When I was 22, I moved to Colombia, South America. By the time I was 24, I was running my own TV show—though we didn’t call it show running back then. Before that, I’d only been in one writers’ room, working on De Pies a Cabeza, a Colombian family series about a neighborhood soccer coach and his young players. I ended up writing about 25 episodes of De Pies a Cabeza, which gave me just enough experience (in my naive head)—and just enough confidence—to try creating something of my own.
My show was called Fuego Verde. It wasn’t very good (I’m being kind). But I saw a gap: nobody was making shows for a male audience in Colombia. In the '90s, almost all scripted content targeted women. So I wrote an action-adventure series with a lot of comedy and heart. Budgets were around $60K an episode. My co-writer Tom Quinn and I used to call our VFX "special defects" because they were hilariously bad. We would watch the show together on Tuesday nights as 8:30pm stoned out of our gourds.
And yet, the …
