Television

Breaking CHEERS

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Emmy-award winning writer/producer Ken Levine talks about how hard it was breaking stories for CHEERS.

For every story we used there were always twenty or thirty we threw
out. The core of every story had to present a substantial problem for
one or more of the characters. And it had to have some comic spin. When
an idea is on the table and the writers are able to come up with
possible scenes and twists and jokes that’s a pretty good indication
that we may have hit gold. And very often a story will evolve into
something completely different from what you started with. You begin
with Sam has to hire a new bartender and an hour later it somehow
becomes Lilith’s pet rat dies and she keeps it in her purse…

[…] Once we had an area we liked this is how we generally broke the
stories: Our first question was always “what’s the act break?” Then
“what’s the ending?”. Then "when’s lunch?" Once we had the big midpoint
turn and the ultimate conclusion we’d go back and fill in the acts.
Sometimes we would lay out a story and see that two or three characters
would be excluded. So in order to service them we would do a B story
that usually could be told in two or three scenes.

Another Great Way to Procrastinate

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Spenser_credit
AOL is offering a bunch of old TV shows from the Warner Brothers vault for free download…among the offerings is the SPENSER FOR HIRE episode "If You Knew Sammy," guest-starring William H. Macy. This is the episode that launched my TV career. It’s the first  script Bill Rabkin and I ever sold… we wrote it on spec and the folks at SPENSER actually bought it and shot it without changing a word (our first TV experience was blessed in a lot of ways). Among the other offerings on AOL Television are episodes of MAVERICK, BABYLON 5, KUNG FU, THE FBI, and THE FUGITIVE, to name a few.

Not So Wonderful Wonder Woman

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Mark Evanier tells the story behind a five minute WONDER WOMAN demo-pilot that producer William Dozier produced during the 60s heyday of TV’s BATMAN.  You can watch the whole demo on his blog, too.

Why didn’t his version of Wonder Woman sell? Well, watch it and
see. What’s usually the case when a network commissions a brief demo
film instead of a full pilot is either (a) they have so much faith in the premise and creative team that they don’t feel the need to waste the time or money…or (b)they have so little faith in the project that, though they’ve been
pressured into giving it a try before the cameras, they don’t want to
waste the time or money. Guess which was the case this time.

The Sopranos Effect

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TV Critic Chuck Barney talks about the impact THE SOPRANOS has had on TV…and he asked me for my take on things.

"The networks used to be so deeply afraid of offending people that what
they typically turned out was tepid and dull," Goldberg says. "’The
Sopranos’ showed that the audience is smarter and more sophisticated
than what they give them credit for. It proved that you can do a crime
show with more nuance than ‘Matlock.’"

[…]But just how "real" is television willing to get? It’s no
coincidence that most of the complex, rough-edged dramas are still
mainly the province of cable channels, which cater to more niche-type
audiences. Yes, the broadcast networks are taking more risks, but
because they’re obligated to aim for larger audiences and please
advertisers, they still tend to hew to the safe side, according to
Goldberg.

"Just look at James Spader’s character on ‘Boston Legal.’ He started
out as a real scummy type of dirty-dealer, but he’s been softened up,
watered down and made more cuddly," he says. "Even Andy Sipowicz on
‘NYPD Blue’ started out as a despicable boozer and a bigot. But over
time, his edges were so sanded down that he became an animated
character. He might as well have been Scooby-Doo."

Facing the Firing Squad

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TVSquad, via MediaLife Magazine, has posted a list of shows that media buyers (the folks who purchase advertising time on the networks) believe are facing cancellation. There are a couple of surprises — like the inclusion of LAW AND ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT and GEORGE LOPEZ and the omission of CLOSE TO HOME and INVASION (cable series, like THE DEAD ZONE and MISSING, aren’t covered on the list).

  • Four Kings, NBC
  • Law & Order: Criminal Intent, NBC
  • Joey, NBC
  • E-Ring, NBC
  • Fear Factor, NBC
  • Surface, NBC
  • Scrubs, NBC
  • Stacked, FOX
  • War at
    Home    , FOX
  • Still
    Standing    , CBS
  • Yes, Dear,
    CBS
  • King of Queens, CBS
  • Out of Practice, CBS
  • Courting Alex, CBS
  • Crumbs, ABC
  • Freddie,
    ABC
  • Rodney, ABC
  • According to Jim, ABC
  • Hope & Faith, ABC
  • George Lopez, ABC
  • Commander in Chief, ABC

It’s a Mystery

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Here’s another true story from the archives of the blog (I’m deep into writing MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU, so the blog has been suffering).

We had a pitch meeting a few years ago at a basic cable network, before MONK
burst on the scene. I pitched a mystery series, a blend of reality and
scripted TV, to the new development exec. He interrupted me in middle
of the pitch.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You want to do a mystery every week?”

“Uh, yes,” I said.

“It can’t be done,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“I mean, you can’t tell a new mystery every week,” he said. “It’s just not possible.”

