101. Elijah Aron, Television Writer

Show Notes:

As a student, Elijah Aron started writing plays, musicals, and making weird films with friends. After school, he moved to San Francisco and started a theater company with friends from college. They transformed an old shoe store into a theater, where Elijah worked and slept. He talks about the imaginative and adventurous shows, which included surrealist works and musical elements, and simulated carnival rides, but despite their creative success, he struggled financially and worked as a temp and at a bookstore to support himself where he met a wide assortment of interesting individuals.

Working in Television Elijah initially pursued the idea theater, as he was drawn to weird art and unconventional ideas. He explains how he began to write scripts for a TV show called Black Scorpion and in 2000, Elijah moved to LA to try his hand at the TV business where he started working as a low-level executive at Disney Television Animation.

Tips on Pitching a Television Show Elijah talks about his career at Disney where he became a development executive, helped produce cartoons and look for new shows. He shares tips on pitching that he learned from this experience, including which pitches sold and why. He emphasizes the importance of being relaxed and friendly in meetings, as well as summarizing the idea in a sentence to sell it. His job involved listening to pitches and working as a programming executive, reading every draft of the script, and looking at storyboards. Elijah also developed and wrote television shows, and he wrote some TV movies. However, he wanted to move into adult TV and was hired on the show Drawn Together, which was an animated reality show with different characters from different cartoons.

100000 Jokes and Working in the Writer’s Room Elijah talks about his experience in TV writers rooms and recalls the first joke that got him quoted in TV Guide. He spent a decade of writing for network sitcoms, including Better Off Ted and Raising Hope. Elijah's work on these shows was characterized by stress, high-pressure work, and a focus on ratings. He enjoyed working with talented writers and developing sitcoms, but eventually changed course to work on Bojack Horseman, an animated show about a horse actor dealing with depression, and Undone, an animated show about a young woman who learns to move through time and space. He states that being a TV writer is challenging, as it involves collaboration, rewriting, and finding the right balance between being funny and not being offensive. He talks about writing jokes and how he combines inspiration and a method of thinking that helps him find the funny. He also mentions that most writers do not want to use AI for ideas and/or writing, but that it can be useful for research.

Influential Harvard Courses and Professors Elijah discusses his lifelong career in the arts, focusing on his extracurricular activities such as creating weird plays and participating in a community of artists. He mentions his experiences with free speech and the creation of a zine called The Little Friend at Harvard, where anyone could publish opinions. He also shared a story about making white jumpsuits with numbers on the back, which led to a cultural education. He took animation classes with Derek Lamb and Janet Perlman, which provided him with a history of animation and allowed him to create his own films. He also mentioned that he is a fan of Helen Venders’ poetry classes.

Timestamps:

05:08: Creating and staging surreal, experimental plays in college

09:43: Career paths, including temping, writing, and TV production

16:58: TV show development and pitching, with insights on what sells and what doesn't 

22:07: Writing for TV shows, including jokes and animation experience

27:02: TV writing career, from sitcoms to animated shows

33:12: TV writing, comedy vs. drama, and joke-writing pr