According to TMZ, Anna Faris' friends called Chuck Lorre "s*y" after he revealed in his new memoir Sitcom that he doubted her casting as the lead of Mom and claimed his gut instinct was correct when she left after season 7.*
Every showrunner's memoir is the same book with different names in it: the network was wrong, the stars were difficult, the writers' room was a family, and the family had a favorite child. Chuck Lorre's Sitcom is not unusual in structure. What makes it a news story is the target. The book does not doubt a fired producer or a cancelled season. It doubts Anna Faris, the woman who carried Mom for seven years, and it says so in the middle of the book tour, on purpose, while the book is on sale.
Here is the problem with the gut-instinct defense. Lorre did not write a book and let the book make the claim. He went on morning television, signed copies at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, and told a room that his gut was right about the woman who was his show for seven seasons. The book is the excuse; the point is the quote. A memoir that calls its star a mistake on the week the memoir is for sale is not a book, it is a season finale with an ISBN, and the cliffhanger is the author looking at the camera.
Faris' friends told TMZ the comments were "s**y," that it is "absurd" for Lorre to claim his reservations were "proven right" after she spent seven years making people laugh and building the audience, and that while the showrunner is "entitled to tell his story," it is "beneath him to take a shot at her while promoting a book." Notice what that does. The book tour was supposed to be about Chuck Lorre's genius: the sitcom machine, the hit after the hit. Now the story of the book tour is that Chuck Lorre picked a fight with his own star to sell the book. The memoir's actual contents will be a footnote to the one sentence in it that was not about him.
There is a rule in the memoir trade. You can rewrite the past as long as the people in the past are dead, gone, or no longer under contract. Faris is all three of those, and that is not a coincidence, that is the editing process. The seven years she gave the show are now a data point in a gut-instinct anecdote, and the gut instinct is, of course, the showrunner's. The book sold in the week it came out. The shot sold in the week it came after. Both are PR. The only difference is that one of them was about the other person.
YOUR TURN: The book tour is supposed to be about the book. What's the worst thing an author has said about a collaborator while selling their own work?
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