Paul B leads off:
The hilarious British TV comedy "Coupling" from the early 2000's (think Monte Python meets Friends) was written single handedly by the creator, Steven Moffat. It was only 28 episodes over 4 years, but still seems like an enormous undertaking. If that weren't enough, his wife was the director. Would you ever consider such an effort?
First of all let me just say that the British COUPLING is one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, and Steven Moffat is brilliant.
If I had an idea that good and the freedom to write the episodes at my own pace and hire the actors I wanted (not foisted upon me by a network), I would certainly consider it.
Again, if you’ve never seen COUPLING, go find it and watch it.
Robert Brauer asks:
What is it that differentiates one of your ten minute plays from a comedy sketch? I am presuming that there are differences, I just cannot make the leap of logic to determine what they might be.
Comedy sketches tend to have funny premises and then as many jokes as they can get to service that premise.
A ten-minute play has a real beginning, middle, and end. Just like a good short story. A character will have to make a big decision, an event will cause change, there will be some revelation, etc. Storytelling drives a ten-minute play, not jokes.
Matt wonders:
Was Mako Iwamatsu cast on the FRASIER first season episode "Author Author" due to his connection with you and David on MASH?
Nope. I always like to take credit for things so actors can feel beholden to me, but the truth is we had nothing to do with that casting choice. Mako got the FRASIER gig because he’s terrific.
And finally, from Douglas Trapasso:
Paraphrasing a question from the recent candidate debates, if -you- were made Baseball Commissioner, and had full autonomy, what three changes would you make in your first 100 days?
Pitchers would have to face at least three batters or finish an inning.
Eliminate interleague play.
Not allow any TV deal that doesn’t guarantee the games be available to at least 70% of the local market.
What’s your Friday Question?
If I were Commissioner for a day I would make celebrations for every good play mandatory. Why? Because baseball is fading away and people seem to love little dances after every play in football and the NFL is raking in the cash.
ReplyDeleteImagine. After a strikeout the pitcher would do a little dance. After a grand slam the batter and base runners could put on a little one act play.
I would also consider allowing the use of all Three Stooges moves when a manager comes out to argue with the Umpire. The Eye Poke, Head Bop and Running in circles on the ground like a dog.
I also love Coupling. I have the entire series and watch it at least once a year. It still holds up well.
ReplyDeleteHere are mine:
ReplyDeleteEach league's post-season games are seen on the same network. Fans should never worry where the games are found.
Each team plays at least 2 home Sunday doubleheaders. Let the fans sense these are "the value days." If the owners desperately need those extra two home dates (2.5 % of the schedule) to make money, raise your ticket prices 2.5%. They'll go up anyway. But give the fans a sense of how much fun baseball Sunday were when Ken and I were growing up and falling in love with the game.
All weekend World Series games start by 3:00 pm ET. Baseball looks best under the sun. This is TV product. Scenes of dark, foggy stadiums under the lights look haunting and gloomy by compasion. Memo to Mr. Manfred: There were bigger TV audiences for the fall classic during the 1960s and early '70s. Maybe someone with long range growth can realize why.
Yes! Eliminate interleague play.
ReplyDeleteI'd like the three-batter rule, especially for relief pitchers, but I would amend it to three batters, finish the inning OR give up a run. Say a pitcher comes in with the bases loaded, promptly gives up a grand slam, and the next two batters hit home runs, too. That's six runs with no possibility of taking him out after the first four.
ReplyDeleteRun at top speed from the AMERICAN version of Coupling. Miscast and it shows what can happen when a good script meets the wrong (not bad, just wrong) actors.
ReplyDeleteNot just Coupling, but Moffat of course wrote and show ran 4 brilliant seasons of Doctor Who (with David Tenant as the Doctor) and Sherlock (With Cumberbatch and Freeman) and . . .
ReplyDeleteBlinky,
ReplyDeleteYou've clearly watched THE NAKED GUN too many times...
