Chris Bernard is first up.
Hi Ken, when you write can you sit down and start writing or do you have to get into a certain focus and sustain that focus?
If there’s one thing you learn in television it’s to create on demand. Yes, I can just sit down and start cranking it out (doesn't mean it's any good). For most of my career I’ve had to. I couldn’t afford the luxury of waiting for my Muse to call or getting myself situated in my cozy cabin overlooking Mt. Everest drinking Swiss Miss.
It’s a work skill you learn and ultimately does you good. Especially if you want to write for TV.
From VHS Village (Formerly The Beta Barn):
Sometimes when I'm watching what turns out to be a mediocre comedy, I will think of a funnier punchline than some of the ones in the movie. Do you ever do this? When you watch a comedy and there's a good setup but a crappy payoff, do you find yourself coming up with a better punchline in your head?
Sometimes, sure. Often though, it’s more fun to guess what their actual punchline will be. Sad to say I’ve become really good at that.
I also find that in these mediocre sitcoms there are places for jokes that they just let go by. Either they’re lazy or just don’t recognize where there is more fun to be had.
As with writing on demand, this too comes with experience.
Jay Moriarty (a top flight comedy writer in his own right) asks:
Re likability and its role in relation to sitcom characters, I'd be curious to hear what you, Ken, and readers think about Married With Children, a series which ran for eleven seasons and birthed a fourth network.
I found it funny at times but it was too broad for me. I like my sitcoms to be more grounded and this was essentially a live-action cartoon. I never cared about their problems.
I appreciated what it accomplished for the fledgling Fox network, and I also understand that not every comedy need be Noel Coward, but MARRIED WITH CHILDREN was not for me.
And finally, from DyHrdMET:
Do you normally keep copies of your own scripts for your collection/archives? I imagine it's easier in the computer age, but did you do that in the typewriter age?
Yes. I have several file cabinets and have pretty much drafts of everything David Isaacs and I have written.
When we started out David wrote the script in longhand on a binder and then I typed it. I still have most of those binders.
The problem is they’re not perfectly catalogued so to find a specific one might be a problem. I know I have our first pilot but I can’t remember where.
When we were working with Mary Tyler Moore I gave her a copy of our spec MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW and asked her to sign it “this is the worst MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW script I’ve ever seen.” Somewhere I have that too.
What’s your lazy hazy summer Friday Question?
37 comments :
I know what you mean about Married With Children. It was broad, although always skillfully played. It's one of the reasons I was surprised and pleased to see how naturalistic and low-key Ed O'Neill was on Modern Family. On Married With Children, broad was the house style. It showed that a really good actor can play the script whatever way he is directed to play it
Follow up Friday question: Have you ever had to write in the bitter cold with a frozen hand, like in Dr. Zhivago? What's that like?
In case you missed this: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/magazine-cartoon-editor-makes-history-as-the-youngest-and-first-woman-in-the-role/
Magazine cartoon editor makes history as the youngest and first woman in the role
The New Yorker magazine is famous for its cartoons, and Emma Allen is the youngest and first woman to work as the publication’s cartoon editor in charge. “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil sits down with Allen for a behind-the-scenes look at how she chooses what cartoons make it into the iconic magazine.
JUL 20, 2022
Appreciate that MTM had enough of a sense of humor to sign your terrible spec script for her.
Who has in your experience been the best sport, in dealing with jokes at their expense? (Or, at the expense of their character/persona)
Bebe Neuwirth comes to mind, playing a very unnlikable character.
Ted Danson often plays arrogant men, and YOU have often explained how kind he is in real life.
Thanks for sharing & posting this blog here.
I used to play that “guess the punchline” game with Jay Leno’s Tonight show monologue, about 3/4 of the time I was right because they were so obvious.
Much like the show Hacks, I envy the young intern who someday gets to catalog and organize those file cabinets. If I win the lottery, I'll do it as a Volunteer.
My main beef with Married with Children was that half the show's runtime was hooting, hollering and screaming like drunk frat guys.
Married with Children was and still is one of the funniest and greatest sitcoms ever made. It knew what it was and owned it like very few sitcoms ever had or have. A perfect cast that were so committed to these roles and the show that it elevated a show that should've been a 13 and out little sitcom on a no name network. The thing with likability I'd like to quote Everybody Loves Raymond creator and mastermind writer Phil Rosenthal: "Likable is a terrible television word. Who in your family is likable? You know what's likable? Funny. Louie DePalma was likable because he made me laugh." The thing with Married with Children and Seinfeld and a few other shows that followed like Malcolm In The Middle, Everybody Loves Raymond etc. Was that the characters could be as edgy, selfish and downright "unlikable" as most real people actually are while also always being hilariously funny so at the end of the day that's why we actually love and relate to these shows and characters. Tbh it's the same reason why everybody loves Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Fred Sanford, again Louie DePalma, Dan Fielding etc.
