Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover conscious rules we've been following. We break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier and more satisfied in the second half of our lives. I'm your host, Erin Keating.
Holy moly. How did we get to the holidays already? Happy Thanksgiving, beautiful friends. We get so overwhelmed this time of year trying to take care of everything and everyone. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about gratitude, which is the gift that keeps on giving. Yes, it's trite to talk about gratitude for Thanksgiving since it's right there in the name that we are meant to be giving thanks.
But I find that when I'm in a swirl and I'm feeling frustrated and burdened by life and all of my single mom, solo-preneur, aspiring artist, wannabe mogul hopes and dreams, the day to day labor of keeping my house in order and my bills paid and my kids fed and the dishes washed and the freaking laundry done. I'm sorry, does anyone else do five loads of laundry a day? How come there is so much laundry when I am buried under a pile of shoulds and have to's and deadlines? One thing that helps me get out from under all of that is to take a deep breath and think about what I'm grateful for. I like to make a list. So here is a list of five things I'm grateful for. And maybe you'll do this today too. Or you'll do it around the Thanksgiving table, which is a tradition we started a couple years ago in my family and it's something I really love. I don't have a lot of traditions. I'm not great at that stuff.
This one is simple, you can add it to your rituals. Okay, so here's my list and if you're inclined to send me yours DM me and I will post it @hotterthaneverpod on Instagram and you can be a part of the Hotter Than Ever story. Number one, I am grateful for my kids. It is a privilege to be their mom and to help them navigate life and their feelings and every stage of their growing up. Number two, I am grateful for my mom who shows up for us in all the ways that matter again and again. For small things and big things and everything. I'm grateful for my dad and his girlfriend, for my brother and sister in law and niece and my cousins and my whole supportive, beautiful extended family who I genuinely like in addition to loving them. I'm grateful for my ex-husband and how much he loves our kids.
And I'm grateful for Hotter Than Ever, for the new life and place in the world it has given me, for my producer Erica and associate producer Melody and my amazing guests, and especially you, the Hotter Than Ever listeners who remind me that what this life is about is each other, loving and supporting and inspiring each other to be the best and most fulfilled version of ourselves that we can possibly be. I am grateful for you.
I'm also grateful for our hilarious, deep, and irrepressible guest this week, Madeleine Smithberg. Madeleine Smithberg is the co creator of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Yes, you heard that right. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was created by two women, Madeleine Smithberg and Liz Winstead. Madeleine ran the show as an executive producer for seven years. She has won Peabody and Emmy awards for the show and was directly responsible for the hiring of some people who have become household names.
You may recognize some of them, like Jon Stewart himself, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Ed Helms, and others. Before the Daily Show, Madeleine was the showrunner for the Jon Stewart show, which was the Daily Show's predecessor on mtv. And she was an EP and writer of the WB comedy variety show Steve Harvey's Big Time. She cut her teeth as a talent coordinator and producer on Late Night with David Letterman after beginning her career as a field producer for Italian national television. You know, like you do. I love that detail. Madeleine has created shows for almost every cable channel when cable was a thing that existed. You probably remember it if you're listening to this podcast.
And in 2018, she turned a lifetime passion for cooking into a career change, becoming a teaching chef at Blue Ribbon Cooking School and launching her own YouTube channel, which of course went viral, Mad in the Kitchen. She's currently working on her memoir, "Almost Funny". There is no debate about whether she is almost funny or actually funny. I'm definitely going to pre order that book when it becomes available. She's also working on a new show for women over 50 called "Lady Girls." I think we share a demographic. Madeleine's story is fascinating and inspiring, and she is a force to be reckoned with. I think you're going to enjoy this one. All right, let's get hot.
Madeleine Smithberg, welcome to Hotter Than Ever.
Madeleine: Aw, thank you, Erin. It's really fun to be here.
Erin: I'm so happy to have you here. Your resume is banana cakes. That means it's completely insane. It's so impressive. And you have had such a storied career. I feel like you're just entering another amazing chapter. It's exciting.
Madeleine: It is. I really Think that I'm pivoting again. And I almost can't believe it.
Erin: You seem to have a gift for figuring out what to do next. But I want to start where you started and have the audience hear sort of your origin story and how you came to create the Daily show, because I think a lot of people don't know that story.
Madeleine: Okay. Whenever the question what do I do next? Comes up right now, I always go, let's make a snack. Because I feel like that's a short term. It's a short term answer for a long term issue. And today was a really good day and now is a pretty good time. But I've had a lot of periods of feeling really stuck, especially after surviving breast cancer. But we'll get to that later. Now we're going to go back.
You mentioned Italian TV. I did a semester abroad in Siena in Italy and became fluent in Italian, worked for Italian TV, like, got hired instantly rose through the ranks and became sort of the 007 field producer for the office of Italian TV in New York. And while all that was happening, I heard rumblings of something that was happening at 12:30 at night on NBC. And this was Late night with David Letterman. And we didn't. My room, I did not have a vcr. They were. It was like owning, you know, a Rivian truck. It was something that you heard about. But they were a million dollars.
Erin: Right, right.
Madeleine: And I was going to say Tesla, but I would not say that.
Erin: Please do not.
Madeleine: I had to switch that in my head. But anyway, so we stayed up. I stayed up till 12:30 and watched the show. And it wasn't an entertainment experience like it was. But that wasn't all it was. It was a calling. And I saw that show and I heard music and all the non existent hair stood up on my arms and I thought, I must be a part of that. And I would send all these resumes in and never get it.
