I thought I'd answer this one from John Neumann, especially because of that first sentence…
Mark, I love your stuff as always, and I did follow the link to buy my Mad Mad World Blu-ray.
Great point about talk shows feeling phony and predictable. I wonder if you've noticed that with game shows, too. In that case, they're violently over-edited. Hasn't anyone ever watched Gene Rayburn?
What do you make of Seth Meyers' delivery? It's fine for fake news once a week, but doesn't seem right for a nightly monologue. He barks his jokes, projecting as if doing dinner theatre, with a rat-a-tat pace that doesn't seem to work well in this forum. Many of his jokes cut off sharply, which is what makes them funny but makes it less of a monologue. I like his material and don't dislike Seth, but he just doesn't feel right.
Question on being a writer. (I write advertising.) How do you cope with the feeling that you're the one who takes an empty page and makes something out of it, and have done that over years and reams of empty pages, yet everyone who isn't a writer believes they know how to do it better than you? Well, not everyone, and I suppose it's the way feedback is delivered. "Could you try…" sounds a lot better than "do this." It's part of the job. Of course it is. But is there anything more heartening than that?
You're right about game shows. Most of them now take 2-3 times their length to "tape"; that is, an hour show can take three hours because of all the redos and extra takes. If a contestant's reaction to winning or losing isn't sufficiently interesting, they think nothing of having them do it over several times until they get the right shot. I've heard The Price is Right does more and more of that, and when my friend Len Wein and I went to see a taping of Deal or No Deal some time ago. they spent five hours (!) taping an hour-long episode. Someone should remember that the time in this country when quiz shows were the most popular, they were all done live.
I like Seth Meyers and I like his material. So far though, I haven't heard him say anything — whether it's delivering a joke or chatting with a guest — that didn't sound like a Weekend Update line. The guy's got one mode of delivery for everything that comes out of his mouth because, I assume, he doesn't have much experience doing anything but Weekend Update. Maybe when he calms down and logs more camera time not doing Weekend Update, he'll develop some other modes.
Now, to your big question…
Writers always have a slight-to-large annoyance when people who can't do what we can do tell us how to do what they can't do but we can. More than once in my career, I've had to turn to a producer or editor and ask, "Where were you when the pages were blank?" But that really doesn't help much because — and this is something I try to remember — our work exists to be criticized by others. So what if a producer or editor or co-worker is saying, "I don't like this joke"? Once the work is publisher or produced, every viewer or reader has the right to say, "I don't like this joke." Sometimes, they don't even have to say that to criticize it. All they have to do is not laugh at it.
I actually am very sensitive about people doing that on work I do not consider finished. I fiercely guard it and show it to no one until I decide it's ready to be seen. Once I do, it's fair game for everyone.
One time, I was offered a TV writing job by a producer who gave me a whole list of ground rules for his writers. One which really scared me off the job was that we weren't allowed to throw anything away. If I wrote a scene — this was back in the era of paper, not computers — I could decide not to use it but I had to mark it as such and hand it in anyway. He then had someone — a kind of story editor/advisor — who would go over it and see if he thought I was wrong and that there was something there. Nothing was to go in the waste basket.
I turned the job down. That wasn't the only reason but that alone would have been. I'm sure I could have smuggled out my trash and not passed it under the eyes of the advisor guy but I didn't want to get into that game. I need to write out what I think will work, stare at it on the page or screen, then decide what, if anything, to fix or discard. I think I became a happier/better/faster writer with the move to word processing. It's so much easier to fix and discard.
But once I decide it's done, I have to accept that it no longer belongs to me in some ways. Others will see it, read it, work with it, etc. Most of them will have opinions, sane or otherwise. At least one person will totally misunderstand it and kick back some reaction that has nothing to do with what I wrote. In television, it's often way more than one. You write a historically-accurate drama set in the old west and someone will come along — maybe even an hour before filming starts when all the sets and costumes are made — and say, "Hey, what if we set this in the stone age?"
One of the main reasons some writers don't write much, get blocked, miss deadlines or never get that great novel finished is that they fear that moment of judgment and, whether they know it or not, seek to delay it by not finishing. So you just have to get used to it…or find another profession.