Billion-Dollar Kiss

The Kiss that Saved Dawson’s Creek

and Other Adventures in TV Writing

Jeffrey Stepakoff

“Call it ‘Adventures in the Small Screen Trade,’ a memoir with insight into history, culture and business. Billion-Dollar Kiss tells its story with everything we strive for in great TV -- some great lines, cool twists, and the one thing we don’t always achieve: truth.” - Juan Carlos Coto, Writer-Producer, Invasion, The Pretender, the Dead Zone

When Jeffrey Stepakoff was graduating with an MFA in playwriting, he imagined a life in the New York theater, wearing a beret and smoking clove cigarettes. Writing for the “boob tube” didn't even cross his mind. But, he ended up in L.A. in the late 80's, when television was experiencing an explosion – both creative and financial. After the billion-dollar syndication of Seinfeld, when studios were paying astronomical amounts of money to writers to create the next Friends, or ER, the sudden mania for scripted entertainment made the TV writer a hot commodity. He found himself meeting with big agents, inside primetime story rooms, pitch meetings, and on the set of some of TV's most popular shows, and at the epicenter of what can really only be called a gold rush.

Weaving his personal story with Television's, Stepakoff takes us behind the scenes to show what it's like to have a story idea one week and see it come to life and be seen by millions of people just a week later. Stepakoff also takes us inside to explain what we're watching and why by exploring the growing problems of media consolidation, the effects of interference from executives, the lack of diversity, and what reality TV is doing to quality scripted television. When the market crashed and the dust settled, TV executives and the media conglomerates they worked for were sitting on a broken business model. Slowly, a new programming idea began to take hold – what if the writers and their salaries were removed from the equation? Reality TV was born and the TV writer suddenly became obsolete – at least temporarily.