And then finally, at the exact same moment that my love of my life, my boyfriend, broke my heart, I got a note on my bed from my roommate's mother that basically said, there's a job at Letterman.
Erin: Oh my God.
Madeleine: And so I never processed losing him. And I dove in and I spent six years with the weirdest job in the world because I had to, without the Internet, go out into America and occasionally Canada and the United Kingdom and find people that had comedic potential that they were not aware of.
Erin: I feel like you. That's like the thesis of the internet today. It's correct.
Madeleine: If the Internet had been there, I would have just searched funny. And I would have been. A day's work would have been done. But I read 35 local papers a day. I subscribed to probably 50 weird magazines a month. I was making these things called phone calls that were before texts, how we communicated. And I did some crazy stuff. And then I also started producing all of the cooking segments with chefs.
And I could go to any restaurant in New York and eat for free.
Erin: Oh, that is a perk. And when you are young in the media business, in the television business, you are not making money. So you live on perks.
Madeleine: You live on perks. And I became friends with Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck. And I got essentially private cooking lessons back stage during the rehearsals. And it was amazing. And then I was ready to leave and I wanted to do something with food and my best friend convinced me to leave and we produced a pilot for something called Eating New York. And it was an entertainment show about food as opposed to a cooking show. And it ended up on the desk of a woman at MTV named Eileen Katz who was heading original program. And she was a foodie and she had a huge stack of cassettes on her desk.
It was ridiculous in those days. It was like Jenga, but like on crack. Everybody had things piling up around them. And it was these 3 quarter inch cassettes for the young ones. That's what we had before our phones to see videos on. And she watched Eating New York, our little pilot and saw Letterman on my resume, called us in and essentially made me the showrunner of the Jon Stewart Show. And we did two seasons on MTV and then we got syndicated by Paramount. And everybody that worked on that show was incredibly talented.
So a big chunk went to Saturday Night Live and then some went out to LA and never were heard from again. But then a big clump of them came with me to launch the Daily Show. Called them my yogurt culture. So what happened was.
Erin: What do you mean yogurt culture? Okay, like it was a petri dish that you were.
Madeleine: No, when you make yogurt, you have to have a culture. You have to have a little bit of another yogurt. You use a little leftover yogurt to start your new starter.
Erin: Okay, got it, got it.
Madeleine: It's a starter like you would use for bread, sourdough bread, or you would use it if you're making beer.
Erin: Got it.
Madeleine: Think any live anyway, go ahead. And that was my little joke. But so I came. I don't Stewart show went down and I focused all my energy on trying to become a mom, which I would succeed at, but not biologically. And I went through in vitro. I had like, four surgeries. I was on fertility drugs. Anyway, the executives that had been at MTV were Doug Herzog and Eileen Katz.
And they ended up moving over to Comedy Central. I was their first phone call. They wanted me to head up original programming. I said no. Then they asked me if I would executive produce a Daily show for them. I said no. I was trying to get pregnant. I had no interest. I can't believe the chutzpah that just, like, turned down a job that big.
Erin: Well, so, yeah, so talk to me about that, because that takes a real sense of self and priorities. And, you know, I think we're told, like, as women, never say no to things. Like, you know, this will be your only shot. Like. But no, that wasn't your point of view.
Madeleine: You know what? It was almost like everything had come so easily to me. I never really tried. I like, you know, I came out of school, I got a job. I went to the next job. I wanted a job. I got that job. I, you know, everything just sort of fell into place. So I had no real concept of what the world was actually like. Yeah, I grew up in Manhattan. Here's a little aside joke. I met my first Republican when I was 17. I thought they were fictional characters.
Erin: Oh, my God. They may be, but they're influential fictional.
Madeleine: Characters, just terrifying ones. But I lived in this bubble, and it was so beautiful. My mother was a dynamo. I was raised believe women could do anything. I didn't realize until Liz left the Daily show. And I was sitting in a room with all of the writers and I noticed that something smelled terrible and figured out that it was the writers themselves.
Erin: Oh, my God. Because it was all dudes.
Madeleine: It was all dudes.
Erin: All stinky dudes.
Madeleine: All stinky dudes. They smelled like a locker room. And that's how I realized. Wait, I'm the only woman here. What are these shards of glass on my shoulder? Oh, it's. There's a glass ceiling. No one had ever told me. So anyway, Eileen and Doug wanted me to do this Daily Show.
I did not want to do it, by the way. I'm having, like, I have the worst hot flashes in the world. I'm steaming up my own glasses. Hold on one second. This is. It's not funny.
Erin: I know. Sorry, but I don't know what to do but laugh other, you know.
Madeleine: Well, that's my life. That's why my book is called Almost Funny. It's like, I'm just like. I have like six of these a day and they're just like, ridiculous. It's embarrassing. But anyway, here you go.
Erin: It's reality.
Madeleine: It's reality.
Erin: Yeah.
Madeleine: It's ours. It's mine. Yeah. Give me some estrogen, please. Like, please. Anyway, so Doug and Eileen want me to do the Daily Show. Want me to work at this new Comedy Central they're building. I have no interest because I'm very naive and feel like opportunities are never going to stop coming.
