“Those writers make a lot of money”: 12 works of unpublished or unproduced TV fiction

Like many wannabe creative types stuck in a thankless service-industry job, New Girl’s Nick Miller isn’t a bartender—he’s an author, forever laboring on an undead epic titled Z Is For Zombie. Well, “laboring” is a relative term: Up until the second-season episode “Eggs,” Nick hasn’t actually done much work on the novel, instead using the concept of Z Is For Zombie as a defense against his innate shiftlessness. Nick has good reason to be scared of the amount of work it’ll take to complete the novel, a trial made more daunting when it’s revealed he unknowingly lifted its premise, setting, and supporting cast of lycanthropes from the Twilight franchise. Another reason to procrastinate: The first draft of Z Is For Zombie—excerpted at the end of “”—is terrible, fraught with misspellings of the word “rhythm,” transparent shots at the author’s deadbeat father, and non-literary filler like a word search that contains no words.