It was only a matter of time until writers made it onto reality television (I guess?), and Tom Rachman reports in the New York Times that the Italians have beat the rest of us to it. Debuting on Sunday in Italy, Masterpiece is a show with a board of judges, a confessional room, and the chance for aspiring authors to try their hands at writing until one of them gets a book deal.
How many people feel like they need public pressure to get words onto the page? Five thousand potential novelists applied for the show within a month, which is a smaller number than you’d expect, actually, and the TV staff whittled the submission pile down to a group of four writers per episode. Writers have thirty minutes to complete each prompt, and must read their work aloud to the judges after the allotted time.