Maria Ferrari is a staff writer on "The Bill Engvall Show." She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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Episode 201 - But That’s Not Fair!

A lot of people wonder how much of television shows are made up, and how much of them come from real life. On the Bill Engvall show, the answer is a bit of both. The writers sit around a conference table just like you would find in any meeting room, except way dirtier because our feet are up on it all the time. And as we think up stories we talk a lot about our lives. The stories for this season have come mostly from two places – Bill’s comedy and our own families.

For example, the cell phone story from this weeks’ show came out of a day when two writers were both having trouble with their cell phones. They each called customer service, but they didn’t get the same results. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Some of our writers have good luck with things like customer service. You know the type – they’re sort of magical. They show up for a flight and get an upgrade, they call tech support and get a brand-new computer shipped within a week. But for others, things just don’t go as smoothly. They’re Charlie Brown on Halloween… always get a rock.

For this episode, we were interested in exploring the idea of fairness in customer service. There are different ways to get help fixing a problem, but at the same time maybe everyone deserves to be helped. So we gave one attitude to Bill, and the other to Susan, and then built the story from there.

Anyway, that’s how this story came to be. Some weeks in the writers’ room we find our stories in other ways. And then other weeks we mostly get in trouble for drawing stuff on the walls. Keep checking back in this space, and we’ll let you know a little about what was going on while we were working on different episodes, important things like whether anyone brought in cake, and if it was good cake. And in case you were wondering, the rule at our studio is if you damage the walls in the writers’ room, they won’t just come in and re-paint them for you when you leave. You have to pay for it yourself. Now is that fair?