Friday Questions

Warming the winter blues with some more Friday Questions.  What's yours?

Brian Phillips leads off.

Which characters did you find it hardest to write for? This is not a question about difficult actors; this is solely about the character.

Fay on WINGS. The actress, Rebecca Schull was wonderful, but the character of Fay was so “nice.” It’s always harder to write characters who were basically “good.”

Daphne on FRASIER was difficult at times and Father Mulcahy on MASH was often a challenge.

And again, this has NOTHING to do with the actors themselves. If anything, we felt bad for them.

Another Brian writes:

I recently saw Shelley Long's Emmy acceptance speech for the first time, and was so impressed by how articulate (no umms or ahhs) and gracious she was - Diane would've been proud! I was also touched she took the time to thank the viewers for watching the show, a group not mentioned in many award speeches. Were the cast and crew of Cheers as moved by her speech as I was?

I can’t speak for the rest of the CHEERS group but I was touched by her speech. (The one I delivered a few minutes later was not nearly as good.) 

First of all, I was thrilled that she won. She was so deserving. And secondly, she was right. Having very loyal and vocal viewers made the decision by NBC to continue the show that much easier. So I thank them too.

From jcs:

I'm wondering what happens when a writer turns showrunner. How did you and David handle the increased responsibilities regarding budget and personnel? Did you hire people for the economic side of producing your shows? Or did you learn financial planning on the fly?

We learned a LOT by working with Glen & Les Charles and seeing how they handled the responsibility. Their people skills, organizational skills, and talent skills were all A+.

We saw them deftly handle problems we didn’t even recognize as problems. I can’t thank them enough.

As for the financial aspect, we had a line producer who dealt with that, but we went over the budget with her. And it’s quite simple really, if there was something we wanted to do that was over-budget we’d have to sit with her and figure somewhere else in the budget we could cut a corner.

There are some producers who would prefer to go way over-budget and just fight the studio and network. I always took pride in being a responsible showrunner and delivering my shows on budget.

The ones that constantly go over-budget may win some of their fights, but after their show ends and a few years later when a studio or network is looking for a showrunner they tend to avoid those producers. Sure not worth it for a more elaborate ballroom scene.

And finally, Andy Ihnatko wonders:

When a recurring prop or piece of set dressing is supposed to be old and beaten-up -- like Marty's iconic chair in "Frasier" -- is it easier to find one or to make one?

Crew members can “age” furniture, props, walls, people. It’s pretty amazing actually. They can also make duplicate furniture if they can’t buy dupes. In the case of Marty’s chair, I am not certain but I believe they had several.

There was this show on ABC a few years ago called ONCE AND AGAIN. They filmed the pilot at a friend’s house, using their living room. When the pilot got picked up to series the production team recreated their entire living room including furniture to fit into a sound stage. Imagine how bizarre that was for the house’s occupants to step into their living room on a sound stage.