Until one day they do. But then I just. On I go. But Liz is my downstairs neighbor. She's a standup comic who I had hired the last, I think it was like three months of the Jon Stewart show in syndication. We needed a segment producer who knew about comedy. And when I hired Liz, she failed to tell me that she couldn't type. And she basically learned on the job.
Erin: Oh, my God. How old was she and how old were you?
Madeleine: Oh, God, I don't even remember. I was like 33 maybe. The way I can carbon date my life is I was at Letterman from 86 to 92. Anyway, so Liz and I were hanging out one night with my ex husband late at night. Maybe there was some pot involved, I don't know. And we were watching. Yeah, we were watching bad tv. And we came up for this concept for a show called the Network.
And the idea was that it was the. It was what Larry Sanders did for talk shows, the network was. Would do for networks. So it was the world's worst cable network. And you'd have the sort of lives of the people that were the executives at this. You've worked at one, so, you know.
Erin: Indeed, I've worked at many.
Madeleine: Yeah, many. Right. Yeah. So it would be that as the day in, day out sort of sitcom aspect. And then you would do promos for the shows which would allow you to satirize all of television.
Erin: Yeah. So fun.
Madeleine: So we went to lunch with Eileen Katz, who was running original programming at Comedy Central, and we pitched her I our idea over lunch. It was me, Liz and Elise Roth. She took us in a taxi. That's what you got around in before Uber, you guys.
Erin: And you think you're talking to people who are under 40 that you are not. You are speaking to our peer group.
Madeleine: Yeah, that's great. We took a horseless carriage and we went up to Doug Herzog's office and we pitched the show. We didn't even have. We'd never written anything down. Just told them Sort of the concept. And we instantly got a development deal. And they put me and Liz and Elise in an office, and we set out to do what we were hired to do, which was to develop this show called the Network. And we invented fake shows and we had cards on a board because, as you know, all of television is made with three by five index cards.
Erin: That's correct.
Madeleine: Without them, there is no television. And there really isn't television anymore. But I have a feeling that streamers use cards, too. Anyway, we're developing the show, and every time I would leave the office to either get a drink of water or use the restroom, Doug Herzog would corner me and say, I need you to do the Daily Show. And I would say, doug, stop it. And he would say, I need you to do the Daily Show. It has to be for Comedy Central what SportsCenter is for ESPN. If something happens in the world.
World, right. Everybody's going to have to turn on Comedy Central and see how the Daily show is handling it. I said, that's adorable. I'm going back in my office.
Erin: It's so wild, because that is what you created.
Madeleine: I know. Mission accomplished.
Erin: I mean, so many people use that show as their window into the political world, into the world of current events. And even until today, I mean, I think it's ebbed and flowed over the years, but there was certainly many decades where it was like, you know, what does John have to say about this ever?
Madeleine: I mean, it really is. And it's crazy to me that, you know, it's the little engine that could. And it just keeps going and going. So, one day I go to get a drink of water. I don't know why this day was any different. And there comes Doug Herzog. And I know what he's going to say, but this time he's a little more passionate. And he pushes me against the wall.
But we're really good buddies. It wasn't a Me Too thing at all. There are no lawyers to be called. It was just sort of, come on, buddy. And he was like, Madeleine Smithberg, what are you doing? You are in there developing a show I cannot afford to make. You're only here because Eileen wants you in the building. Why won't you do this Daily Show for me? I'm going to put 90% of my production budget and 95% of my promotion budget. And here were the words that changed my mind. You don't have to do a pilot, and we'll give you a year on the air to figure out what you are.
Erin: Okay, so I'm going to take a pause for one second because this is not an entertainment podcast. So let me just set the context for this never fucking happens. Like, ever. This doesn't happen. You don't get given a year long series commitment by the head of a network with financial commitments and marketing commitments to be the anchor show of a new platform. It just doesn't happen. So what happened to you was lightning struck you.
I mean, you were in the right place at the right time with the right credibility. But this is an extraordinary thing that happened to you.
Madeleine: It was nuts. And I, luckily at that moment, I came out of my delusional, you know, stupor. I was like, I'll have a baby. Later, I walked into the office where Liz and Elise were with all the cards for all those wonderful fake shows. And I said, girls, the plan is changing. And I got a little bit of pushback. And then it was like, okay. I told them the part about no pilot, a year on air, and all the 3 by 5 index cards came down and we started putting up new ones for the Daily Show.
And then it just became the most collaborative and fun process ever because everybody who we interviewed and hired, it was like playing ping pong with them. Them. And we had a lit. We were. It was like that game Elephant is what I say, where it's like, okay, does it have a trunk? Yes, it has a trunk. And you kind of narrow. Does it have a little skinny tail that looks weird? Yes. Yes.
Does it eat peanuts? I think so. And bananas know it's a monkey. But you play this game and by process of elimination you end up at what it is. So we had a lot of that. We knew it wasn't a sketch show, it was based in reality. We just. But it kept growing and growing. And then we hired this person, this guy named Brian Unger who came.
He had been my intern and he had dated Liz for a little while and he came from CBS News and he brought with him the disgust and disdain and frustration with television news. And he was really, he was like angry and he was like, they make it all about themselves. They try to like manipulate you and scare you into needing to watch. They create drama where there isn't one. They why, you know, and we were like, yeah, bring it. Let's go, let's go. And so that kind of like took us up a notch. And we had hired most of the staff and we were in this meeting and I want to say it was like three weeks before we were going to Launch.
