In the world of situation comedy, Penn alums are getting big bucks for big yucks.
By Howard Gensler
To understand what it’s like to create situation comedies in the crazed, egomaniacal world of network television, talk to Bob Young, C’74. A 15-year veteran of laugh tracks, punchlines, and more than a half-dozen popular shows, Young can philosophize about television with equal parts merriment and bile.
Here’s an example. In a sitcom, this would be the teaserthe short, pithy opening which may or may not have anything to do with anything:
“A writer and a director and a network executive are sitting at Spago having lunch. And the waiter brings each of them a bowl of the carrot soup. And each of them tastes it. And the writer says, ‘That is wonderful. It is utterly the essence of carrot. It’s perfectly seasoned. It’s just perfect soup. I wouldn’t change a thing.’
“And the director tastes his and says, ‘You know, it is quite good. It does have that carrot flavor. But the seasoning is off. I would add a little more salt. I would puree it a little further, maybe reduce it, get it a little thicker, and then I think you would have good soup.’
“The network executive tastes his and says, ‘It’s pretty good soup. Let’s piss in it.’ ”
Normally the teaser would end herebut this isn’t a sitcom. So here’s another Young example:
“On My Two Dads [a somewhat improbably-premised family sitcom about a teenage girl who lives with two menplayed by Greg Evigan and Paul Reiserbecause her deceased mother was unsure which was the father], we would spend a lot of time writing every line of dialogue. And we would bring the script to the table, which is the first day of rehearsal, in what I considered to be damn near perfect shape. Big laughs. Good stories. Excellent. The network would listen to it and say ‘You know, what if it was less about the two dads. Our research shows that we’re getting more of an audience in the younger demographics, so let’s make it more about the little girl’s life.’ So we would stay up until 2 a.m. totally rewriting a perfectly good script, so that on the second day of production the cast would get an entirely new script. The cast gets the script, which they thought was good the first day, and sees all this new writingand none of it makes any sense. They didn’t hear the network notes. And they come up to us and say ‘Why did you throw out all the good stuff?’ So then we’d stay up the second night until 2 a.m. trying to write it kind of back to what it was the first day, but trying to keep some of the network notes. So then we bring it in the third day, it’s now another new script, and now the network’s angry: ‘What happened to all our notes?!’ So by Friday, the fifth day, you’ve got this cobbled together, malformed, hump-backed, horrid script comprised of network notes, the parts that the cast was fond of in the first place, and studio notes from the production company. And it’s almost never as good as the first day.”
Ah, television.
Young last appeared in the pages of the Gazette in the company of his then-partner Bob Myer, C’73, when the former Mask & Wiggers were the hardest-working comedians in Philadelphia [“The Value of Silliness,” November 1981]. (Young married Joan Ruggles, the photographer who took the photos for the piece.) In 1982, the team left Philadelphia for Los Angeles. “Our goal when we came out here was making it as stand-up comedians,” says Young, “but we discovered when we got here that there were a zillion comedians. But there weren’t a zillion writers.” So after a year of writing sample scripts (“specs”), Myer and Young got their first jobpenning prep school bon mots on The Facts of Life. From there, they quickly moved up the sitcom food chain to positions on 227, Who’s the Boss? and My Two Dads. It was during that show that the duo severed their partnership and began working independently, though they remain friends.
Since their split, Young has gone on to executive- produce Dinosaurs, Boy Meets World, Maybe This Time, and the new WB network show Smart Guy. The route followed by Myer, who is married to Randy Rubin-Myer, Nu’82, has included more fireworks. In fact, if the Emmys gave a peace prize, Myer might become its first two-time winner. When Roseanne was about to implode before the 1990-1991 season, Myer was brought in as executive producer and head writer — or, as he says, “to provide the new civilian government.” He stayed two seasons and remains one of only two executive producers to not be fired in the history of the show. Having handled the olive branch so effectively on Roseanne, Myer was asked by the show’s production company, Carsey-Werner, to calm another stormy set. Last October, he took over as executive producer of Cybill, starring Cybill Shepherd. “I haven’t found either [Roseanne or Shepherd] very difficult to work with,” he says.