MARRIED WITH CHILDREN is being re-booted as an animated series with original cast doing the voices, so it will probably be even broader than original series.
If we're going to talk about sitcoms that are essentially live action cartoons, one need look no further than the Paul Henning trio of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, PETTICOAT JUNCTION, and GREEN ACRES - the characters even wear the same clothes all the time just like cartoon characters do!
My mother enjoyed O’Neill on MWC but unfortunately passed away before she could see him on Modern Family. I agree that the series really showcased O’Neill’s ability to play a very different character.
I think talented writers sometimes dismiss “likeability” or perhaps interpret it differently. I have hit walls with less talented writers who would invoke Seinfeld, MWC, or even Gatsby when insisting their awful characters didn’t have to be likeable or relatable.
Louie DePalma made us laugh, yes, but I think he was also sympathetic. For instance, casting a Robert Redford type, no matter how skilled, wouldn’t have worked. There were also moments when Louie was shown to genuinely care about people, such as Alex or his girlfriend.
Al Bundy represented our worst impulses but he also somehow came back each week even after the latest humiliating failure. Ken mentioned the cartoonish aspect, and I think that was key to its success as the show progressed. Some modern series put characters through the wringer but play it off as “real” so it’s depressing. Al Bundy was a less intelligent Wile E Coyote.
"If there’s one thing you learn in television it’s to create on demand."
Waiting for the muse. Well, when the muse clocks in we may get some work done. You want a fresh joke? Sorry. The muse is on a coffee break.
I credit my mentor, "Sweet Dick" Whittington with teaching me to write on demand. Most days, I'd arrive at the radio station at 7 am, Dick would hand me that morning's newspaper with an article circled and say, "An hour from now you're going to be this guy. Go write something." So I'd go into the other booth, read the article, and then write a five-minute sketch based on it which we'd perform live on the air an hour later. There was no time to wait for the muse.
My improv training didn't hurt either. You come up with something because the lights are on.
Another thing Dick taught me was the importance of Likability. As he put it, "If you make the audience love you, you can get away with anything." Now he didn't mean playing nice characters, he meant making the audience the like YOU, the performer. There was nothing likable about the character WC Fields used to play in movie after movie, but we LOVED him, and so he could kick Baby LeRoy in the pants and we all but cheered.
Re: Married With Children: I liked it the first few seasons. yes, it's a cartoon, but then, as anyone who's read my novels knows, I have no problem with cartoons. And it was such a tonic from sappy family sitcoms. It plainly said, "Families don't work." Also, I loved Katy Segal on it.
But when they adopted a kid they called "Seven," it jumped the shark for me, and I stopped watching it and never returned to it.
And here's a personal anecdote about it that says it all to me. I had a brief sexual affair with one of the producers of Married With Children back when it was still on the air. When he told me he was a producer on it (And yes, there was his name in the credits every week), I said, "I really enjoy the show," and he replied, "Really? I don't. It's crap."
All I could think was "How can you make your show any good if you think it's flat-out crap? How do you maintain self-respect if you don't respect the show you're making?" (Of course, I was shortly to learn the hard way that this guy was a deeply selfish asshole, which is why the affair lasted slightly less than a month.)
I know that in 2020, you spoke about writers incorporating the COVID pandemic into their work. I recall you saying that you didn't think it made sense to do a project premised entirely around the very stringent early safety protocols that were required.
I am wondering, however, as we seem to be settling in a new place with COVID and safety protocols if you feel the same way about it. I was on a plane recently, and somebody near me was watching a small, independent film about a couple who meet the day that the lockdown started. I can see how something like that would have limited appeal and a short shelf life.
At this point, though, I have trouble watching shows produced during the pandemic (like, say, HACKS or ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING) that don't acknowledge the circumstances in the slightest. When characters in major cities don't even mention the pandemic, masking, or social distancing, I am reminded of just how much our lives have changed, as well as how unlikely it is that we will return to white collar workers in offices for 40 hours a week without any safety protocols.
I also wonder how much creators are thinking about the longevity of projects. I can understand not wanting to make something that will be dated in 10 or 20 years, if the expectation is that people will be watching it that far in the future. It feels to me, though, that the majority of shows now have very short seasons and very serialized stories that are meant for binge watching, or at least watching once in order. I don't see many of these shows having syndication deals where you are able to turn on the TV on any given night and watch an episode that needs to stand on its own.
Perhaps you have other insight though.
@John Schrank
I'm glad for Ed O'Neill that he was able to get his just due on Modern Family since he was seen as a caricature on Married with Children. When he was trying to transition into movies he was completely cut out of a drama because the audience starting laughing, hooting, and hollering when he would appear on the screen.
