This might be one of the sweetest revenge-of-the-nerd stories you've ever heard.
Mind you, our protagonist does not carry herself as a geek, what with her long, wavy blond hair and strapless, funky dress with a skull-and-bones imprint and gold flip-flops. But she insists she was a nerd in high school, and we'll just have to take her word for it because it's landed her a spot on the ABC prime-time lineup.
In the brutal TV production world, it's rare for an unknown writer to pen a script at home, show it to a few people, land a United Talent Agency agent and a full-time gig on a hit show within a month and have her own series within a year. But that's what happened to Caroline Williams, the creator of ABC's "Miss Guided," a single-camera documentary-style comedy, starring Judy Greer as a woman who returns to her high school to work as a guidance counselor.
"Every step of the way, I was like -- oh well, they'll buy it, but they'll never make it," said Williams while lunching on a turkey sandwich at Bloom Cafe last week. "Well, they'll make it, but they'll never pick it up. Then, no, they'll pick it up, but they'll never put it on the air. Every step of the way, I was convinced it was dead and I was ready to become an assistant again."
Now, that would be a little drastic. But when your resume lists your first gig as a writer on "The Office," a position you abandoned to produce your own show, chances are your days picking up Ben Stiller's dry cleaning (her first Hollywood job) are over. Williams studied theater at USC, where she wrote one-act comedies, and later in 2004 earned a graduate degree in film and screenwriting from UCLA.
According to sources close to the negotiations, a bidding war over "Miss Guided" prompted Katalyst Films (Ashton Kutcher's company) and 20th Century Fox Television to pay "six figures" for the script, an unusually high sum for a new writer's first effort.
"When I was in school, I never even thought of this as an option because a lot of the TV writers I was familiar with were from the Harvard Lampoon, or it was a total guy's club or they were stand-up comedians," Williams said.
She owes all of it to those four years at University High School in Irvine in the '90s, feeling like an "outsider" and a "loser," envious of a brunet she admired for being "beautiful and smart and fun."
