Kappa

Sometimes, it’s all worth it.

This has been a hard year. Kat’s been in L.A. for most of it. My dog almost died (and keeping him alive was very expensive!). The business of journalism is more depressing and grim than it’s been since I’ve been in the industry. Some of the stories I worked on turned out to be harder than I’d ever imagined. That guy is still the president.

But today I get to tell you about something good. Today I get to tell you about Kat’s show, for NBC Indigo and Snapchat, which premieres tomorrow. Do you want to look at the key art for it? You can, because it exists, it’s real and in the world and has a poster:

Great, right? Those colors!

So Kat got her MFA in the summer of 2017. She started spending time out in L.A. to build her career. She got selected for a fellowship with HBO Access, landed a manager, and started taking meetings. She had a good meeting at the end of the year with NBC Indigo, which is NBC’s digital studio, making shows for platforms like Snapchat. They asked her to pitch them a few ideas, and I have a really distinct memory of her coming up with a handful of concepts while standing in the kitchen. One of them was called “Kappa Delta Crypto,” about a sorority girl-by-day, hacker-by-night who gets recruited by the FBI after she gets busted hacking gift cards. It was clearly a hit.

The wild thing is that they thought so too. You can go an awfully long time in Hollywood not getting anything made—there are people who’ve had long and successful careers as writers whose projects never actually get produced—but this one ended up on the fast track. They were interested. She went back out to L.A. in February to formally pitch the show, and within 48 hours of her plane landing at LAX, she had a deal. Most of this is her story to tell, so I’ll just talk about my experience of it, which is that it was this incredibly affirming and exciting thing to watch happen.

Because you never know how things will turn out. You never know if taking a chance will pay off. You never know if the things you dream of doing, but which are outside of your control, might actually happen. It’s luck and timing and talent and making a good impression on someone who’s in a good mood when they meet you and having an idea that they want to hear at the time they want to hear it and a million other things besides. When Kat was just starting grad school, we met with a financial advisor. He was, as you’d expect from someone in his line of work, a nuts-and-bolts numbers guy. He asked questions about our plans and our future and our income. We told him that Kat was going back to school to get a Master’s degree, and he asked what her expected income was when she completed it—which is a fair question, and one that makes sense if you’re getting an MBA or something, but I remember sitting in this dude’s office and laughing. How the fuck are we supposed to know? This might just be a thing she gets that hangs on a wall while she continues to work for a non-profit! It’s not that kind of degree, I wanted to say.

The money for Kappa isn’t change-your-life money—allow me to shatter that illusion of Hollywood in 2018—but it’s the start of a career, I think. I don’t know. You never know. I’ve always wanted to be like, “I have no doubt that you will succeed, for you are brilliant and talented and the world will see it,” but I can’t, because I’ve seen brilliant and talented people fail a bunch. I believe in Kat’s talent, but it’d have been naive to believe in the world’s willingness to recognize it. I believe in her like Kanye believes in Beyoncé—I know for sure that she deserves the award, but I don’t know if the world is going to give it to her.

So watching Kappa happen felt, for me as a person on the sideline, like having that belief validated, at least for now. The world doesn’t always do that for you.

And it really is amazing to see this thing just exist in the world. So many people came together to make it happen! Young actors auditioned, hoping that their own dreams might be validated. They learned to identify with these characters that she just plain made up, and turned them from ideas into people. Earlier this year, this was all just a half-formed idea she was batting around in the kitchen. Now, as of tomorrow, anybody in the world can watch it (open Snapchat; swipe left to get to “Discover;” it should be right there! If not, search “Kappa Delta Crypto”).

It’s been hard to spend a lot of this year in a long-distance relationship. Kat’s been under a ton of pressure—going from pitch to product in less than a year is a breakneck pace—and quitting the steady non-profit job has made things feel scary and uncertain. But tomorrow, anybody who wants to will be able to watch this thing she made, and it really is all worth it. It would have been worth it just to try.