When I was a child actor and my mom was forcing me to do all of the child actor things, she was obsessed with my reviews. She made me feel like they were a test that I had to pass. I had to make the reviewers happy, so the audience (“your fans”) would remain happy. She relentlessly drilled into me that nothing was more important than what other people thought about me and my work, that I should be terrified of this audience that simultaneously hung on my every word (“your fans”) but was also so fickle they’d abandon me the instant I upset them.
That wasn’t how anything worked. It did not reflect reality at all, but it was an extremely effective method of control. After Roger Ebert gave The Buddy System (a bad movie) a fair review (It’s a bad movie), I was distraught. He said something about how I played a brat in the film (I did) but what I heard was “Wil Wheaton is a brat”. All the fear and anxiety my mom had poured into me threatened to drown me — did I mention I was ELEVEN? — so the only way I could manage to fight back was to just completely reject the whole notion of reviews. I remember telling people that I just wanted to let the work speak for itself, and I didn’t want to be out there talking about it. I didn’t have the awareness I have now to understand I was crying out for my family to notice me as a person, instead of the thing that paid for their stuff and made my mom feel important. I knew in my heart the next review would be the bad one that my dad would shove in my face as evidence that I deserved his rejection, that I wasn’t good enough to be worthy of his love and attention. Over the decades, I decided it was better to just ignore all the good ones, because I knew in my heart I’d only listen to the bad ones. And it’s all subjective, anyway. It can’t be about an artist’s inherent worth or value as a person and creator.
(It breaks my heart that younger Wil carried that burden as long as he did, and as a parent, I can’t comprehend doing anything that would make my children feel about themselves the way my parents made me feel about myself. It’s why, when someone in my Reddit AMA asked me what’s one thing in your personal life that you’re proud of?, I said “I am the dad I didn’t have.”)
In about 1986, my mom realized that teen magazines were always thirsty for me. Before too long, their editors realized that she was thirsty for their approval. Thus began several years of me being forced into endless photo shoots and choreographed encounters with other teeny bopper magazine kids. It all felt like I was just being used by everyone involved, and I couldn’t say no to it.
For the longest time, I didn’t grok that all press isn’t the same, that some press can actually work against my career goals (like being in every teen magazine in the world when you’re trying to be taken seriously as an actor), and that there is press that can make all the difference. My experience was warped because the press my mother prioritized wasn’t the kind of press I learned how to do when I was promoting my book, and now my podcast. It wasn’t press that was coordinated and targeted to give the work the best chance to find its audience. It was almost always attention for its own sake, another way for my mom to put me in a place where I was on display while she gorged herself on the attention I didn’t want. I hated it. I hated that it was more important than literally anything about me as a person or a son. So I frequently chose to give bad interviews, rarely took them seriously, and was pretty crap at the whole thing. If you’re one of the people who had to interview that kid, I’m sorry. He’s struggling like you wouldn’t believe and doesn’t have any support.
I always felt like it was speeding up the countdown clock on my fifteen minutes. After Stand By Me, it sent this message that I was the teeny bopper flavor of the month, and River was the serious actor*. When I was put in front of the photographers and stuff, I felt like a piece of dry bread, being pecked to death by birds who didn’t care who they were eating, as long as they were fed.
Starting with Tabletop, my attitude about press and promotion began to change. I began to see it as a necessary part of the whole thing, that didn’t have to be gross. In fact, I learned that it wasn’t inherently gross — that was my mom — unless I chose to talk to a gross outlet, which I haven’t done since I was in charge of my life. Doing interviews with Felicia, I began to see press as something that could be fun while it was helpful. I realized that nearly all the people I’m talking to are also just people who are doing their jobs. I’m sure there are countless entertainers who treat press the way I did when I was a kid, and I’m sure working with them (or that version of me) isn’t great. So I choose to be as close to great as possible when I have the chance. I’m going to honor their time and their audience’s attention, and I’m only going to say yes to people I actually want to talk to.
I took all of that energy into the promotion of Still Just A Geek, and I think it’s a big part of my book becoming a New York Times bestseller. So OBVIOUSLY I’m going to continue down that road as I promote It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton.
This is where I stop to make sure you know that I don’t hate any of what I’m doing now. I love all of it, and I’m grateful as fuck for everything that’s in front of me right now. This is where I think for a long time that I’m going to delete everything I just wrote and get to the thing I sat down here to write about in the first place.
…but I feel like that context is going to make the thing I wanted to write about in the first place a little more poignant. So. Thanks for your indulgence.
This is where I get to the actual post, and you realize that everything you’ve read to this point isn’t really the post, for some reason.
Before I walked Marlowe this morning, I was doing some administrative podcast work with my team. Our launch last week was met with enthusiasm that vastly exceeded my expectations, and we have way more media requests in five days than I thought we’d get in the whole first season. Yay! Go us! More people will get to find out we exist!
