TV Heaven: A Novel

Filman is the showrunner of a TV show called The Showrunner about a showrunner making a TV show called The Showrunner. Confused? So was the audience—or lack thereof.

When the show gets abruptly canceled mid-season, Filman finds himself magically transported to “TV Heaven,” a surreal town full of the greatest characters from television history. There he meets an assortment of citizens spanning a century of shows—from grayscale to animated, old to young, human, animal, robot, alien, and everything in between.

However, something is missing from this seeming paradise: Emma, the co-star and love interest from his show. As Filman struggles to adjust to life in TV Heaven, he goes through an existential crisis upon realizing he was just a fictional character on a television show.

Desperate to reunite with the woman he loves, Filman goes on a quest to return to the real world and find Emma. Hopefully then they can revive their show and give fans the cathartic ending they deserve.

TV Heaven – A Novel by T.Z. Barry

For fans of The Truman Show, Pleasantville, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Stranger Than Fiction, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, The Good Place, The Studio, Hollywood satire, and television history.

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Soccer vs Football in America

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Every four years during the World Cup, Americans wonder why America isn’t good at soccer. The United States is not good at soccer because most children don’t grow up watching professional soccer on television. They don’t watch soccer on TV for the same reason football is the most popular sport in America. As Chuck Klosterman explained in his recent book Football, American football is the ultimate sport as a television product. The TV broadcasts of the games are what made the NFL so popular, overtaking baseball. Football is perfectly designed for television, to both the fans watching it, the networks broadcasting it, and the advertisers sponsoring it. Football is one of the rare sports that fans agree is better watched on TV than in person.

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Fantasy Sports as Preparation for Investing

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Investing is the greatest game in the world. All previous games I played were preparation for financial investment—such as collecting baseball cards, fantasy sports, poker, chess, and Monopoly. Investing is the ultimate game because it is a combination of all other games. Investing has the strategic thinking of chess, the research and tracking of fantasy sports, and the monetary stakes of poker—except investing is better than all of them, because it combines those aspects together into one omni-game.

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Style vs Substance in Writing

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What matters more in writing, style or substance? It is an age-old debate, and there is no clear answer, other than “it depends.” It depends on what type of piece you are writing and the ultimate intent of the writer. A literary poem is heavily weighted toward style, while a technical essay is heavily weighted toward substance. However, some essays can be highly stylized, such as those by David Foster Wallace. Fiction sits somewhere between poetry and essays. Some fiction is much more about the style of the prose than the substance of the plot, as in most literary fiction. The unique voice of the writer is more important than the plot, which sometimes doesn’t even exist. Meanwhile commercial fiction (romance and page-turning thrillers) is much more about the substance of the plot and characters. Readers of commercial fiction don’t care about highly stylized prose—in fact that is a distraction. They prefer straightforward, journalistic essay-like prose that delivers the story clearly.

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The 2026 Nova Knicks

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The New York Knicks, my hometown basketball team, just won the NBA Finals for the first time in 53 years, led by three players from Villanova, my college alma mater. Dubbed the “Nova Knicks,” it felt surreal, like this team was specifically designed for me. As an adult, I don’t get as emotionally invested in sports as I used to, but I’ve never had this much fun rooting for a professional sports team. The only thing that compares is the two times Villanova won the NCAA championship (2016 and 2018), led by three of the same players: Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, and Josh Hart. Watching the Nova Knicks felt like being an early fan of a local indie rock band, who years later, break out into worldwide mainstream success. But unlike indie hipsters, I don’t resent the newcomers. I welcome any and all onto the Nova Knicks bandwagon. To explain why this team meant so much to me, let’s go back to the beginning.

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The Future One-Man Business

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The best companies in the world are led by a genius founder with a vision. This founder envisions how the company can become successful, then delegates that vision to subordinates. Lower-level employees are essentially like drones. The founder/CEO tells them exactly what to do to fulfill his vision, then they do it.

Take Jeff Bezos and Amazon for example. Bezos has specific detailed protocols for all his managers (now including his successor CEO), telling them what to do, then they tell their lower-level employees exactly what to do, so on and so on, to the lowest-level warehouse worker and delivery driver. It’s all designed by the leader at the top. Essentially what all great business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk really want (or what they wish they could have) is an entire company made of clones of themselves.

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The Professional Incubus and Indie Publishing – HP Lovecraft’s essay on amateur writing in 1924 vs. today

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“The Professional Incubus” was an essay written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1924 in The National Amateur, a magazine he self-published. In the essay, Lovecraft wrote about “amateur literature,” or what would now be known as “indie publishing,” AKA self-publishing. Not much has changed in the century since, except that indie publishing has become much more widespread and easier to do. Using excerpted quotes from Lovecraft’s essay, I will explore how amateur literature in the past relates to indie publishing today.

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The AI Art Crown in the Slop Gutter

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I don’t know how people can so brazenly dismiss AI art (for writing, music, images, and videos) when no one even fully knows the capacity of current models, let alone future ones. They say AI is not that good at X (be it writing fiction or making movies), when it is impossible for anyone to have fully explored the potential of AI at doing X. And that potential is growing by the day as each new LLM model is released.

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“Have You Been Shoe-Pilled?” – On the Benefits of Minimalist Footwear

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In 2024 I read and reviewed Born to Run, a nonfiction book about a journalist (Christopher McDougall) who traveled to Mexico to study the Tarahumara, an elusive native tribe consisting of many elite long-distance runners who wear nothing but thin sandals. That led him to learning the science of how humans evolved to run barefoot, and how excessively cushioned shoes are detrimental to foot health. By wearing more minimalist footwear, he helped heal his own foot pain. I had already learned about barefoot shoes before reading the book, so it was like preaching to the choir. I’ve been wearing “barefoot shoes” for several years now, healing some foot problems of my own. At this point, I don’t think I could ever wear traditional shoes again.

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