The last episode of Coupling's Series Two, "The End of the Line" is amazingly well plotted. I won't spoil just how, but my reaction at the end on seeing it for the first time amounted to "How the hell did he pull that off?".
ReplyDeleteEliminate the video review. Let managers dispute calls the way Earl Weaver did -- by yelling, making faces, kicking dirt on the umpire's shoes and getting ejected. Much more entertaining than watching them stand around waiting for someone in New York to uphold the call (as almost always happens). Baseball doesn't have colorful managers any more; I can barely remember the names of the current ones. It's hard to get excited about a game when the manager reminds you of your high school math teacher.
ReplyDeleteI haven't watched COUPLING for a few years, but I remember liking the bit where the male character nicknamed "Donkey" by the women is all psyched for a heterosexual threesome, but runs away shocked and horrified at the closing reveal that the third person is to be the show's nerdiest guy instead of a beautiful young woman. I can't imagine that happening in an American version of the show.
ReplyDeleteHere's a Friday Question:
ReplyDeleteIn Cheers Episode 5.10 - "Everyone Imitates Art" by Heide Perlman, Sam and Diane "battle" over who can get a poem published. I was struck by one "feminine insight" after another - especially at the end of the show.
I wonder if Ken believes that a male writer could have done such a good job writing from Diane's point-of-view.
Of course the general question is "do female writers have a siginificant edge writing for female characters?"
Matt Weiner, speaking mostly for himself, has stated in interviews that, of course, men can write effective female roles.
Add a pitch clock. 18 seconds.
ReplyDeleteIf you walk Mike Trout intentionally, he gets a free triple.
-30-
Ken, if you eliminate interleague play, with 15 teams in each league, then one team in each league will have to not play every single day, which practically speaking means they are not playing for three days at a time.
ReplyDeleteTo fix this, would you send the Astros back to the NL, or perhaps go back to the start of interleague play, and send Milwaukee back to the AL? They didn't have this problem before because Tampa Bay and Arizona were added at the same time, so it was 14 teams in each league. They needed to move Milwaukee(Bud Selig's team) because interleague play started out as only occupying specific parts of the schedule and not an everyay thing.
I wouldn’t regulate how many batters a pitcher has to face, but I would make it painful for a lot of pitching changes by limiting the number of pitchers on the roster.
ReplyDeleteOfficial MLB rule change for the 2020 season : Rule 5:10 (g) Starting pitchers and relief pitchers must pitch to either a minimum of three batters or to the end of a half inning. Expections for incapacitating injury or illness.
ReplyDeleteEliminate interleague games!
Never even heard of "Coupling." So I have no idea of it's any good or not.
ReplyDeleteWhen I've tried to write a ten-minute-play, they sound a little too much like sketches. Mostly because that was my background. It's difficult to unlearn that skill.
However, in previous blogs you've stated that you want your plays to be as funny as possible with laughs throughout. Obviously, there must me a compromise somewhere.
I'd eliminate the safety fences surrounding the infield. Running the risk of getting beaned by a baseball is the tradeoff for having the best seats in the house. And what could be a better souvenir than a chunk of a broken bat in your jugular?
But seriously, one of the thrills of seeing a game in person is the possibility of catching a foul ball. Take that away and there's not much insentive to slog all the way to the ballpark.
As long as we're on the subject of baseball, F##K the Dodgers! As I've said before I'm really not a baseball fan. But, I do root for the Dodgers (and to a lesser extent the Angels) when they're in the playoffs. You do get invested in the outcome. That's why I'm SO disappointed with the Dodgers. They set a franchise record for wins during the regular season! It seemed like a no-brainer. But, they turned into the Hillary Clinton of sports. Something needs to change on that team. Either on the coaching staff and/or in the front office. Let's start by trading Clayton Kershaw.
M.B.
MacGilroy: When Moffat was the show runner, it was Matt Smith and then Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. He did write some of the most well-regarded scripts of the Russell T. Davies era for David Tennant and his predecessor Christopher Eccleston however, and enriched the English language with the phrase "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff".
