Jennifer Weiner’s best seller, The Next Best Thing. (
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Jennifer Weiner’s hit summer novel “The Next Best Thing” gives a juicy fictional account of life behind the scenes for a female TV showrunner — from high-maintenance actors to clueless network execs.
But anyone who noticed in her book-jacket bio that Weiner created a TV show of her own in 2011 that was canceled after one season had to wonder how much of her own experience she was drawing on. We got the scoop from the author:
Q: In “The Next Best Thing,” your protagonist Ruth’s show gets picked up by a major network. How much did your ABC Family show “State of Georgia” inspire the book?
A: With all my books, there are elements I pull from real life and then amplify — I make them more funny, more sad, more poignant, more real . . . and then there’s stuff I just flat-out make up. So, “Georgia” getting picked up, then canceled, was an inspiration . . . but I wouldn’t go looking too hard for similarities. (However, I did have to cast a goat, and that was just too good not to use!)
Q: How closely does Ruth’s experience running a show mirror your own experience?
A: There were some similarities between me and Ruth (we both learned our shows had been canceled by reading about it online), but there were also lots of differences (I never had to work with the current wife of an ex-flame).
Q: A lot of the book revolves around Ruth’s disappointments with the process of getting a show to air. How different was the vision for “Georgia” from what we saw on TV?
A: I think that if you take any show, there are major differences between the pilot, as written and as shot. So yes, the pilot that Jeff Greenstein wrote, about a curvy, confident girl who was going to change the world without letting the world change her, changed a lot when we cast a girl [Raven-Symoné] who wasn’t curvy, no matter how we dressed her or shot her.
Q: Has anyone at ABC read the book and thought they found characters inspired by them (good or bad)?
A: I haven’t heard from anyone at the studio or the network since the show was canceled.
Q: The most striking similarity between “Georgia” and the series in the book is that both lead actresses lost a lot of weight after they were cast in the lead roles. Could you talk about that? And were you concerned with Raven-Symoné or ABC taking offense?
A: As for Raven-Symoné losing all that weight, I wasn’t concerned about her being offended. It happened, the whole tabloid-reading world knows it, and I don’t blame her for doing it. [But] I worried a lot about my readers feeling betrayed. I’m known for writing plus-size heroines who get the guy, the funny lines, the great clothes, the happy endings, without magically losing weight, and the week the show premiered, People had this huge story about Raven’s incredible slim-down. In the pilot we wrote, our star was told she was too big to play the sexpot lead of Damn Yankees, and, after “Georgia,” Raven went on to a starring role on Broadway [in Sister Act]. Oh, the irony!
Q. Are you interested in more TV writing? Or do you have the same feelings towards the industry as Ruth does at the end of the book?
A: I’d love to write for TV again. I think it’s one of the most exciting places in the world to tell stories. I’m still convinced that there needs to be some diversity in terms of the characters that young women see held up as beautiful and role models.