Television writing is a collaborative process, which often means that seeing a writer’s credit in addition to an episode of television is not as strong of his writing style as you think. They may have written most of the script, of course, but a large part of what’s going on is often decided by the showrunner and the other staff writers. Add the general chaos that comes with it to try to have a career in Hollywood, and the result is that you sometimes get writers who live in a surprisingly different direction once a major project.

For example: Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer were all writers of the successful “Seinfeld” sitcom, which lasted nine seasons and has become one of the most acclaimed and popular shows of all time. When the series ended in 1998, did these writers continue to write for sitcoms nominated to Emmy Emmy and limits? Well, in a way, but they also wrote for “The Cat in the Hat” of 2003, with Mike Myers as the titular cat. The film has a huge 4.0 on IMDB, a score of 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was considered a disappointment at the box office.

The film was so badly received, in fact, that it seems that its director, Bo Welch, has never been allowed to make a film again. From “Cat in the Hat”, he only made a handful of episodes for The Fun Netflix Show, “a series of unfortunate events”. As a film critic of NYT Ao Scott wrote at the time:

“The first director Bo Welch set up a vulgar and inspiration of sweets for poisoned eyes that Universal has the temerity of calling” Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. “It is nothing like, despite the narration of the voiceover which sometimes tries to imitate the rates of the Seissian verse and the sets which sporadically evoke the anticable drawing of Seuss.”

The good news is that “the cat in the hat” was not the new normal of any of these “breast” writers. Alec Berg would do an excellent job in the HBO series “Barry”, David Mandel wrote for “Veep” by HBO, Jeff Schaffer wrote for “Dave” by FXX, and all three would write for “Seinfeld” by Larry David de Larry David. Followed, “set your enthusiasm”. The “cat in the hat” nominated in Razzie was bad, but not bad enough to ruin their careers. The other good news is that, over time, more people are starting to wonder if “the cat in the hat” was actually a bit good, maybe?