Jake Kasdan made his feature debut as writer and director of Zero Effect, starring Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller, in 1998. The following year, Kasdan directed the pilot for the short-lived, highly acclaimed television series Freaks and Geeks. Created by Paul Feig, Freaks and Geeks also marked Kasdan's first collaboration with executive producer Judd Apatow. Kasdan served as a consulting producer through the run of the series and directed several episodes. Next, Kasdan directed his second television pilot for another short-lived Apatow-produced series, Undeclared. In 2002, Kasdan directed Orange County, starring Colin Hanks and Jack Black and written by Freaks and Geeks alum Mike White. The TV Set is Kasdan's third film. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

I started writing The TV Set on November 4, 2004, two days after the U.S. presidential election. Like a lot of other people (49% of the people), I was in the midst of a minor existential depression that week, trying to make sense of what had just happened. I was thinking about the campaign, and how complex ideas and people get simplified and reduced in the process of making them palatable to absolutely everyone. I was thinking about focus groups, about compromise, and about how good people make bad decisions. It was a familiar feeling. It reminded me of pilot season. This movie, "the pilot season movie," was an idea I had been thinking about for a while. But it wasn't until the Thursday after that Tuesday that I felt moved to write it. I've been fortunate to have had great experiences making television shows. And I've had other experiences too. I've also watched and sympathized as several of my friends had their own experiences with TV pilots. One friend, who was in the midst of making a pilot at the time, told me she didn't want to read the script because she feared that it would be like finding out how and when she was going to die. You spend a little bit of time in this world and you quickly start to realize that the things that happen tend to happen repeatedly. It's a similar drama every time, with similar conflicts. And yet, if this is your life, if it's the only thing you're good at, you go back and do it again the next year. Similar to the way that women have to partially forget the excruciating pain of childbirth so that they might do it again and ensure the survival of humanity, so goes the television writer back into those same offices, pitching another idea for another pilot, so as to ensure the survival of network television. And though it doesn't get much easier, it ceases to feel like such high drama. It feels more like comedy. The movie is populated by fictional people, making a fictional pilot. Everything they say and do is made up. The rest, I'm afraid, is all real.