“Of course it is,” I replied. “I’ve done it. Diagnosis Murder was a mystery.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was,” I argued.

“Nobody can do a mystery every week,” he said. “It’s ludicrous.”

“Murder She Wrote, Law and Order, CSI, those are all mysteries,” I said.

“No, they aren’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “What is your idea of a mystery?”

“Scooby-Doo,” he replied.

“That’s an animated Saturday morning cartoon,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

(By the way, this was the one pitch meeting in my career where I actually lost my temper…surprising my agent, my writing partner, and a cop-friend who was pitching with us).

Maintaining Integrity

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Here are a few more true stories from my experiences in TV land ( I’ve mentioned these here before in the early days of this blog)…

Before starting a pitch,  I like to ask the execs what they are looking for. At a recent meeting at a network, the exec said: 

“We’re
wide open,” she said. “The only things we don’t want to hear are cop
shows, science fiction shows, anything set in the past, military shows,
buddy detectives or stuff with monsters.”

I could think of only one genre she left out. “What about a medical show?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “We don’t want those, either.”

* * * * * *

We were writing our first episode of a detective series. We turned
the script in to the network executive for his notes. The first note
was in scene one, act one.

“The hero doesn’t know what’s going on,” the executive said.

“That’s right,” I replied. “Because it’s a mystery.”

“You can’t do that,” the executive said. “The hero should be ahead of the story.”

“Ahead of the story?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

“The hero should know,” the executive said.

“Know what?” I replied.

“Everything,” The executive said.

“But
he just arrived at the scene,” I said. “He’s taking his first look at
the body… and you want him to already know everything?”

“Is he a
hero or a complete moron?” The executive asked. “Nobody wants to watch
a show about a guy who’s lost, confused, and stupid.”

“It’s a mystery and he’s a detective,” I said. “He’s going to show us how smart he is by solving the crime.”

“If he was smart,” the executive said, “he wouldn’t have to solve it. He’d already know.”

“So what’s the mystery?” I asked.

“There isn’t one,” the executive said.

“So what’s our show about if there’s no mystery to solve?”

“You tell me,” the executive said.  “You’re the writer.”

* * * * * *

Bill Rabkin and I were in middle
of writing an episode of “Spenser: For Hire,” which was airing at 10
p.m. on Saturday nights. In our episode, Spenser sees a woman jump off
the roof of a building, so he begins to investigate why she wanted to
commit suicide. He discovers she’s fleeing her brother, with whom she
shared an incestous relationship. The network loved the story.

We
get a call on a Friday from the network. They had just decided to move
“Spenser For Hire” to 8 pm on Sunday, sandwhiched between “The
Wonderful World of Disney” and “The Dolly Parton Show.”

Somehow
our episode didn’t seem quite right for the Family Hour, unless your
idea of family is rather twisted. But the network didn’t think it was
quite as big a problem as we did.

“We love everything about the
script, so all you need to do is take out the incest,” the network exec
said, “but maintain the integrity of the story.”

Running from The Walk

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I’ve been too busy to post as often as usual…preparing for a pitch meeting (it went well), preparing for a meeting for a possible writer/producer gig (it also went well), and I’ve been working hard on MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU (going well as well…and I’ve now broken my personal record for using the word "well" in a single paragraph).  I’m also a judge in a short story contest and been reading hundreds of submissions. Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of justifying yet another rerun post from my blogging past…

This is a true story.

I was in  the offices of a major movie producer who had just read  my book THE WALK
and wanted to talk about a possible screen version. The story is about
a TV producer who is stuck in downtown Los Angeles when a major
earthquake decimates the city and has to walk back home to the suburbs.

The executive loved the book, the human drama, and the action-adventure elements. He only had a few thoughts and concerns.

“Does the guy have to be a TV producer?” he asked.

I
was prepared for that question. I knew the character might be “too
inside,” meaning too much a part of the entertainment industry, to
connect with a wider audience.

“No,” I said, “Of course not. We can give him a different profession.”

“How about if the TV producer was a team of cheerleaders instead?” the executive asked.

I laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t. But he wasn’t done with me yet.

“And what if the earthquake was a tidal wave?”

The book remains unfilmed.

Offending the Morons

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No, I’m not talking about the Colonial Fan Force again. This is a true story that I’ve told here before (so this is like a blog rerun — only I don’t get any residuals).

I was working on Murphy’s Law,
a light-hearted detective series starring George Segal as an insurance
investigator when I got this call from the network censor with notes on
our script:

“You’ve got one of your characters calling another character a moron,” the censor said.

“Yeah, so?”

“You can’t do that,” he said. “We’ve approved ‘dolt,’‘dummy’ or ‘dink,’ as acceptable alternatives.”

“What’s wrong with calling somebody a moron?”

“You’ll offend all the morons in the audience,” he said.

I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

So I said, “Don’t worry, all the morons in the audience are watching Hunter.’”

Three months later, Murphy’s Law was cancelled… and I got a job on Hunter