Rob Long is in Tbilisi, a city he last saw 26 years ago when it was broke and hopeful and is now prosperous and — inconveniently — cozy with Vladimir Putin. Turns out streaming had the same trajectory: total freedom, total data and somehow the timidest programming decisions in television history. Rob has notes for Netflix executives: bring back the 22-episode season — nobody wants a six-year relationship with your drama. Then his godson Jackson shows him the real numbers — how many viewers abandon his Instagram Reels by the one-second mark — and Rob realizes he’s become exactly the kind of storyteller he just finished lecturing.

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The summer box office is having its best season since before the pandemic — and the first real hits weren’t the franchise machines, they were two cheap horror movies made by guys who started on YouTube. Naturally, the industry is busy reading the wrong signs: mine Reddit, buy a graphic novel, staff up a division. Rob Long has seen this con before — he knows a successful project that was a script disguised as a self-published graphic novel with a fan base of five. The right sign is simpler, and it comes by way of a high school basketball coach and a friend who survived a stroke: We didn’t lose the ability to make a fun summer movie. We lost the feeling. And the feeling is the part worth getting back.

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Rob Long was 24 years old when he met James Burrows, one of the creators and executive producers of Cheers, where he had just been hired as a staff writer on a 10 week contract. It didn't take 10 weeks for him to realize just how brilliant Burrows was. The Will & Grace and Friends director knew how to tell if material worked even if it didn’t do much at the runthrough. He knew when a line was funnier when they threw it away, and he knew when a scene needed to be tossed and re-written. Rob still remembers the day he met Burrows — and the six words that stuck with him all these years later.

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Rob Long’s friend has a near-perfect system for staying in touch: a text every five weeks to the day, the wording on rotation, the calls auto-booked — friendship by tickler file, a little bit human and a lot robot. Naturally, Rob sets out to sabotage it. But AI in Hollywood is a much different, nuanced debate. From screenwriting manuals to the algorithmic clockwork of Law & Order, Rob believes that the one thing the machines can’t do is make a really interesting, unexpected mess. So we should.

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Clint Eastwood just turned 96 — older than the talkies, a man who’s been alive for every talking picture ever made. Which got Rob thinking about Dirty Harry and a 1952 thriller almost nobody remembers called The Sniper: same city, same crime, same rooftops, 19 years apart, and two completely different Americas. You can read the country off them like rings on a tree. Or, you can just write them off and refer to the films as “dated” — a grave mistake, according to Rob.

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Rob Long is watching a Satyajit Ray film on Criterion while eating ice cream and staring at his phone — which means he is, essentially, just eating ice cream. Rob is a pro at keeping his head down. Writers do it at auditions, following along with their own words instead of watching what actors are doing to them. Which turns out to be expensive, because the two actors who read “You’ve heard of me” as completely opposite character choices taught the writers something their script didn’t know yet. Heads down feels productive. Heads up is where the show actually lives.

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Rob Long has a favorite story about network upfronts: a television network, unable to decide which of three pilots to schedule, flew all three casts to New York on the same plane, collected focus group results mid-flight, and met them at the gate — whisking some into Manhattan and stardom, and sending the others home. It contains everything you need to know about Hollywood: extravagant spending, procrastination and cruelty masquerading as efficiency. But here’s the thing — the focus group never actually went away. It just moved to TikTok. And it’s been telling Hollywood exactly what audiences want since approximately 1994. They just won’t look.

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In Amsterdam last month, in front of a Dutch painting of a plump, nearly bald, angelic figure of indistinct gender, an old friend turned to Rob Long and said three words: “Hear me out.” It’s the great phrase that buys a few seconds of grace before you say something insane — along with its writers’ room cousin, not this, but. Oftentimes the ideas that emerge out of hear me out aren’t usable whatsoever. But Rob makes the case that its those risky Hear Me Out projects that the entertainment business runs on.

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Rob Long remembers Radford Studios — the working lot in Studio City where the parking sheet promised “premium” spots that never quite existed, the guard who couldn’t understand why you’d skip the Leave It to Beaver street for the fifth floor of the garage, and a writer friend who stumbled, mid-meltdown, onto the abandoned set of Gilligan’s Island. This week, news broke that Goldman Sachs — having seized the lot after Hackman Capital Partners defaulted on a $1.1 billion mortgage — is selling it to Netflix for a fraction of what Hackman paid in 2021. Turns out the premium parking wasn’t premium after all. It never really was.

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Rob Long is at a bar on a Monday night, pretending to pay attention to a conversation while secretly watching CBS’ The Neighborhood on a TV across the room, sound off. He predicts every beat of the episode anyway. A friend in the business says that’s exactly the problem with those shows. Rob disagrees — politely, and then less politely. Sitcoms are the same as they always are. That’s the point.

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