What a bad idea!

Show business memoirs are often about the author’s greatest hits. That’s not true for the book by Bruce Vilanch, 77, the cherubic comic actor and writer probably best known for his appearances on the original “Hollywood Squares.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, he took a different tack. His new book is “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.”

Fortunately, many of these programs are eminently forgettable: a “Star Wars” holiday special; a Village People vehicle called “Can’t Stop the Music”; and the “Paul Lynde Halloween Special.”

Others, not so much, particularly the Snow White, Rob Lowe, Proud Mary debacle that you can find on YouTube under the heading “The 11 Minutes that Ruined Hollywood Producer Alan Carr’s Career.” Although he was the main writer in the show, Vilanch claims that he had nothing to do with this segment.

The idea for the book came about during the pandemic, when Vilanch started appearing on podcasts hosted by people much younger than he was. “They kept asking me about those TV shows I wrote before they were born,” he said in a Zoom interview.

“They discovered them on the Internet. I thought there’s a book in how I wrote the worst shows of all time and how they managed to live and be reborn.”

The Paterson native returned to his home state to promote his tome at Bookends in Ridgewood.

“It was great,” he said. “A lot of people showed up, and I got to see the Jersey contingent.”

Adopted by Henne and Jonas Vilanch when he was just four days old, he grew up in Paterson, went to Hebrew school at Temple Emanuel of North Jersey (then in Paterson but now in Franklin Lakes), was a member of the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth, and actually had two bar mitzvahs. When I spoke to him a couple of years ago, he told me that the first was his regular one and the other come came on its first anniversary, when there was no one else around to read haftorah, so the rabbi asked him to read it again.

Vilanch recalls his childhood as relatively happy, “considering I was overweight, not athletic, and had a life of the mind, you know. So I wasn’t a popular kid, except I could make people laugh. But I had fabulous parents, who were very enabling. They saw that I enjoyed performing, so they encouraged it.

“They said you’re a good writer. You should work for newspapers, because they’ll never die.”

He attributes much of his success to family. “As I got older, I could discern things I got from my parents and my relatives,” he said. “My mother’s family was crazy. They were all nuts one way or another, and they all had vivid personalities. I’m sure I pulled from them and her.

“Later, when I found my birth family, I found my mother had been in show business as a showgirl.

That discovery began about 10 years ago, when Vilanch took a genetic test and discovered a cousin in California. “My birth mother had me when she was 16,” he said. “Ten years later she married and had a whole other family.” She’d died by the time he made the connection with his cousin, “but there were home movies of her. She had this big personality, and there are things I do that absolutely come from her.

“As I got older, this led to a lot of introspection. Was this” — his theatricality and gift for writing and acting — “passed on genetically? Nature or nurture? But eventually I stopped asking myself that, because it’s just who I am and it doesn’t make a difference.”

Vilanch spent 25 years writing for the Academy Awards, the last 15 as head writer. He also wrote for the Emmys and Tonys. So it seemed natural to start our conversation by asking what he thought of this year’s Oscars show, hosted by Conan O/Brien.

Bruce Vilanch: I thought it was a great show, really classy and well done. I hadn’t seen Conan’s stand-up for a long time, and I’d forgotten that his fallback position is self-deprecation. That’s perfect for an Oscar telecast, because if something doesn’t work, just tap dance. I thought he hit all the right notes.

Curt Schleier: Do you miss being there?

BV: I was there for years and years, so sure. It’s like [the revived] “Hollywood Squares.” People keep asking are you sorry you’re not on it. I tell them I’ll be on it when they get down to the Vs. Sooner or later, they’ll call, because they’ll run out of people.”

CS: What would you say was your funniest contribution to the Oscars?

BV: I never know how to answer that question, so, any funny things we made up on the fly. I don’t have one specific thing I wish I could tell you.

CS: On the subject of hosts, who was your favorite?

BV: My favorite was Hugh Jackman because he was not a standup. But we had done the Tonys twice, so he knew what the job was and slipped into the role very easily. I enjoyed everybody — well, everybody except for Ellen [DeGeneres]. Ellen was a trial. She was nervous and had her own staff from her talk show. She was sort of isolating herself with them. So that wasn’t terribly pleasant.

CS: Getting back to the subject of your book, when you’re asked to sign onto one of these projects, do you know in advance how bad it will be?

BV: You usually know it’s not a very good idea, but then you ask what are you paying? Oh, well, now I see how I can make it work. Or sometimes, like “Star Wars Holiday” especially, it was sort of irresistible because “Star Wars” was in the zeitgeist. It hadn’t yet graduated to become the Scientology of the nerds. So the idea of trying to marry “Star Wars” with a variety show was intriguing. I don’t think it was a good idea, but it was an intriguing one. While the others, they were just more of what was being done at the time.

CS: Once you begin, how soon do you become discouraged? Or do you remain convinced you can make it better?

BV: You do at the beginning, but then you begin to realize you’re sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire. So you try to make it as good as you can.

“It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Others I Wrote” by Bruce Vilanch. Chicago Review Press. 202 pages. $28.99