The career of Alan Kirschenbaum, W’83,
took a somewhat different path — a bridle path. After graduating from
Penn with a degree in marketing, Kirschenbaum shunned the high stakes of
the business world for the parimutuel stakes of the Meadowlands
Racetrack in northern New Jersey. “I had horses when I was at Penn,”
Kirschenbaum says, “so when I left Penn I went to work doing the only
thing I wanted to do, which was train standardbred race horses.”
That
career had lasted three years when Kirschenbaum, tired of the fact that
his horses were eating better than he was, decided it was time to try
something else. “I love sitcoms, and I was always sort of thought of as
a funny guy,” he says, “so you gravitate towards what you’re good at.”
He moved to Los Angeles and got a job writing at Dear John and moved from there to Anything But Love to Baby Talk to the short-lived Man of the Family. “That show,” he says, “lasted seven episodes — which was probably about six too many.”
Kirschenbaum’s biggest thrill in television came when Down the Shore, a show he created, was picked up by Fox for the summer of 1992. “When I wrote the pilot for Down the Shore
we had a lot of trouble getting it shot. But HBO, the studio I was
involved with at the time, convinced Fox to let us do a live
presentation of it for them — like a play. We didn’t film it. They
couldn’t test it. They couldn’t do research on it. They couldn’t do all
the things that a network usually does. They just had to watch it and
decide from watching it. There was a tremendous amount of pressure. You
couldn’t fix it in post-production. You couldn’t produce the shit out of
it in order to hide the weaknesses. And all the executives, including
Barry Diller — who at that time ran Fox — came down and watched it.
And it went great, and they picked it up. That was my best day in show
business.”
Now he’s hoping for another of those great days. Following three years as executive producer of Coach, Kirschenbaum has two of his own pilots at CBS and is waiting to hear if either will make the network’s Fall schedule.
A decade ago, Bill Diamond, C’83, was working in the public information office of the New York City Parks Department while completing his master’s degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. But at Columbia Diamond met Michael Saltzman, and the two would-be journalists decided they wanted to write … a movie. Thinking that television might be the best way to get a foot in the door, they started writing spec scripts and soon became staff writers on Anything But Love (where they met Alan Kirschenbaum). That was followed by two seasons on Wings and five seasons on Murphy Brown, which stars another fairly well-known Penn alum, Candice Bergen, CW’67, Hon’92. The pair split as a writing team three years ago and Diamond spent the last two years as one of Murphy‘s executive producers.
To Diamond, sitcom-writing is all about constraints. “You’re working
with existing characters,” he says. “They have to sound like every other
episode that’s ever aired. They can’t be too radically different or
it’s going to seem like you’re writing a different show. But within
those constraints is — hopefully — the art.”
Diamond, however, is quick to acknowledge that “art” is frequently in short supply. “The fact that anything good gets produced from this process,” he says, “is nothing short of a miracle. Television is artistic-endeavor-by-committee, and whatever passion the original creator may have had for something often gets watered down. That’s why it helps to have a considerable amount of power. And often you get that power by attaching yourself to a big star. But in attaching yourself to a big star you have to give over a lot of your power. So you try to line yourself up with an actor with whom you’re in synch and then the show becomes a collaborative process.
“There are a million reasons why bad TV gets produced, and you just hope you’re not responsible for much of it.”
Now married to Wendy Blankman Diamond, C’83, with
two children, and starting a second year of a development deal with
Warner Brothers, Diamond hopes he can avoid most of those million
reasons and “come up with something that I would like to watch —
something that tries to be intelligent and gets me home in time for
dinner with my family.”
When Lew Schneider, C’83,
folded up his last Mask & Wig gown, the word around campus was that
he had gone off to Clown College. Not true. He took classes at
Chicago’s Second City and started working as a stand-up comic and actor.