And we were talking, as we always were, about what the show was, what the show is. What the show is. And then it was almost like the entire room got sprinkled with some kind of powder. Creative powder, not poison, just that gave you enlightenment. And today we would call that ayahuasca. Today we would call that ayahuasca. This time we didn't have to go to Peru. And we all together in like the same moment, had a thought and we said, what if we pretend we are them? And we all were like, oh, my God.
Oh, my God, there it is. There it is. Because we realized that we could be as silly as we wanted to be as long as we pretended we were really serious.
Erin: Right.
Madeleine: So we studied tapes of Stone Phillips.
Erin: Yeah.
Madeleine: On Dateline NBC, which was on like five nights a week then. And we studied the furrow brow and the walk and talk and the way he interacted with the mic. And all of our correspondents would have to do serious exercises. And that's really how it happened.
Erin: Wow. Wow. It's like the. It was always satirical in your minds, but the framing of it as we're actually going to completely parody. We're going to take all the rules and all the tropes and all the mannerisms and affectations of this other medium and then we're going to pack it full of jokes.
Madeleine: Yeah. We had a correspondent named Beth Littleford, and I think Beth was great. And in the first, like, maybe month of the show, we made fun of the way that news reporters always insert themselves in the story. And we had read an article about a place in, I think it was Texas, where they were harvesting pig semen manually.
Erin: Oh, sure. Like you do.
Madeleine: And like you do. And Beth went to cover this story and she actually jerked off a pig.
Erin: Oh, my God.
Madeleine: Yep, she did it. She took one for the team. And then I was thinking of this during the hurricanes in the last couple of weeks because I just. Why, like, Anderson Cooper is outside on CNN and gets hit with like a piece of Styrofoam. Like, what are you doing out there? We took. There was a hurricane and we sent Brian Unger to Coney island and he literally went into the ocean and he went under. Oh, my God. Just show how the waves were so good.
Erin: It's so good. But it's so funny because the Daily Show is now in this sort of notion of satirizing the self seriousness of the news. It's almost impossible to watch the news now without that lens on, of thinking of being aware of how much crazy Affectation is going on, especially on the hyper polarized news media now. Everything is so extreme. It's almost like. It's almost like when Trump got elected the first time I'm here, it's so heightened. Like, how do you even know what to parody at this point?
Madeleine: I agree. It becomes impossible to satirize because it is doing it for itself. It's very tricky. And I am writing this editorial for the Huffington Post about comedy and politics and how do you do it? And my conclusion is, I'm so happy I don't have to.
Erin: Yeah, and I think so many of us get our news today from the Daily Show or from. I listen to a closer look, Seth Meyers on podcast almost every day. So good, so smart. I think it's almost like we need it to be satirical in order to absorb the degree of crazy that we are surrounded by.
Madeleine: It's off the Richter scale. And the thing that pisses me off is that both MSNBC and CNN, it's like they've sewn the breaking news banner onto their screens. It's not breaking news. Like, it's what you're doing. You're covering the run up to the election. Save that banner of breaking news for actual breaking news: World War III has started. Then you can put it up there and I will tune in. But I've become numbed to the urgency because I feel like it's just overused.
Erin: Yeah, for sure. And there's so much we could say about the news and the media and all of these things. But I really want to return to you because I think you're more interesting to me and I think to our audience in that you decided at a certain point to leave this extraordinary thing that you had created and then what came next for you?
Madeleine: Okay, so, you know, I had gone through, as I was saying, I had gone through a really unpleasant process of becoming a mother or something that should be, you know, more or less natural for me. Just wasn't happening. I waited too long. I was too old. I had endometriosis. I wanted it so badly. My biological clock wasn't a tick. It was like a fire alarm that started ringing when I was 27, and it just was like, have a baby. Have a baby.
And it was really hard to tune out. But I was on this ride, you know, I was at Letterman. I was doing all this stuff. So finally, after the first failed in vitro, I decided that I wanted to adopt. And I got my beautiful boy, Harrison Pointer, who's now 27, which doesn't even seem correct to me. But I got my baby. I had my dreams come true.
And I never saw him. I would be like. My nanny would, like, call me and go. He walked. And I'm like, great, Madeleine. He spoke. He said, dada. My husband at the time was a stay at home dad.
And it just got to a certain point where I felt like anywhere I wasn't where I was supposed to be. And I concluded that whoever had said you could quote, have it all was bad at math because it wasn't actually possible. And I stayed probably two years longer than I should have. And then I missed Halloween for the 2002 election. And I just had this, like, epiphany that I couldn't do it anymore, that I wanted to become mother of the year. That was my goal. I wanted a mug.
Erin: Yeah, I'm sure you got it, too. I'm sure you got it. Is he still speaking to you?
Madeleine: Oh, God, yes.
Erin: So you did it. You did it.
Madeleine: He's adorable.
Erin: I think that's such a common story, and it's a refrain that we hear over and over again with, from the women that I talk to on this podcast, that having it all is. That's not a real thing. It is something. We were sold as a generation of women that, you know, our mothers had sort of paved the way for us. And then we were going to have the career and we were going to have the kids, and we were going to have the, you know, the equitable marriage, and we were going to. Everything was going to just be, you know, we were going to get everything we wanted. And that has not been. I don't think it happens all at the same time.
