Sheila Lawrence: TV Writer

Introduction

Lawrence is a TV writer who has written for hit shows like Gilmore Girls, Ugly Betty and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. At the time of our interview, she was focusing her time and energy on a new show for Amazon pitched during the pandemic. Having submitted the pilot episode script, Lawrence was working on the show bible which outlines the show’s first season and explains the characters and the future of the plot. When we spoke, Lawrence said, “I’m waiting for notes and to find out if they’re going to make the show.”

Lawrence’s Past

Growing up, Lawrence had a thousand ideas of what her future could look like, but zero ideas on how to narrow that down. But in college, she took every opportunity to spin her projects into something TV related. For example, “in a religion class, I rewrote the book of Job as a soap opera and did a sociology project that involved the portrayal of gender stereotypes in primetime television, just so I could do a lot of research watching TV.” At that time, however, she didn’t realize she could turn her love of television into a career and it took Lawrence all of college to figure that out. In her senior year, she interned at NBC and it finally clicked. But her more round-about path never bothered her. In Lawrence's eyes, if people know they want to be a film writer in high school, then they would probably go to film school, learn how to write a script, get an agent and learn industry skills. However, Lawrence believes there is no clear path to being a writer – what’s important is having your life experiences inform your writing.

“I personally really value having had a liberal arts education and then learning the technical stuff on the job.”

The Highs and Lows

As a recent college graduate, the idea of working in Hollywood seemed daunting. Everyone always talked about having to pay your dues. Generally, jobs did not pay well, so Lawrence needed extra money to pursue her career. She ended up participating in a game show where she won $9,000. Aside from the financial security this provided, it also gave her an opportunity to give them her resume. She was living in San Diego at the time, but the drive up to LA was worth the excitement she got while working on game shows in development. For the next three years, Lawrence did almost every job available – everything from an assistant and receptionist to a casting and location manager – all in an effort to stay tapped into the industry in any way possible while simultaneously trying to figure out exactly what she wanted to do.

In her mid twenties, Lawrence secured a role as an executive producer’s assistant. During that time, her boss continuously promised to promote her to a segment producer, but never did. Lawrence eventually realized he had no intention of actually promoting her because he wanted to keep her as his assistant. Lawrence was faced with the decision of whether to stay or quit. With no real plan ahead, Lawrence took a risk and left. In the days that followed, she called any and all sitcoms, but unfortunately they had all wrapped filming. During that same week, her car was totaled and she was evicted from her apartment. Lawrence was in a pure panic wondering if she had made the wrong choice. Luckily a friend reached out asking if she had ever been a writers assistant and Lawrence responded, “No, but I will know everything about it by tomorrow.” And she did. She “stayed up all night, called friends, and read up.” She was determined to do well at the job despite having no previous writing experience. Her first day as a writing assistant was a pivotal moment in her career, “​​I walked in and it was literally like the clouds parted and the beam of light came down and it was like, ah, these are my people.”

From then on, Lawrence’s job was to transcribe everything being said in the writers’ room, which was especially difficult because “jokes were flying fast and furious and writers were convinced it was funnier the way they said it and you somehow didn’t type it right.” Despite the difficulties, it was an invaluable learning experience because Lawrence had the opportunity to immerse herself in a writer's environment and learn how to develop a script.

After a year as a writer’s assistant at Nickelodeon, Lawrence was faced with another hard decision. Should she accept a scholarship to pursue a Master’s Degree in Scotland or stay and have the opportunity to have her sketch featured in the sketch comedy show she was working on. Excited for the opportunity to have her sketch featured, she stayed. Eventually Lawrence wanted to understand how sitcoms worked and ended up leaving Nickelodeon to work as a writers assistant on an NBC sitcom called Mad About You. But Lawrence notes, it was “another one where they weren’t going to promote me. Someone actually heard my boss say, ‘She is too good an assistant, I can't make her a writer.’” Once again, Lawrence decided to leave rather than stay on a show where she was undervalued. So that’s how she ended up as a writers’ assistant on Friends. While working on Friends, however, Mad About You gained a new show runner who Lawrence had previously worked closely with. That’s how she got her first big network writing job, as a staff writer for Mad About You.

“​​I walked in and it was literally like the clouds parted and the beam of light came down and it was like, ah, these are my people.”

After working on different network shows, Lawrence started writing for Gilmore Girls. Lawrence was a fan of the show even before she wrote on it. Being part of the staff was a valuable and memorable experience. She loved the smart witty aspects of the show. Lawrence ended up writing for seasons 2, 3 and 4 before she left, which was a tough call. As a writer, she was worried that she was forgetting how to tell the bigger story because Gilmore Girls tended to focus on relatively small ones. Furthermore, it is expected that writers who move up the ranks take on more responsibility, but she was solely in the writers room on Gilmore Girls. Lawrence wasn’t developing the skills that would be expected of her as a co-executive producer. For example, she would need to know how to work with a director, be able to work with budget and production needs, and have the authority to make decisions and move things along in the writers room.

Following Gilmore Girls, the next steps for Lawrence were difficult. In the TV world, one hour shows are known to be dramas and 30 minute shows are known to be comedies. Having come off an hour long show that was more of a comedy, she was only being considered for dramas: “Hollywood only remembers the last thing that you did. I’m still to this day fighting to get back to half hours.” She prefers 30 minute shows not only because they are usually comedies, but because her brain works better with smaller stories. Lawrence loves being able to “tell smaller, more relational, more observational stories that lend themselves to a half hour.”

A couple years later, the creator of Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino, reached out to Lawrence about her new show, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. At the time, Lawrence had been bouncing around to different shows. Ultimately, she decided to join Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and was one of the original writers of the first season. Halfway through season 2, however, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel wanted their writers to be based in New York. Although she loved writing for the show, Lawrence did not want to move to New York. But Lawrence had always dreamed of being part of a staff of an outstanding comedy and she achieved that on the Emmy award winning Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She notes that writing for a show that captures the hearts of so many takes hard work with a lot of luck.

Life Advice

Every person has their own hurdles to overcome and for Lawrence they were her insecurities about writing. Interestingly, this is common with Lawrence mentioning that a good amount of writers aren’t the most confident despite constantly putting themselves out there. For her, accepting that a negative and demoralizing voice inside of you exists but trying to move past it was an uphill battle. Lawrence notes, “I try to look at evidence from my career… I couldn’t have been fooling people for three decades now.” She learned that you have to recognize what you have to say is meaningful, relatable and worthwhile.

"You have to strike the right balance of being confident and being humble."

When thinking about what she would say to her high school self, Lawrence mentions, “it’s going to come back around to the confidence thing… I don’t think current generations have as much trouble in general with that as perhaps past generations, but I would say that you have to strike the right balance of being confident and being humble. I think I got the humble part right but at the expense of thinking, ‘Oh no, I can’t do that... I better just sit back here real quietly and listen and learn.’ At a certain point you have to jump. It would make me sad to think that all the people who end up running things in the world may know even less than a lot of quieter people, it’s just that they’re willing to be like, ‘yeah, I can do this.’ So that’s again where I think ‘confidence but mixed with humility’ because no one likes a 20 year old who thinks they know it all. No one.”