Failed Sitcom Scripts

Dear Dr. Plume,

      I know you are a professor and not an entertainer, but I am a sitcom writer whose just had his fifth script turned down by a major network. Do all famous sitcom writers go through this long process of rejection?

                                                                             Leif in Sioux Falls, SD

Dear Leif,

      Let me tell you a little story about a very smart and talented man I know.
      Many years ago, when TV sitcoms were just hitting the big time with the success of pioneers like Lucille Ball, this man decided that he wanted to be a big time writer for one of those sitcoms one day.
      So he started writing. His first drafts were too complicated for his peers, what with the characters snappy, realistic dialogue about existentialism and constant cigarette smoking, the kind of stuff his fellow 5th graders never appreciated.
      For years, he toiled, finally completing that first script seven years later, by which time it had morphed into a workplace comedy at the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, it was rejected by the studios.
      He then began a career in education and started writing new sitcoms aimed at informing the uneducated.
      His first two attempts were historical comedies about the Ming Dynasty and the Spanish Inquisition, respectively. Then, an adaptation of Moby Dick. Each was met with little enthusiasm.
      In the late seventies, this man wrote the first sitcom to educate the world about global warming. He called it, Day-yum, It Hot in this Motha, hoping to capitalize on the growing popularity of urban culture. This man was one of the first people to even mention global warming long before it became as politicized as it is now. Though he based his theory not on a mountain of scientific evidence but simply on the succession of a number of very hot summers and his sneaking suspicion that the sun was growing. Again, he was rejected.
      In the 1980’s, he wrote an animated sitcom, predating The Simpsons, to help teach young people about the reproductive system, an area in which he had always himself been quite curious.
      Though it took him several years to come up with a pen name that would allow him to again contact literary agents whilst circumventing numerous orders of restraint, he never gave up and that sitcom about reproduction eventually became…you guessed it! Everybody Loves Raymond.
      As you may have figured out by now, this man was not me, but a gentleman named Lester Maddox whom I was forced to sit next to on a transatlantic flight and who insisted upon telling me his entire life story rather than simply allowing me to sit and peacefully read my collected writings of Mao Tse-tung.
      My point is, there’s certainly hope for your failing career, though I suggest you drop the struggling writer shtick and get a real job.

                                                                             Very Truly Yours Me,
                                                                             Dr. Douglas H. Plume*