His first big break in television came a few years later with a starring role in Wish You Were Here,
a CBSshow, in which he traveled around Europe with a camcorder for six
episodes. From there, he went to a starring role — and a 29-episode run
— in Alan Kirschenbaum’s Down the Shore series. The two actually knew each other at Penn.
His
career as a writer, Schneider says, grew out of the fact that “you
can’t count on work as an actor. I had a pilot that didn’t get picked up
in 1994, but luckily a writing project took off and became The George Wendt Show,
on which Schneider got bumped up to producer level. “I was in way over
my head,” he says. But he got to learn on the job and when Wendt was cancelled he worked as a creative consultant for The John Larroquette Show. That led to a producing spot on Everybody Loves Raymond, which premiered on CBS last fall.
The key to writing good sitcoms, says Schneider, is “to write what you know and what you feel comfortable with and hope that people respond to it. I just try to do something that I would laugh at. I can’t write [according] to what I think the network will like. The network doesn’t know what they’re going to like.
“When
I was working at Nickelodeon, somebody told me that television is life
with the boring parts taken out. For a sitcom, I would add, the boring
parts are taken out and funny parts put in.”
With another dozen Raymond
scripts recently ordered by CBS and a new infant, his third child, at
home, Schneider, who’s married to former Penn Player Liz Abbe, C’84, doesn’t have too many boring parts to cut out of his own life. And although he loves working on Raymond,
his dream TV job is to reconvene some of his old Mask & Wig buddies
for a show of his own. “I have this fantasy,” he says, “that some day
I’ll call up [fellow Wigger] John Joseph, [C’83, L’86], and say
‘Drop your job at the Justice Department, I’m now running a show and I
can pay you more than you’ve ever made suing the bad guys. Come out and
work for me.’ ”
That’s exactly what happened to Jonathan Pollack, W’88, who was a newlywed management consultant in Boston when he got a phone call from his old buddy David Rosenthal, C’89. Following low-level stints on Nurses and Anything But Love, (where he received career support from Diamond and Kirschenbaum), a more important role in the early days of Ellen, and a development deal with DreamWorks — the production company founded by entertainment powerhouses Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen — Rosenthal had become top gun on the new Arsenio Hall sitcom, Arsenio. He had the power to hire whomever he wanted on his staff, and he wanted Pollack. “He thought it would be amusing to turn my life upside down,” says Pollack, who left his job and moved west to work with his friend. “Now any success I owe to him and any failure will be my own.”
Unfortunately, in the world of situation comedy, a potentially
disastrous plot twist is always just around the corner. With only two
shows in the can, Rosenthal and Hall had a rather public feud and
Rosenthal left the show he had helped to create. The move left Pollack
in a somewhat awkward situation, as Rosenthal was no longer around to
show him the ropes. But again following Rosenthal’s advice, Pollack has
stayed on the Arsenio staff — at least until Hall boots him or
the show gets cancelled. “Then I’m going to see if I can pull off a job
on my own,” says Pollack, busily writing spec scripts for the May hiring
season. “I kind of did it backward. Normally you have to have an agent
to get a job, but David gave me the job, and then he got me the agent. Now, I have to prove to the agent that it’s worth it to have me as a client.”
As
for Rosenthal, he’s back in his DreamWorks bungalow dreaming up a new
pilot for next year. And as Penn luck would have it, Rosenthal’s
Dreamworks office is next to that of Mike Sikowitz, C’88, and Jeff Astrof, W’88, two
Penn friends who got together for writing sessions while they were
working in New York, got an agent, moved to L.A., were accepted into the
Warner Brothers Writing Program, “graduated” to a job on Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, went from there to Duckman, and then struck the sitcom mother lode in two seasons of helping to shape the sensibilities of Friends.
As part of their development deal at DreamWorks, Sikowitz and Astrof have their first show set to air on NBC in the fall. Titled 7:08, it’s about the lives of five Long Islanders and their daily commute on the LIRR.
What’s
unique about the show in today’s sitcom world is that there are no big
stars — yet — and the humor, according to Sikowitz, is driven by the
writing. “It’s against the trend,” he says, “but the shows we’ve
responded to were created this way.”