I think you can have all the things, but you need to stagger them. You got to stagger it. Exactly. And we all tried to do all of it all at once. And always felt like. I know. I always felt like as I was building my career, I was failing as a mother.
Madeleine: Yes.
Erin: I was not available enough to the kids.
Madeleine: I felt like I was failing as a mother, I was failing as a wife. I was failing as a human being because I never had time to go to the therapy or go to the gym or get my nails done or anything fun or positive. I just worked and worked and worked. And when I was at work, I was like, I'm snack mom. Like, what am I going to do? And I remember once we had, he. He would bring home his little backpack from, you know, kindergarten, and it would have, like, notes in it. And one night I got home, he was already sleeping. I saw the little backpack and I pulled out a piece of paper.
And apparently there was a fair that Saturday and since I hadn't signed up for a volunteer position, I was given the hot chocolate concession. And I ended up out in the freezing rain with my hands coming off while all these other people were doing jobs like, oh, we're upstairs working on the clothing. I'm like, how did I end up out in the snow? Because I didn't know there was a signup sheet because I wasn't doing drop off.
Erin: Right, right. So it's always something that you're failing.
Madeleine: It's always something.
Erin: Yeah. It hurts so much. It hurts so much because you were burdened by the expectation that we should be able to do this.
Madeleine: We should be superheroes. Yeah. And then you just feel like a failure. And it was a very tough thing and a very tough decision. And then I just walked away. I had no plans for what to do later. I walked away from my back end. I had 30% of the book. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for five years. I mean, a lot of pain there for me.
Erin: Yeah, I bet.
Madeleine: But I became mother of the year and it snowed, and I went with a friend of mine and we bought sleds and picked the boys up at school and went sledding in Riverside park. And I got to go to terrible birthday parties in the basement of upper west side Manhattan, like apartment buildings. And, you know, just everything I wanted to do. I made flashcards of all the kids in his class and I learned all their names. There were three Nathans, and I just like, Nathan L, Nathan P, Nathan Q. I just like, I knew them all. And then one day I got a phone call from this man named Garth Anseer who was at the time the president of the wb. And he said, hey, I'm doing a show, a pilot for the WB out here in Hollywood, and it's with Steve Harvey.
And I think you'd be perfect because it's what you did at Letterman. It's all human interest. So as a New Yorker, I always had thought, oh, I'm never going to live in la. I thought Woody Allen was like scripture, you know, my joke, which isn't funny anymore, which was we were like little Palestinian kids and we would throw rocks at the Hollywood sign. That's a joke. That doesn't work in any way.
Erin: No, that does not work.
Madeleine: Correct. It does not work. It was always one of my favorite jokes. But we were culturally indoctrinated to hate Los Angeles for sure. And I had been there many times, but always on like a week or a weekend and work and on the Strip and never really knew. And so I got to LA in April to do the pilot for Steve Harvey's Big Time. And I was just like, wait a minute, we can live here. And I kind of moved the kid out, jettisoned the poor husband. It wasn't his fault.
It was just, you know, it was a really hard transition for me. And if I could go back, I would do that part a little bit differently. We're really good friends. He's awesome, we're great parents together. But I just was. I was shell shocked. I was really shell shocked. So moved to LA, Harry started at the Hollywood School house and he lives there still. Not at the Hollywood Schoolhouse.
Erin: Good. They probably kicked him out at the.
Madeleine: Same point they kick him out. He's like, we have a homeless guy. No, he lives Island Park. And I just, I never kind of looked back. I bought the house in the canyon with the saltwater pool and a Jacuzzi and had a never ending Sunday brunch called Super Sunday and just did Steve Harvey's Big Time and then got hired by Current TV to start a news franchise for them. And it was something called Infamania. That was Al Gore's channel.
Erin: Yep.
Madeleine: And then started a production company called Mad Cow Productions. And we did a late night show for bet. We did pilots for Show Time. And then at a certain point, I think it was 2008, there was the. It was, I called it the perfect storm of shit. But there was the economic meltdown. There was a, you know, financial crisis. Yep, financial crisis.
Then there was writer strike. There was another one of those then. And then reality TV sort of came into being. And when we came out of the strike and the financial crisis and all of it, it was as if my place, it was like a wave had come and my sand castle had been completely washed away and there was nowhere for me to be. And I would continue to produce what I thought were absolutely beautiful pieces of pure comedy. And nobody could see it. And I had like three that were picked up. And then it was like musical chairs would be played and the person who hired me would suddenly not be at the network and my show would go with them.
Erin: Yeah, always.
Madeleine: Or, you know, just.
Erin: You lose your champion, you lose your show.
Madeleine: Yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden, like the network would go, you know what? I think we're gonna be a true crime network now. We're not gonna do comedy anymore. And I go, what did you, like, indigestion? And you, like, changed the focus of your network? And I was getting more and more frustrated. And then my son was getting ready to go to college. I had to sell my house because my father got Parkinson's. So I stopped trying to develop tv, and two years helped my father die and my kid through high school and 18,000 sports. And then my mother started sinking into dementia. My joke is I was in the sandwich generation just as carbs were going out of style.
Erin: God, you're trying to do Atkins, but you're in the sandwich. I'm trying to do acto or whatever.
