In this week’s Hollywood Stories, Richard Rushfield sits down with TV comedy legend Nell Scovell — creator of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and writer for everything from The Simpsons to Late Night with David Letterman.
Before breaking into TV, Scovell sharpened her voice at Spy and Vanity Fair, where editors Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter taught her to “be funnier, go harder, be meaner.” She shares how she defied her agent to leave Vanity Fair and dive into the boys’ club of TV writers rooms, a dynamic she was still battling decades later — even on The Muppets in the 2010s.
She also opens up about her sharp, hilarious memoir Just the Funny Parts, which she jokes she really wanted to title, “Penis, Penis, Penis, Penis, Me, Penis.” (Scovell: "It would have sold more.") Richard calls it “one of the best memoirs of working in television I’ve ever read.”

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