the writers' room

I emerged from my three week course of antibiotics and went to help a friend with a multi-camera comedy pilot he's making for a basic cable channel. It made me realize that I've written more about sitcom scenes I hate to write than I have about how much I hate to write them. I'd like to remedy that right now.

I'd forgotten about the crazy high spirits at pilot table reads, the banter so quick between executives dancing up to each other that the words themselves become the beat. They were literally dancing. People at pilots are as manic and raw and optimistic as in a scene from "All That Jazz" I vaguely seem to remember where a new show is being read aloud.

After the read, there's hours of talking, executives and non-writing executive producers going head to head, even though they're all saying the same thing.

Meanwhile the writers gather in "the room."

The writers' room was a romantic place to me when I was first starting out. The remarkable minds pulling jokes out of the air, the funny personal stories, and the food, the wonderful food from the finest midrange restaurants in town, food and coffee that just kept coming, riding into the room on a never-ending wave of bags and foil and cute young production assistants who also had funny stories.

Over time, I realized the jokes weren't coming from the air but from the jizz-stained files of passive aggressive hacks whose funny stories were mainly justifications for things they were still angry about. The production assistants also grew angry over time, at a business that promised riches but dried up before their turn at the trough and whose funny stories were more and more about jobs they were promised and didn't get.

Then the food began to smell. When you could get it. Some writers will never choose a restaurant but veto anyone else's choice. Certain showrunners pretend not to notice when the food has arrived and make everyone join in the charade. And lots of writers throw away their disgusting half-eaten dinners in the very room where you can spend up to seven days a week, sixteen hours a day.

So no I don't like writers' rooms very much. I get claustrophobic. I'm anxious until I've located a bathroom not too near but not too far. I watch the clock. I've made some great friends working for television. But I got into writing to get away from people, not to be locked in a room with them.

How do they do it?

You're very lucky if you create one hit television show. But for David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, the ideas just keep on flowing. The creators of Will and Grace have sold a new show to ABC, loosely based on their relationship, about the friendship and working partnership of a straight man and his gay best friend. From variety.com:

"The untitled laffer is not related to Kohan and Mutchnick's comedy pilot last year at CBS; that show also revolved around the friendship and working partnership between a straight man and his gay best friend."

Sitcom Scenes I Hate to Write, Part One

There are certain set-ups that don't lead to anything good. "Box canyons," writer Don Reo used to call them. "We're in a box canyon!" Best you can do is get out.

I carry with me a mental checklist of such scenes. Sometimes the set-ups themselves are inherently flawed. Sometimes it is possible to fashion a scene that is "correct," but lacking in all other virtues (to me, the only thing worse than a correct scene is a correct joke). Other times, I'm just being an asshole. So here's my list:

Scenes where characters get along on first dates, with an emphasis on eating food together to establish a short hand for intimacy. Is it ever interesting to watch two people hit it off? And once they start eating, it's just disgusting.

Scenes where characters open gifts. I have spent too many late nights in writers' rooms, pitching on what's in the box. Better for there to not be a box. Nina Wass may disagree. She has a story about Jim Vallely pitching crotchless panties as a gift for Blanche on the Golden Girls twenty years ago that was the right joke for the right moment. To me, that's the exception that proves the rule.

Jokes that have the word "since" in the middle. I haven't seen her this upset since...

The danger here is in not taking the first decent pitch and moving on. Because all decent since jokes are basically the same, once you set the bar a little higher, it becomes like turning down the first house you looked at--the one that, in retrospect, was perfect. Now you have this impossible standard. I've seen rooms grind to a halt over that elusive bit of funny history, all to service a stupid little word that never should have made it into the sentence in the first place.

Scenes that serve no purpose other than to explain why someone decides to do something. These scenes are almost always reductive, making the decision more understandable but only in a connect-the-dots sort of way, while eliminating anything interesting we might learn about a character doing something slightly off kilter. In editing, these scenes come right out.

Sometimes it is difficult to separate a box canyon from a firmly held superstition. Tony Thomas hated what he referred to as Man Who Cam to Dinner stories. "You don't want to do Man Who Came to Dinner," he'd warn, about any story involving an unwanted house guest. Even a guest star taking a coat off and sitting down made Tony nervous. At the time, I thought it was silly. But experience has taught me Tony was right. Man Who Came to Dinner stories never work. You don't want to do Man Who Came to Dinner.

Other times, our pet peeves can lead to self fulfilling prophecies--scenes that never work because we're determined that they not work. Is it possible? I'd rather be right than watch a successful scene featuring a man and woman eating Chinese from the box and talking about their childhoods?

Tony Thomas had a huge pet peeve about scenes set in restaurants. "You don't want them sitting in a restaurant," he'd say, "with the waiter, and the guy hiding behind the potted plant." There wasn't going to be a guy hiding behind a potted plant, we'd assure him, which was true because we hadn't considered the possibility until that moment. But Tony was adamant, "You've got to have the guy hidding behind the potted plant."

(to be continued)