Madeleine: Yeah, I got keto, and I got, like. It was a joke. So I saw my house rented, a cute place in Sherman Oaks. Everything was fine. Harry's getting ready to go to school. I realized what is my life? My life had become three meals a day, seven days a week. Practices, homework, you know, whatever. Getting clothes that were the right size, no matter how fast he was growing, all of that stuff.
And that was leaving, and I didn't know what I was going to do. And I got so scared that one weekend he was with his dad, I lay on the floor in my bedroom and I cried for 48 hours. And that Monday morning, I got a phone call from my manager, Rick Dorfman, in New York, who said, national Geographic Explorer is rebooting, and it's a studio based show. Nobody working on the show knows how to do a studio based show. They want to fly you to New York. They're going to pay you $5,000. They'll fly you business class and put you in a hotel to consult. I got on the plane, I consulted.
They never let me leave. And I produced Explorer. And while I was doing that, the guy who broke my heart when I got my job at Letterman contacted me through Facebook, and we got back together. And that's why I live in Seattle.
Erin: Oh, my God, Madeleine. That moment that you talk about where everything feels so confusing and dark and, you know you can't go back, but you don't know what's ahead, I feel like that moment is where so many women land. I really think at. At this point, and, I mean, I'm looking at my peer group and people who were television executives and people who were producers who were working in the heyday of scripted television over the last 10 years.
All of the people I know in my world who sort of came up and had success and then were, like, expecting, like, okay, now's the time where I get to be the boss and I get to lead and the shows get to be my decision. And all of these things, like, we hit this moment, the business has changed, the economy has changed, our skill set needs to shift and pivot and be applied to other things. Like that moment of crying on the floor. I feel like so many of us can relate to that and so many of us don't. Get that phone call on Monday.
Madeleine: I know, I feel bad. I did and I was so lucky and it pulled me up and I realized that it's a lot about ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs. And when you're in the downs, you don't really see the ups coming.
Erin: No, you can't. You can't. And the only thing is to just try to keep yourself out of the black.
Madeleine: Right?
Erin: Like out of feeling. Like, stay in the hopeless. Right, Exactly.
Madeleine: Stay there. I would say go out for a walk if you don't live in Seattle. Too wet up there. It was a little too wet and gray for my taste. But as I'm telling you that story, I feel myself going to that place and my heart starts beating because it really was like 2008, there was a thunderclap and it just. Everything changed. And the world went from a place that loved me and was invited me with open arms. I was throwing money at me.
Erin: I'm ready for that to start again, by the way.
Madeleine: I know when does that happen again? Social Security, it's not quite cutting it, but it's fine in my book. I go through all of that and then I arrive at the end and I say that the weird thing that has happened to me at this juncture, after everything, all the ups, all downs and more downs, some ups and more downs. I'm a totally atheist daughter of a lapsed Catholic and a lapsed Jew. And I feel, Erin, like I've actually found something. Faith adjacent in that I trust. I trust that I can't control anything except for whether or not I have another French fry. And sometimes not even that.
Erin: Right.
Madeleine: But what I can do is try to bring myself, reel myself in, take a deep breath, put one foot in front of the other and just go to the other room and know that I'm not going to fix it right this second on the bathroom floor. I am. So why don't I just remove myself and go watch something funny?
Erin: Yeah, yeah. And baby steps, right?
Madeleine: Incremental, incremental, Incremental. And just. I went through the year after my cancer treatment where I had surgery. I Had six months of chemo and six months of radiation, and then just. They kind of dump you out. They're like, okay, bye, have a good life. They don't even ring a bell at my hospital because they don't want to make other people in the chemo area feel bad.
Erin: Normally they would ring a bell too.
Madeleine: Say, yeah, they used to traditionally, yeah, your cancer free, woohoo, remission. And now they don't do that. They don't even use the word remission. They come sometimes say symptom free. But they don't want to keep your hopes up because this thing is really sort of aggressive. You would hire it as a PA, it wants to get its job done.
Erin: It's going to work hard for you.
Madeleine: It's going to work really hard for you. But the year after cancer, you're done. And I've been in treatment for a year now. And literally you have the ladies in radiation and the whole team in the chemo room and the. Your surgeon and her team and there's a social worker and that you get massages and everyone is like, your job is your treatment. Right.
Erin: Right.
Madeleine: You don't have to spend any time fixing your hair because that's gone. And you. That gives you just an extra like, you know, 30 minutes in a day. It's great. So then all of a sudden, one day it's over and they just send you home by yourself and it's like all the structure of your life is gone. And 2023 was the worst year of my life. 2022 was the year I had cancer. 2023 was horrible.
I was alone in a rainy place in a house I'd been in with my husband, who I love, but we have one bathroom. He has a lot of shoes. And I just didn't know what to do. I was actually stuck. Now I realize a little bit more because I feel like I have returned. Like me has returned. And I'm feeling creative and focused and driven. And as I do it, suddenly the phone's ringing.
Hey, will you read an editorial? Hey, will you be on my podcast? I'm like, sure. You know, it's all fun. I'm feeling like some. Is it mojo? I'm not sure coming back, but that year was awful and I wouldn't wish it on anybody. And I feel like the. They got to do a bit of a better job of kind of letting you down gently from your cancer treatment. Yeah, it's a little bit like these silos and they just kind of. Everybody's checking the boxes and doing their job, but no one's really making sure that you're okay.
Erin: Right. Right.
Madeleine: Like, they did not leave me as they found me.
