park. The sequence of “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song” where an out-of-work Skinner pitches his novel in the Kwik-E-Mart is an expertly written bit of comedic bait-and-switch, but it also demonstrates how the hopelessly square, pop-culture-illiterate once-and-future administrator belongs in a principal’s chair. But what more can be expected from a man who stole another man’s identity out of pure spinelessness?

New Warden is a disturbingly plausible, probably confessional screenplay written by Warden Stefan Gentles about his experiences running the prison where George Bluth Sr. is incarcerated. Every random sample (“Listen, new fish, that bunk was open because the last guy wouldn’t do the things you’re going to do”) suggests the sinister side of its scribe, whose vision manifests most clearly in a running motif in which the titular new warden beats misbehaving inmates with a pillowcase full of batteries. Gentles’ sleaze even crops up in his quid pro quo with Hollywood exec Maeby Fünke, but he’s surprisingly collaborative. He wisely trades crabs for chlamydia at the suggestion of Lucille Bluth, and he stages the show as his granddaughter’s school play, delighting in the violence of his imagination in spite the children’s stilted delivery of lines like, “Nobody sells any coke in this pen without daddy getting a taste.”

From the moment she steps into Sam Malone’s bar, Diane Chambers describes herself as a “poetess,” but she didn’t write much of anything until an attempt at prose in season two’s “.” In one of Cheers’ rare celebrity cameos, Dick Cavett drops by the bar, and Diane naturally can’t resist hounding him with her poetry. To her horror, Cavett blows her off, only to turn around and suggest Sam may have a memoir in him, even offering to hook him up with a publisher. Sam manages to flatter Diane into ghostwriting for him, but to protect her academic reputation, she adopts the pen name Jessica Simpson-Bourget. After writing a few sample chapters of a ballplayer’s struggle with alcoholism, Cavett returns to reject the book, but suggests that sex sells, and with some of Sam’s womanizing thrown in, another publisher could go for the book. Diane insists she would never prostitute her talents, but Sam slyly asks, “Would Jessica Simpson-Bourget?” “That little smut-peddler? In a minute!” Soon they’re back to work on a steamier version of the memoir, leading to the terrific gag of Diane calmly asking Coach for a glass of water, then throwing it in her own face and declaring, “Boy, can I write!” Even though the book is never mentioned again, it’s nice to see that, stripped of her pretensions, Diane manages to get more written—and enjoy it more—than she ever did in the world of academia.

In space, no one can hear you scream. But if someone’s in space and screaming, chances are they were dragged into one of the writing workshop exercises staged by Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Crow T. Robot, whose only qualifications as a writer are a head filled with bad movies and way too much time on his hands. Hosting a reader of his sci-fi spec script “Earth Vs. Soup”—“capturing that Cold War flavor”—Crow insists on absolute fidelity to what’s on the page, even when Joel Robinson complains that he’s being asked to perform “six pages of ‘no’s!” Let he who has never been paid by the word cast the first stone.

Frasier rarely wasted a chance to work in a musical number, usually as a chance to give star Kelsey Grammer a chance to flex his booming baritone (see: the show’s theme, sung by its star). The third season’s “Martin Does It His Way” gives co-star John Mahoney a chance to croon, building a plot around Martin Crane’s secret hobby ghostwriting Frank Sinatra songs. While working as a cop, Martin apparently killed time on stakeouts writing big band numbers and squirreling them away in a shoebox. With a little help from his sons, Martin polishes off the song “Groovy Lady” and sends it off to Ol’ Blue Eyes. There’s no interest, but Martin’s able to flex his songwriting chops all the same. He also gets the opportunity to hear the song performed live, when Frasier mounts a performance at a funeral in lieu of a eulogy for his unlikable aunt.