Through The E-Mail Looking Glass

By Joel Stein

Someone is e-mailing something mean about you right now. And you are lucky you don't know about it. Trust me. You see, two years ago, VH1 asked me to come up with an idea for an animated sitcom. I did, and for two years they have pretended they were going to make it. It was all going quite well until last week, when I got an e-mail from Lauren Zalaznick, senior vice president of original programming at VH1. She was forwarding notes she had written on the eighth version of my script, most of which were smart and helpful. It also had these comments she forgot to delete: "acts II and III are bizarrely rough--amateurish, not funny, awful structure"; "i'm actually shocked that anyone thinks it's good enough to turn in as a first draft, let alone a finished one"; "makes me all the more sure that joel cannot write this series"; "I think we should find out who edits joel's column and get him/her in here!!" and, most painfully, "tell him to use a real font."

Now, I'm slightly callous to criticism, getting so much of it from octogenarian TIME readers and women I've slept with, though, oddly, never when those Venn diagrams overlap. And Zalaznick's criticisms were entirely accurate, except for the part about my editor, who is a total dimwit and barely even reads these things. See?

But being insulted accidentally to my face was still pretty shocking. Especially since last October, Zalaznick wrote a column for openletters.net about a producer who accidentally sent her an e-mail in which he called her a two-word derogatory term that this magazine is definitely not going to let me print.

When Zalaznick got her offending e-mail, she immediately hit REPLY, in order to make the guy panic. I, being more cowardly, just complained to my friends. And really, that was mostly so I could mention the fact that I had a television project. Plus, I was flummoxed by the politics. Confronting her might make her feel so guilty and uncomfortable she would avoid me and thus end our pretend-show business relationship. Or she might compensate by making the show because she felt bad for letting me find out that my script stinks. I was having trouble locating the upside.

Zalaznick got her offensive e-mail near Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which made her ultimately forgive the e-mail sender. I got mine right before Passover, which just made me want to eat even more bread. Eventually, I replied to the e-mail, telling her how right I thought she was and that I wasn't hurt. I don't exactly have a real April 19 sense of revenge.

But Zalaznick, as evidenced by her impressive title and ability to spell her own last name, is no fool. Her return e-mail made it seem as if she meant for me to see those comments, using tricky, obscuring, multilayered terms like "kidding--but not really." She'd have had the Americans home from China in two days.

After that I avoided writing anything bad about anyone in e-mails, afraid of making the same mistake. That was until I remembered that I write mean things about people every week in a national magazine. Still, just knowing it's been thought out and edited makes it feel stylized and less real than that e-mail. You should have read what I wrote about Zalaznick in the first draft.