Author, Author

A character decides to write a book. Usually they take on the persona of a tortured genius.

Car 54, Where Are You?

Appearances

• Car 54, Where Are You?: Season 2, episode 28, "The Loves of Sylvia Schnauser" (1963). The Captain asks Sylvia to go undercover to a scam publishing house to pose as a writer. She gets a little too into character and writes a book about the "loves" of her life, which turn out to be her favorite foods.
• The Patty Duke Show: Season 2, episode 19, "Author! Author!" (1964). Patty reads about a teenager who published a book and decides to do the same. She dresses in black, sequesters herself in her "garret" (the attic), and moons around like a tortured artist. Her final product, "I Was a Teenage Teenager," is, as Martin put it, "a combination of Hemingway, Salinger, and Superman, only not grammatical," with random cooking recipes that she thoughtfully threw in "for nothing."
• The Dick Van Dyke Show: Season 5, episode 12, "See Rob Write, Write Rob Write" (1965). Laura wants to write a children's story to go along with some illustrations drawn by the butcher's son. When she asks Rob to proofread it for her, he gets a little carried away.
• The Addams Family: Season 2, episode 8, "Morticia, the Writer" (1965). Morticia is appalled by the wholesome, happy books Wednesday and Pugsley are reading in school, so she decides to re-write some classic children's stories, but her dedication to her work leaves no time for her to spend with Gomez, and he worries her future success as an author will take her away from him.
• Cheers: Season 2, episode 9, "They Call Me Mayday" (1983). Dick Cavett offers to get Sam's autobiography published, so Sam asks Diane to help him write it. When Dick deems their first draft too tame, they get to work writing about Sam's steamy love affairs.
• Night Court: Season 4, episode 3, "Author, Author" (1986). Bull writes a children's book to enter a contest, and he's told that his book frightened the children.
• The Golden Girls: Season 4, episode 16, "Two Rode Together" (1989). Blanche and Rose collaborate on a children's book based on stories Rose's parents told her as a child, and it has them at each other's throats, but eventually they find out that Rose's parents got the stories from a published book, so they have to abandon the project.
• Murphy Brown: Season 3, episode 16, "The Novel" (1991). The gang finds out that Jim wrote a novel, and they all want to read it, but he's reluctant to let them. When they all read it, they realize that the main character is a lot like Jim, and his love interest could only be Murphy.
• Black Books: Season 3, episode 2, "Elephants and Hens" (2004). After hosting a kids day at the bookshop, Bernard and Manny think they could write a children's book, but they can't think of an idea, so they get drunk and somehow manage to write a brilliant children's book about an elephant who lost his balloon, but they don't think they could handle being rich and famous authors, so they burn it.