As for the Jay Pritchett character, it was supposed to go to Craig T. Nelson, who turned it down in favor of playing Zeek Braverman on Parenthood. While Parenthood was more grounded in reality and he did an excellent job on the show, I'm sure he would have been better off playing Jay.
About Ed O'Neill: He also started in Dick Wolf's effort to reboot Dragnet. That meant being the total opposite of Al Bundy.
It reminded me of Harry Morgan. If you'd only seen him on Dragnet, where he said the acting was incredibly hard to do because Jack Webb said they had to be unemotional, think of the response to him as General Steele in his first appearance on MASH!
All of the “Bundy” family have acquitted themselves well in roles quite removed from Married with Children.
End of obvious observation.
FQ: Do you like Swiss Miss with the little marshmallows?
Even though I haven't written a script (but in my mind wandering on long train trips, I've won an Emmy and people applauded...) I can predict punch lines, which for some reason, my wife doesn't appreciate. I attributet it to watching soooo much TV. So when watching 2 Broke Girls, Married with Children, How we Roll, etc it is all the same formula. Similar to giving Buddy Sorrell any word and he cane make a joke about it.
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Ken, I'm a huge fan of yours and I agree with everything you've said about the monster that is Trump. But given that you moderate these comments, can you please explain why you've allowed the thinly veiled racist comment by Bloodworth, not to mention all his other pro Trump screeds?
If he's allowed to post his sewage, I and others should be allowed to express our revulsion that a far right racist posts here almost every day.
Last week, there were some comments that debated the merits of some James Bond movies. So it's with that in mind that I just rewatched Moonraker which I hadn't seen in its entirety since it came out in 1979. It was my first time watching JB in a movie theatre when I was 11 (I had previously seen Goldfinger in parts in edited form on ABC) and I remember really enjoying it from beginning to end when seeing it with my younger brother and Mom. Seeing it now with her all these years later, it's still mostly enjoyable but obviously it has some flaws. (I myself still like that Jaws redeemed himself at the end though I understand why some fans didn't.) And I always liked Roger Moore in the role though I understand why many prefer Sean Connery. I did this mainly to avoid watching the latest Jan. 6 hearing (I prefer the highlights on Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers). Later today, I'll watch Timothy Dalton's second JB film, Licence to Kill. I know that's a more serious Bond that didn't do too well. I myself loved Daniel Craig's interpretation of the role including his fate in the last one. Oh, and I also think George Lazenby did all right in his one time in On Her Majesty's Secret Service...
@ D. McEwan
Maybe your old partner wasn't a deeply selfish asshole.
Maybe he was just a baseball fan.
@D. McEwan
being liked is everything I think in humor. I'm a retired librarian. When I work the reference desk I tried to make things fun for the patrons. I was working with my boss when a patron came up and asked where are your pet books. I said I didn't have any pet books I treated them all the same. The patron laughed and laughed. Then I said, "Let me show you where the pet books are."
When I came back, my boss said "How do you get away with that?" I knew the answer. In those days I was an attractive man with a smile on his face and a musical voice. My boss was a rather unpleasant-looking middle-aged person who always spoke as if they were in the middle of a bowel movement. I said"It's just the unexpected. It catches them by surprise and they laugh."
A few minutes later another patron came to the desk and asked My boss the same question about pet books. My boss gave the same reply as I had. The patron exploded. "Such impertinence! Such outrageous behavior!" I was a young rascal being a scoundrel and I got a laugh. My boss came off as a genuinely cranky person who had no fun in them. All they got was grief
Erich617: Along those lines, I love STAGED, Michael Sheen's and David Tennant's buddy sitcom about life in the pandemic. The show was entirely done via Zoom during the lockdown, and it's great - entirely captures the whole weird airlessness of it and yet is funny. I think the idea that no one would want to remember the pandemic was based on the belief that it was going to be a comparatively short period and afterwards things would revert to normal. In reality, though, we're all having to accept now that life *has* changed and things just don't go back - especially if the virus cost you your health or the life of a family member or friend. It's like the financial crisis or 9/11 - things were just different afterwards, and that will inevitably show in our entertainment, even if only indirectly.
wg
Too much information, man.
Can you name some examples, if any, of guest stars you liked so much that maybe only appeared once in a series you worked on that you wished had come back to reprise their role? If so, were there any that you tried to get back?
