"And so they pitched the show to me. It sounded like a good idea. We pitched the show back, and got it sold and got it on the air. And that's kicking the tail"
About this Quote
The charm here is how aggressively unglamorous it is. Mills Lane, a TV personality with a referee’s cadence, narrates the birth of a show the way a guy describes fixing a fence: someone pitched it, he pitched it back, it got sold, it hit the air. No mythmaking, no tortured artist routine, no “journey.” Just transactions and momentum. That bluntness is the brand.
“Kicking the tail” is the tell. It’s a cleaned-up, broadcast-safe version of “kicking ass,” and Lane uses it like a victory stamp: the point isn’t elegance, it’s winning without apologizing for wanting to win. In one phrase he captures the late-90s/early-2000s reality-TV ethos before it fully admitted what it was: entertainment as a contact sport, where authenticity is less about vulnerability and more about confidence.
The repetition of “pitched” does cultural work, too. It frames creativity as leverage. He’s not the passive talent being discovered; he’s a participant in the hustle, returning the pitch like a boxer countering a jab. That posture mattered in an era when “celebrity” started to mean “person who can turn attention into a product,” and Lane presents himself as someone fluent in that economy.
Underneath the genial simplicity is a quiet flex: I understand the game, I played it, I got it on the air. The sentence structure is a victory lap disguised as small talk, which is exactly why it lands.
“Kicking the tail” is the tell. It’s a cleaned-up, broadcast-safe version of “kicking ass,” and Lane uses it like a victory stamp: the point isn’t elegance, it’s winning without apologizing for wanting to win. In one phrase he captures the late-90s/early-2000s reality-TV ethos before it fully admitted what it was: entertainment as a contact sport, where authenticity is less about vulnerability and more about confidence.
The repetition of “pitched” does cultural work, too. It frames creativity as leverage. He’s not the passive talent being discovered; he’s a participant in the hustle, returning the pitch like a boxer countering a jab. That posture mattered in an era when “celebrity” started to mean “person who can turn attention into a product,” and Lane presents himself as someone fluent in that economy.
Underneath the genial simplicity is a quiet flex: I understand the game, I played it, I got it on the air. The sentence structure is a victory lap disguised as small talk, which is exactly why it lands.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sales |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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