Erin: Yeah. God. I mean, the illness is the worst. It's the most devastating.
Madeleine: Right. And it comes out of left field, and you can. It can happen any time to any of us. And going back to the faith adjacent thing.
Erin: Yeah.
Madeleine: I'm trying to really train myself, like, to be, like, to wake up and go, guess what? I'm alive. I'm taking breaths. I don't have a diagnosis that my insurance will accept. I have a roof over my head. I have food in my belly. I have a husband who I love. I have a beautiful boy. I have fabulous friends, and I have an Emmy, a couple Peabodys. Couple of Peabody.
Erin: Yeah.
Madeleine: Just to remind me that I've earned my place on this planet that may not exist in six imminent six weeks. And just it's trying to be in the present like it really is. It's so overused and seems really simple and corny and duh. But at the same time, it's like, let's just come to this moment, take a breath, realize we can't change a lot of things, and then go have a French fry.
Erin: Yeah. I love that it keeps coming back to food because the one chapter that we skipped over just a little bit was Mad in the kitchen. And Mad in the kitchen is you taking your love of cooking, your, you know, back to the origin story of producing all the. All of the food segments on Letterman, and you decided, actually, I love to cook. Let me turn the camera on and make a little show in my kitchen. And then that was a thing that took off before you got taken out by the cancer for a while.
Madeleine: Yeah, yeah. Basically, the first Christmas that I was here in Seattle, Sam, my husband, gave me a gift certificate for a cooking class. And I went and I took something called knife skills. And we were chopping carrots. I'm looking at my watch, I'm going, this is. I need that. We need some comic relief here. And so I started just being silly me and entertaining the troops from the back of the room.
Chop, chop. Ouch. I cut myself. No, I didn't. And at the end of the class, the chef who was teaching the session called me over, and I thought, oh, I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. I disrupted his knife skills class, and instead he said, hey, I run a cooking school in Seattle called Blue Ribbon Cooking, and we do corporate team building classes for all the tech companies here. And you clearly Love food, and you have a great personality, and we can train you.
I'm always looking for people to run our sessions, and I was like, wait, excuse me. I think I need a Q tip. And at the almost age of 60, I pivoted from arguably near the top of one field to the absolute bottom of another, and I got hazed. The other chefs were like, who is this home cook? That's, like, the biggest insult you can give anybody.
Erin: Amateur hour.
Madeleine: Ina Garten was a home cook. In other words, we didn't go to culinary school.
Erin: Got it.
Madeleine: But people, I learned that you can get. It's not like med school. You can become a chef many different ways. You can come up through the line in a restaurant. You can go to culinary school. You can be a home cook and teach yourself. So I dove in, and I started, you know, floundering and burning myself and cutting myself and just horrible accidents. But then after, like, six months, I started really getting the hang of it.
And all of our sessions were these miniature, like, Iron Chef competitions. And you'd been get a secret protein.
Erin: I'm terrible. I'm not a chef at all, but I would enjoy that.
Madeleine: I can teach you, but you get a secret protein, you have 90 minutes to make a main course, two sides, and a dessert. And I would lead the teams and blah, blah, blah. Well, after six months, my team started winning a lot, and I realized, wait, my instincts are good. I've been cooking since I was 12, when my parents took me to France and I got obsessed. It was like another one of these calling things, like working at Letterman. And I felt really confident, so I had my name embroidered on a chef coat. Chef Madeleine. And something is very real when it's written in thread.
Erin: I'm going to remember that.
Madeleine: Yes. When you write it in thread, you can't erase it.
Erin: Power in a monogram.
Madeleine: Yeah. And I was Chef Madeleine. And then Sam proposed, and we were planning our wedding on a beach in. On the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. And I had every second planned out. I was so excited. Dress and rhinestone flip flops and everything. And I just. I said, Madeleine, at my birthday.
Look at you. You've pivoted to followed your dreams and your passion to a new career. You're marrying the love of your life on a beach in Mexico. And I swear, Erin, I thought I caused Covid because how dare you be so positive? I jinxed everybody. And the first death happened, like, seven miles from our house. Blue ribbon closed in February. My wedding, which was supposed to be March 24th. 2020 happened on the 14th.
Erin: I'll remember March 2020.
Madeleine: Yeah. In an empty courthouse. And I just proceeded to have my honeymoon in lockdown. And I just took to the couch, and I was depressed. And then one day, a force of nature pulled me by the hair and in my pajamas, no makeup, didn't clear the counters. I called my husband in and grunted, Here, phone me, cook you record, make YouTube. We hadn't been speaking much. We were both so depressed.
And we were watching Tiger King. Everybody was. Everybody was. So I made some pasta, and Sam recorded it on my phone, and I put it on YouTube. And then magic happened, and just one thing led to another, and some guy came and knocked on my door and said, I want to edit your videos. And then he said, I want to shoot your videos. And then I got an intern who would become an executive producer. And then this whole group of people in San Francisco kind of adopted me.
And next thing you know, I had five cameras, a switcher, teleprompter, a lighting grid in my kitchen. Then a friend of mine who was a publicist said, do you want to be on the Today show? And next thing you know, I was on the Today show. And then I was on the Today show again and again. And one of those times, I burnt my hands on a pan. Then I became a regular on two different morning shows, and it was amazing. And then I had another publicist come in and go, hey, I can put you in a morning show every day. And then I was doing my own corporate team building classes, and I was making money. And then I was a regular on this platform called kitsch, which is Twitch for chefs.