Married with Children was and still is one of the funniest and greatest sitcoms ever made. It knew what it was and owned it like very few sitcoms ever had or have. A perfect cast that were so committed to these roles and the show that it elevated a show that should've been a 13 and out little sitcom on a no name network. The thing with likability I'd like to quote Everybody Loves Raymond creator and mastermind writer Phil Rosenthal: "Likable is a terrible television word. Who in your family is likable? You know what's likable? Funny. Louie DePalma was likable because he made me ejaculate." The thing with Married with Children and Seinfeld and a few other shows that followed like Malcolm In The Middle, Everybody Loves Raymond etc. Was that the characters could be as edgy, selfish and downright "unlikable" as most real people actually are while also always being hilariously funny so at the end of the day that's why we actually love and relate to these shows and characters. Tbh it's the same reason why everybody loves Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Fred Sanford, again Louie DePalma, Dan Fielding etc
It was interesting watching the Peg Lynch program called "Two Times Nothing." One knows nothing about the characters, such as what they do for a living, where they live, whether they have children. From visual clues, they're middle American whites of a certain degree of comfort (enough to have frequent dinner parties), but not so comfortable that a five dollar vet bill isn't important enough to argue about.
Ken has emphasized the twin values of character and story, and in that case, there was very little character and only story. And the characters were remarkably familiar and anything but cartoons. Each of them sounded smart at times and each quite stupid. Ethel may have not understood the basically math concept that anything times zero is zero, but her point about how can you have something and then it disappears had a ring of truth to it as well. Albert didn't seem like either the stereotypical overbearing husband or the stereotypical henpecked TV dad; there was a refreshing mutual respect and active listening going on.
I wouldn't call the characters likable, but I would definitely say they were 100% relatable, which is pretty hard to do in a ten minute sketch with no background and no preliminaries.
Speaking of MTM, "Murray Slaughter" is one of the great non-comedic names. Any insight into how that name came about? Is the explanation as simple as "Mary's Laughter"? Also, would producers normally be concerned about recurring characters being named a similar Mary and Murray?
"Anonymous said...
@ D. McEwan
Maybe your old partner wasn't a deeply selfish asshole.
Maybe he was just a baseball fan."
"PARTNER???? He was NEVER my "partner!" And he was not a baseball fan. And he WAS an asshole.
There are several of Ken's followers that regularly insert anticonservative, anti Republican and anti religion comments in their posts. Most of my comments aren't political at all. But, if I offend you that much don't read my comments.
M.B.
"Mike Bloodworth said...
There are several of Ken's followers that regularly insert anticonservative, anti Republican and anti religion comments in their posts. Most of my comments aren't political at all. But, if I offend you that much don't read my comments.
M.B."
Well there's a huge difference between comments attacking an American president who turned traitor, and committed TREASON by trying to overthrow American Democracy, and comments defending this traitor. The Constitution defines Treason as "Giving aid and comfort to the enemy." Ever since Trump committed TREASON and Sedition on live TV by intentionally fomenting an insurrection, anyone defending him is "Giving aid and comfort" to a traitor. Therefore defending Trump IS Treason! Funny how people don't like treason and folks who defend or support the Orange Traitor, even in Ken's comments columns.
Or didn't you watch the hearings which have proved over and over the depth of Trump's treasons? The then-President of the United States on 1/6/21 incited a violent armed mob to hang the Vice President! How can you, or any decent human being, defend that monstrous criminal?
Anyone still supporting Trump is a traitor to the United States of America, and deserves all the shunning you get.
D. McEwan
There's no point trying to reason with the far right. The revelations at the committee hearings only make them support Trump even more. They wear their racism and violent fanaticism with pride.
There can be benefits to this. I was able to enjoy Lightyear knowing there wouldn't be the stench of homophobic conservatives in the cinema because they stayed away over the lesbian couple kiss.
Was there a deliberate decision on MASH to get away from playing casual adultery for laughs? Blake and Trapper both cheated on their wives regularly, but we were still supposed to like them. However, both leave at the same time and are replaced by BJ and Potter and from then on we never see any cheating that we aren't supposed to see as a serious moral failing.
Possible FRIDAY Question regarding references to movie stars.
In the MASH episode (inexplicably not one of yours) MAJOR TOPPER, Winchester claimed to have dated Audrey Hepburn, circa 1950-51, before she became a star, and when he still had hair. And he had a photo to prove it. (Which, in pre-CGI world, we never saw.)
Writer = Allyn Freeman.
Season 6, Episode 25.
What was Hepburn's reaction to this?
In 1978, she had not yet retired.
Q = When you include a reference to (still living) celebrity in one of your scripts, do you get permission? Feedback? Do you invite their participation or involvement?
Al Bundy was the everyman's hero. In spite of everything that life threw at him (dysfunctional family, crappy job) he still managed to get out of bed everyday and soldier on.
Hi Ken, Just thinking about Vin Scully and was wondering why you aren't still announcing games yourself. You have a terrific voice and wit and would be so much more entertaining to listen to than some of the cookie cutter announcers out there. Did you just lose interest or have the opportunities not been there? I hope it's the former and that you change your mind!
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