I’ve always planned for this podcast to start small and grow slowly. If this is going to find a large audience, it’s going to be because people who listened to it told their friends about it, who told their friends about it, and so on. It’s the only way I can compete for time and attention in a crowded marketplace.
This is a very important distinction I want to make about that phrase: I’m not personally competing with anyone in any kind of zero sum contest that will define our worth. I don’t feel like I need to prove to anyone that this is good enough (or that I am good enough) to justify their time; I just want to ensure that any person who will enjoy what we are doing knows we exist. And I hope those folks will choose to give me some of their time, once a week, until the heat death of the universe or I retire, whichever comes first.
As part of this discussion, my producer asked me if I’d looked at any reviews. I most certainly had not, for the reasons I wrote about (and nearly deleted) above. Well, I may want to, she told me, because they were entirely positive. Not mostly positive, mind you, but entirely positive**. I did not believe that was possible, so I went ahead and peeked through my fingers at the Apple Podcasts page for my show.
And, uh, well … yeah. The audience that listened to episode one and left reviews seems to have loved listening to it the way I loved narrating it.
Holy crap that’s incredible. It looks like what I worked to put into the world and what these people heard ended up being the same thing. That’s wonderful and so exciting!
We have a new episode dropping on Wednesday, and some other extremely cool stuff that’s sort of rendering into our reality as I type this. I’ll have more on that later this week or early next week. Also, I wanted to shout out Caroline M Yoachim, who wrote Rock Paper Scissors Love Death, for her Nebula nomination for We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read.
Oh, also, I was going to put this into its own blog, but it can go here: I don’t watch myself often, but when I do, I’m always looking for what I did wrong, where I fumbled my words, what I forgot to say, all the ways I sucked, etc. Because I am the executive producer and primary force behind this whole thing, I felt like I needed to watch myself on KTLA, the way an athlete looks at tape from the game, in case I am invited to be on other broadcasts or whatever.
I pressed play, and after about one minute, I became aware of tears flowing down my cheeks, because I was watching someone who looked and sounded just like me, only he was so happy and so comfortable in his own skin, so effortlessly proud of what he did without being Prideful, totally engaged with the hosts and genuinely grateful to be there. That guy takes nothing for granted and chooses gratitude. I want to be more like him.
Crying, yawning, laughing, are all ways our body reregulates our nervous system from an activated, fight or flight state, into a resting, parasympathetic state. My body had a lot to release, it turns out. Tears poured down my face and I felt all this tension in my chest and shoulders soften and release. I noticed that so much of the worry and weight of the possibility and hope I’m afraid to embrace wasn’t as heavy.
I was so happy to see that guy be happy. I was so happy to see that guy genuinely enjoying the opportunity in front of him, and I was so happy that he could receive the sincere interest and kindness of the hosts.
And that guy was me! I’m that guy!
There’s a version of me who doesn’t do The Work I have done and continue to do, and I don’t know that he even tries to make It’s Storytime. He doesn’t believe in himself, and he’s terrified to take chances. He is convinced that his dad is right about him. I want to gently hug that guy and show him what’s possible when he does The Work. I want him to know — I need him to know — that he can do it, because if I can, anyone can. Everything worth doing is hard, including The Work. That version of me — all versions of me — are worth it. I’m so grateful to be a version of me who never gave up when it was hard. I’m so grateful that I could see and feel and BE that version of myself.
To bring this back around (I love a good bookend***): I rarely read reviews, and when I do, I’ve always struggled to take anything away from them other than “well, 500 people say you’re awesome, but this one dude who can’t spell says you suck so he obviously sees through your facade and you should quit because you’ll never be good enough.”
I’ve done so much work, healed so much trauma, grown into something that looks an awful lot like what I hope my best self looks like, and that means I’m in a place where I can accept that the audience I hoped to reach is finding the thing I made, they are enjoying the thing, and telling other people about the thing. And not because they feel sorry for me or want something from me, but because they liked the thing I made and want to share how it made them feel with other people. That means everything to me.
It’s my understanding that the reviews and ratings y’all are leaving on the show are all very helpful for our discovery and growth. So I appreciate you all so much. I think we’ll have a good sense of the size and retention of the audience in about two weeks, and we’ll know if we can start ramping up for another season.
Thanks for being part of this, and coming on this journey with me. As I will continue saying, I’m so grateful you are here, and offering me a chance to entertain you.
Here’s my subscribe to the blog thingy:
And here are the obligatory collection of links to subscribe to (and rate and review) It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton:
- Apple Podcasts
- PocketCast
- Stitcher
- Spotify
- Pandora
- iHeart
- Amazon
- or grab the RSS directly from me right here.
*That’s not entirely inaccurate, but not because of any choices I made, or anything inherent to me.
**I realize that this is begging for a review bombing.
***I need it to have been a true Oner, don’t you? Either way, it’s amazing, and they even told us where they could have cheated, but she said it was a true Oner with no cheats so … I choose to believe that it was, even though I know how unlikely that is.