And then I had a woman making a deck for me to get brand. I had a TV deal, and then I got cancer. It was the same day that the war broke out in Ukraine, And I would call my cancer Vladimir Putin, and I would call my chemo, Vladimir Zelensky, because my joke was that he was doing good work, but he took some collateral damage unwittingly, and everything came to a screeching halt. All of my mat in the kitchen, people scattered to the wind.
Erin: Sure.
Madeleine: And, yeah, it was pretty rough.
Erin: But, Madeleine, what I see in your story is that you're wildly receptive to these strikes of inspiration that you really listen when this. I think a lot of people have the thing that you had with Letterman, the thing that you had with Matt in the kitchen, this calling moment, and they don't know to recognize it for what it is, and they don't act on it. And you have a bias towards action, obviously, and you just do the thing. Like the thing comes at you and you go, I have to do the thing. And I would love to hear, as we wrap up this conversation that has been so awesome and inspiring, what can our listeners take away from your story? Because not everybody's going to have the level of, oh, my God. Rebirth, massive explosion of success. Retraction, massive explosion. Like, never.
Erin: You are on a wild ride in this lifetime. What can we extrapolate from the way that you've handled the ups and downs?
Madeleine: I think it all, you kind of said it. And I, for me, I really want to thank my parents, Eugene and Lorraine Smithberg, because as I said, I was raised in this bubble and I was, you know, the first child, and I was adored, and I was raised to believe that I could do anything that I wanted, and I felt that love. Now I can't tell everyone, go back in time and have the Smithbergs as your parents. No, what I would say is what you said. Listen, pay attention. Don't let fear put you out of reach of your dreams or even just your desires, your wants, your casual yearnings. Don't allow fear to stop you.
I think it's a lot like the movie defending your life where we get paralyzed because when we're feeling bad and bad things are happening to us, I think it's a natural assumption to start thinking, well, I'm bad. That's why this is happening to me. And therefore, I don't deserve anything good. And when you feel like that, guess what happens?
Erin: Nothing.
Madeleine: You don't get anything. And that's really messed up. And it's one of those toxic positivity things, because people would say to me, when I had cancer, you've got this girl. Just stay positive. And I was like, you get into my shoes, which are slippers, and try to be positive right now, because I don't feel positive. And so it's this really delicate dance of staying positive but not being obnoxious about it.
Erin: Or delusional.
Madeleine: Right, or delusional. And just because you think you want it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to get it. But all I would say, Erin, the best advice that I can give is get out of your own way. Get out of your own way and get out of the house. Because if you stay in your house and don't do anything, nothing's going to happen. But if you get out of your house and you go to a cooking class, you're going to be a chef, right?
Erin: Right.
Madeleine: Even if it's only for 90 minutes.
Erin: Right, right. But take action. Take action.
Madeleine: Take action.
Erin: Yeah.
Madeleine: Depression is really insidious, and it's very easy to just sort of shut the world out and get in your pajamas and get a, you know, gallon of ice cream and curl up on the couch, and that's fine for a weekend. Right. Someone taught me this, which is talk to yourself in a really nice voice. I like to talk to myself the way I talk to dogs. So I'll go and I talk to myself in a really nice voice because I'm. Because I'm the only one that can control that. Like, you know, people in the world can be, hey, lady, get out of the way. Huh? Screw you.
Can't control them. But I don't have to join in with the yelling. I can be nice to myself. And when I'm nice to myself, I feel better about myself. And when I feel better about myself, better things seem to happen, even if they're only little things. And if you have a couple of little things happen, all of a sudden you notice, I don't feel so bad because I'm a good girl. I think that's actually really good advice, which is nice to you.
Erin: Yeah, I think that's actually really good advice, too. Thank you so much, Madeleine. I've loved this conversation. You are a force of nature, and I can't wait to read your book, Almost Funny and watch your show, Lady Girls, which, if I can contribute in any way, please let me know. I'd love to help.
Madeleine: We'll figure out. We'll figure out a way. I gotta get you on there. All right. We'll get you on. Erin, thanks so much for asking me. I feel like, you know, like, I'm a decade ahead of you, but we're on the same sort of, like, yellow brick road.
Erin: We are.
Madeleine: And it's just. I think part of it is just knowing you're not alone. And that's actually the whole purpose of Lady Girls, and I think it's the purpose of your podcast, too, is to let women know that there is a community out there. And I think that we all need to stick together because no one else is really getting our backs right now.
Erin: No, it's us. It's us for us.
Madeleine: It's us. Yeah, it's us for us. But we're here for each other, and I think that's a really good thing.
Erin: I agree. I agree. Thank you so much.
Madeleine: You are so welcome.
Erin: Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. If you loved this conversation with Madeleine, and it made you think about what's possible for you in a different way. Please let us know. If you haven't already, Please go over to Apple Podcasts and write a review of Hotter Than Ever. This really helps to support the show, maybe share about how it's impacted you in some kind of meaningful way, even if it's just that Madeleine and I made you laugh in this conversation.
God, I love smart, funny, accomplished women, and I am willing to bet that you are one of them. Please tell the world, or at least your three best friends about this show so we can keep it going and keep it growing.
Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez. I will talk to you next week, Hotties. Enjoy your tryptophan coma.
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