Hot Tub Tim Machine

Not every idea that gets made is a great idea, and not every idea that doesn’t get made is a bad idea.

For years, I have been trying to make things. Movies. TV shows. Reality series. Game shows. And at one point, I even tried to make a talk show… that takes place in a hot tub.

Yep, you read that right.

It was called HOT TUB TIM MACHINE.

A simple, yet timeless premise.

I originally pitched it as a short-form celebrity talk show where I’d hire a famous Tim to host it, and he would interview only famous people named Tim. There would be a house band full of Tims, and they’d be called the Timbones.

Yes, I understood that only having famous people named Tim in the hot tub was limiting. So I mapped out a life beyond the Tims.

The plan was that Season One would feature only Tims. Then, without explanation or warning, Season Two would suddenly become HOT TUB KIM MACHINE, hosted by a Kim interviewing other Kims in the exact same format. By Season Three, we’d pivot again to HOT TUB JIM MACHINE and simply hope audiences stayed in the water for the expansion of this increasingly unhinged hot tub cinematic universe.

At various points, the show almost happened. There were conversations. Decks. Budgets. Sponsors flirted with the idea. Production plans were discussed. I even started expanding beyond an all-Tim guest list because I realized I could simply remain the only Tim in the tub, with new and exciting guests every episode.

That version almost went.

Then it didn’t.

Which, if you work in entertainment long enough, becomes a strangely familiar genre of heartbreak.

Creative people live on a roller coaster of belief, delusion, momentum, disappointment, false starts, near misses, and the dangerous phrase, “Let’s circle back after the holidays.”

The craziest part is that even the wildest ideas can start to feel inevitable when enough people around you nod their heads. You begin mentally spending money that does not exist. You picture the billboard before there’s a pilot. You imagine telling the story years later about how this whole thing started, because you had the dumb idea to interview people in a hot tub while you were sitting in one. Genius.

And then suddenly, one day, everyone stops replying to emails.

The truly dangerous thing about creative people is that we can become emotionally attached to things that barely exist yet.

At one point, I became deeply committed to a segment in which the water temperature slowly rose throughout the interview until someone physically tapped out.

“Who can handle the heat?” I wrote in the pitch deck, like a man who had completely lost perspective.

I also genuinely explored the possibility of a mobile hot tub rolling through Hollywood because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether something was practical and became fully focused on whether it would look incredible in a sizzle reel.

I was fully aware that interviewing people in a bubbling hot tub presented certain audio challenges. You cannot exactly clip a microphone onto a wet bathing suit, and the sound from a boom mic hovering over aggressively churning water felt, at best, ambitious.

This never bothered me.

Because one thing I’ve learned about creative people is that we are remarkably good at treating enormous production problems as “future issues.”

I simply assumed that if HOT TUB TIM MACHINE ever got greenlit, a sound engineer somewhere would stare at me silently for a very long time, sigh deeply, and eventually figure it out.

This did not stop me from creating an actual distribution strategy.

In my mind, people everywhere would soon be consuming HOT TUB TIM MACHINE across YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and whatever platform eventually specializes in watching celebrities slowly overheat while discussing childhood trauma.

Believing in ideas before you understand how they work is almost required in this business.

I got beaten up in college by a kid named Tim.

To this day, I maintain I got sucker punched. Though there is another version of the story I have been told where he grabbed my then-girlfriend’s butt, I shoved him, and then made the fatal mistake of keeping my hands down because I believed there was no longer a threat of pain.

Which, honestly, is how I enter most creative projects.

Hands down. Completely exposed.

Every time, I convince myself this one will be different. This one will work. This one won’t hurt.

And yet, most projects in this town end in pain.

Even the ones that get made.

Especially the ones that get made.

Because every project eventually becomes a collection of compromises, bruised egos, anxious phone calls, shifting expectations, sleepless nights, and bottles that were once full of chilled red wine.

Still, the truly dangerous thing about creative ideas is that they never fully die.

They just move into another room in your brain.

Not now ideas.

Ideas you revisit every few months while brushing your teeth, driving alone, or sitting in traffic on the 101. Ideas that still make you smile, despite all the available evidence.

And if I’m being honest, HOT TUB TIM MACHINE still occasionally floats back to the surface.

I still think it would work, by the way.

Which is either the mark of a true creative person…

Or someone who has spent too much time in a hot tub.