ReplyDeleteMacGilroy and Jekyll, an updating of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story.
ReplyDelete>> First of all let me just say that the British COUPLING is one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, and Steven Moffat is brilliant.
ReplyDeleteThat first EP, where they're at the restaurant, all of them together and it's messy with friends and new lovers, and gfs, and she's going to bare one breast, so the one guy is debating which one, with definite views as to which breast is better? Wow. Just a full embrace of the story, the characters, all of it, all going down the same rabbithole, and you as viewer is just along for the ride.
P.
"Matt Weiner, speaking mostly for himself, has stated in interviews that, of course, men can write effective female roles."
ReplyDeleteTake that one on, Ken.
A good writer is a good writer. And part of a good writer is being secure enough to seek input from others outside your realm of experience to see if your characters are accurate.
My question is, are other creatives so selfish that they would not share insights among each other to keep their "demographic" knowledge to themselves to grab the work? Some people are that shallow, but others sre not. That's why Betty White marveled at how men could write for women for The Golden Girls (not all of their writers were gay and female).
To say a writer can only write for his or her own individual check boxes on a medical form is to negate every writer of every race,gender or preference since chisels on rocks.
Apparently now it takes some kind of Lite-Brite of creatives, based on claims of the last decade or so. This has NOTHING to do with opportunity or equality in hiring, this has to do with talent and skill. Black writers have written some great and poor scripts for black shows and films, as have women. They can pick up a check for taking the road easier traveled.
I'm sure there are people reading this who have already disputed Golden Girls so I won't mention other shows that prove demographics in writers are not sacrosanct, but talent is. You really have to be good, willing to rewrite, live in the real world with real people (there's a tough one in Hollywood) and get over yourself.
Last nights Nationals- Cards game took 3:23 to play. Which was ridiculous considering only 4 Cardinal players got on base. So I would order strict enforcement of the pitch time limit rule. Even if it means putting in a pitch clock.
ReplyDeleteTotally worship at the altar of the British Coupling. As good as the writing is, I think the other key to the excellence is perfect casting for the six lead roles, even after one bolted prior to the final season, and they had to bring in another character and actor.
ReplyDeleteI don't think my wife and I have seen an episode for at least ten years, but every so often, just out of the blue, one of us will start talking about one of our favorites.
***Questions***
ReplyDeleteWhen you began getting paid for your television writing how did you get paid? I have read that the studios pay the talent agency who then pays their clients less the applicable commission? Do actors, writers, directors, etc. have the ability to avoid this situation and get paid directly from the studio or network? I have also read that agents have stolen their client's cash with this kind of arrangement. How does it work when you have had multiple agents over the years?
You have stated that several writing assignments were the result of referrals from Larry Gelbart. How does it work with respect to with paying agents/managers under that situation?
Weren't half the writers on MAD MEN women?
ReplyDeleteI have a random Friday question. When you were a disc jockey, did you have regular callers? Did you get to know them at promo events? Did any regular callers seem really weird o you?
ReplyDeleteThe recording the national anthem as sung by Enrico Palazzo mandatory at all games.
ReplyDeleteKen wrote "A ten-minute play has a real beginning, middle, and end. Just like a good short story. A character will have to make a big decision, an event will cause change, there will be some revelation, etc. Storytelling drives a ten-minute play, not jokes."
ReplyDeleteSpeaking as someone who wrote comedy sketches by the hundreds for decades, that description also applies to GOOD comedy sketches. The reason so many SNL sketches seem so pointless is because they ignore that and write sketches without small stories. "Character portraits." Go look at their best classic sketches, or the ones on Carol Burnett or Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour. The best are ten minute plays.
Frankly, the whole "These are not vulgar little comedy sketches; these are PLAYS!" attitude, strikes me as a rather snobbish, artistically-elitist way to describe what are basically good sketches.
In terms of writing feats, Joe Strasinsky wrote like 3 and hAlf seasons of Babylon 5 all on his own.
ReplyDelete