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AE: Your novels poke fun at the upper levels of American society, which the TV sitcom Frasier also does--it seems fitting that you would end up writing for the show, but how did that connection end up being made?
JK: Whenever people looking for advice on how to break into television ask me, I always [feel that I have to apologize], because this is quite the least helpful story anyone could ever hear about how to break into television.

What happened was, there was a writer named David Lloyd, a TV writer whose work I actually was familiar with in an odd way--because usually, you know, somebody who is a fan of certain shows, like MaryTyler Moore, or Taxi, or Cheers, wouldn't happen to know the writers. But I loved MaryTyler Moore so much that I would watch it in reruns, and I always noticed that my favorite episodes were written by one guy, David Lloyd.

It turned out that David was a huge [P.G.] Wodehouse fan, and when he read [that Blue Heaven was being] compared to Wodehouse in a Boston Globe review, he read the book and he loved it, and gave the book to a lot of people that he knew in Hollywood at Christmas. Among them were Glen Charles and Jim Burroughs, who were the creators of Cheers. One day I got a call from my literary agent, saying, "I got a call from the Cheers guys, and they loved your book, and they want to know if you'd like to create a series for them."

I had never written for TV or thought of writing for TV in my life--not because I looked down on it, but because I was a New Yorker and everything [involved in television production] was in Los Angeles. The last thing I really felt like doing was pulling up stakes and moving to another city where I didn't know anybody and I didn't drive, and [I'd end up] knocking on doors and writing spec scripts and doing all the rather odious things that I was told one has to do if one wants to seek a career in TV.

[Nonetheless], I went out and I met with them, and I pitched them an idea for a show, a comedy set in 1930s Hollywood, because I was thinking, "What is not on TV? What do I enjoy watching that you don't see on network TV?" I was very much taken with old Hollywood screwball comedy -- Preston Sturges and Frank Capra and His Girl Friday, and all those kind of things.

I said, "Is there an idea for a series where it kind of captures the feeling from those movies?" And I thought, "What if you just set it in that period of Hollywood?" [What I came up with] was a show about a movie star called Gloria Vane and her entourage, her family, her mother, her agent…so basically it would be a Joan Crawford sitcom, this actress who, on-screen, was a master of the "school of noble suffering," a master of that Norma Shearer school of terrifically tender, compassionate heroism, and who, of course, off-screen was an insecure, neurotic bitch on wheels, terrified that at age 40 she was hanging tenaciously on to her fading celebrity because she knew that in 10 years she would no longer be on top of the heap.

So I wrote this pilot, and I thought it was rather funny, and they thought it was very funny, and they produced it at Paramount to the tune of two million dollars. And it was such a kick, to somebody who had never written a TV script before, to write one and see it produced so wonderfully, and so lavishly! And of course, NBC, once they were delivered the pilot, had no idea what to do with it. But it made a terrific calling card for my agent to give to the people from Frasier.

They came over and they watched the pilot, and though [my show] didn't get picked up, I got offered to join the [writing] staff of Frasier for the second season. I took it, thinking that it would be [a good job to have] maybe for a year or two, to get me out of the debt I had been in writing musicals and novels. I clicked with the show, and liked it, and they kept promoting me and offering me more money.

I wound up, ironically, partnering with Christopher Lloyd, who is the son of David Lloyd, who is the man who started the whole thing by reading my book. And actually, David Lloyd, I should mention, was still writing at the time--he retired a year or two ago--but he was on the staff of Frasier as a consultant. He was working, oddly, for his son, but at that point, he didn't want to be a full-time staff member or a show runner. He just loved to come in two days a week and help us work on the scripts. And he wrote episodes--he wrote many, many funny episodes of Frasier.

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