“And since this is our first time running a show,” says Astrof, “we didn’t want to have to deal with a star with a big ego.”
Penn alums are also in close proximity on the country’s other coast, at the Chelsea Piers offices of Spin City in New York, where Sarah Dunn, C’91, and Michelle Nader, ASC’86, gaze at the Hudson River and create laughs for Michael J. Fox.
Dunn, a former 34th Street writer at Penn and author of The Official Slacker Handbook,
still longs to be a slacker, but she’s too busy taking calls from her
two agents, boyfriend David Rosenthal (they met in L.A., not Penn), or
restructuring her production company for the best possible tax benefits.
Even she finds it hard to believe that just two years ago she was
waiting tables three nights a week and writing a $200 column for the
Philadelphia City Paper.
Nader also started as a low-paid writer at Philadelphia Magazine and The Cable Guide, but before coming to Spin City from Caroline in the City, she spent time doing resarch for a documentary film in a crack house and was also associate producer of Damned in the USA, a look at censorship produced for Britain’s Channel 4.
And
while Dunn says she may opt for a writing life outside of sitcoms,
working on movies or books, Nader’s goal is to follow her TV career to
its “logical conclusion.”
“I
eventually want to run a show and make my experience in South
Philadelphia come to life,” she says. “When I was at Penn I lived at
home in South Philly, so I wasn’t really part of the whole campus life
thing. I was a commuter. Me and some other person. And I have about
$3,000 worth of [parking] tickets to show for it.
“Some people pay their student loans. I’m paying tickets.
“But
what’s nice,” she adds, “is that the atmosphere of a writer’s room is
like a fraternity. I’m getting my college experience now.”
Fran Kaufer, ASC’91, had
her college experience at Penn — plenty of it — and she’s now using
it to good effect. Kaufer honed her writing skills not in her
Communications courses or her English classes, but at Penn’s school of
even higher learning, Smoke’s. “There’s a lot of material when you go
out at night and you have to keep your wits sharp against those great
come-on lines from drunk Penn guys,” she says. More inspiration came
from Kaufer’s friends on Penn’s Ivy Champion volleyball team, for which
she was voted MVP.
So
how did she go from the sets of volleyball to the sets of Hollywood?
“It’s all who you know,” she says. Raised in Los Angeles, Kaufer
returned home after Penn and did a little neighborhood networking. “I
used to babysit for a lady who lived down the street, and when I
graduated college she was dating a producer, who found out I wanted to
become a writer.”
The resultant job brought Kaufer to the short-lived Fox sitcom Vinnie & Bobby, with pre-Friends Matt LeBlanc, and when that show was cancelled she moved over to Married…with Children.
“I sat and watched for a couple of years,” she says, “then started
freelancing scripts there. This season I started writing for Malcolm & Eddie [UPN’s top-rated new show]. It’s a hit among sixth graders. My mentality fits right in.”
In
a sitcom, this would be the tag — the short and pithy ending that
usually runs scrunched up on the side during the credits. Heaven forbid
that a viewer should be able to read any of the names of the people
mentioned above:
“Thirty
years ago,” says Bob Young, “the networks had nothing to do with the
shows. Only the sponsor gave you notes — if they had any. But they
didn’t have any. As a result they could shoot 39 episodes a year — we
now shoot 22 — and each writer could write eight or 10. Now a writer
maybe writes three. The difference is there were no notes. There was no
executive from the network who may have a totally different idea about
how the story might go telling you to change it all around. ‘Redo it.
Now change it back halfway to the way it was before. Now change it a
different way … Oh, we just got new research that shows….’
“But no one needs to pity TV writers. We’re only rich enough that we can afford to quit.”
HOWARD GENSLER, C’83, is a former associate editor of TV Guide. His next book, The Student Athletes’ Handbook, written with former Penn basketball star Perry Bromwell, C’87, will be published by John Wiley & Sons in the fall.
