You may have noticed something strange on this week’s episode of It Happens in Florida.

Namely: it didn’t quite… make sense.

That’s because our head writer, John, quit the show. Or stormed off dramatically. Or wandered into a Publix and ghosted us for 48 hours. The details are fuzzy.

It all began last Tuesday when John turned in a script titled “The Emotional Weight of a Flamingo Who’s Seen Too Much.” It was rejected. Not because it wasn’t brilliant (it was… maybe), but because the crew accidentally threw it away, thinking it was fanfiction.

This, we later learned, was the last straw in a stack of unspoken straws.

John had been quietly spiraling for weeks. Sure, we thought everything was fine — he laughed when Florida Man rewrote dialogue using BBQ sauce on a whiteboard. He smiled (tightly) when Oscar pitched a musical episode set inside a Waffle House bathroom. But apparently…
John felt deeply disrespected.

He thought no one liked his writing. Or his cardigans. Or his 27-slide pitch deck titled “Building Narrative Arc in a World of Alligators.”

So he vanished.

No official resignation letter. No dramatic “I’m out!”

Just a half-eaten granola bar, an untouched kombucha, and a Post-it on his laptop that read: “Guess no one cares. I’m gone. Whatever.”
(He even drew a tiny frowning flamingo next to it. It was devastating.)

The crew panicked.

Raymond suggested a seance.

Oscar suggested replacing John with AI. (He was immediately booed by everyone, including a squirrel.)

Florida Man suggested we “let nature write the next episode.” This led to 20 minutes of us watching a raccoon steal the camera battery.

Meanwhile, John was not in hiding — he was at the Naples Public Library, passive-aggressively writing poetry in all caps.

He didn’t actually tell anyone he quit. He just assumed we’d notice. Which we did… two days later, when we realized our B-storyline was being written by someone’s nephew who thought “Skunk Ape” was a kind of coffee.

The comeback? It happened like everything on this show does: awkwardly, unexpectedly, and surrounded by deli meats.

We found John standing in line at the grocery store, holding a frozen pizza and reading a self-help book titled “You’re Fine, Probably.”

He tried to pretend he didn’t know us.

Florida Man hugged him anyway. With mustard on his hands.

Someone blurted, “We missed your weird flamingo metaphors,” and John visibly teared up next to the salami bin.

He came back the next day, no explanation, no apology — just a new script titled: “Episode 14: When the Writer Quits and Nobody Notices Until Everything Catches Fire, Metaphorically (Mostly).”

Spoiler: we’re producing it.

Final Notes:

• John is back.
• We now have weekly “Tell John He’s Good” meetings.
• And yes — flamingos are officially part of the season arc now.