Just the Funny Parts

by Nell Scovell

  Chapter 9

  We’re All Oompa Loompas

  Ohmigod, you’re working on The Muppets? That show must be soooo much fun to write for!

  —People who don’t work in Hollywood

  YOU’RE PROBABLY FAMILIAR WITH PHYSICIST ERWIN Schrödinger’s thought experiment involving a hypothetical box, some radioactive material, and a hapless cat. But you might not know that Schrödinger’s cat also reveals two fundamental truths about Hollywood. First, Schrödinger’s experiment suggests that the act of observing a dynamic changes the dynamic. The same is true for a writers’ room. Sometimes a journalist will try to capture the experience of being a TV writer with an article entitled, “A Day in the [fill in the show] Room” or even “A Week in the [fill in the show] Room.” But until you’ve spent “Eight Soul-Crushing Months in the [fill in the show] Room,” you can’t understand what it’s like. An outsider isn’t privy to the venting in the parking garage or a coworker pantomiming blowing his brains out in the snack room. A writers’ room is like a family and we all know that families act differently when they have company.

  Schrödinger’s experiment also illustrates the absurdity of quantum mechanics because until the lid of the box is lifted, the cat inside is simultaneously dead and alive. This brings us to the second truth of the writers’ room: Working on a TV show is simultaneously fun and not fun. When people conclude that it must be “soooo much fun” to work on The Muppets, it’s like assuming the Oompa Loompas love every minute working at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. To outsiders, it’s all chocolate waterfalls and funny songs. But late at night, someone’s got to clean up after all those nut-testing squirrels. And let’s just say the nuts are very high in fiber.

  On the plus side, I can’t think of another workplace where job performance is tied to how hard you can make your coworkers laugh. Perks include high salaries, low risk of injury, sweet snacks, salty snacks, and the chance to hang out with pop culture icons like Mahna Mahna and his back-up singers, the Snowths.

  With the Snowths © Disney

  The ratio of fun versus not fun varies from show to show and depends on what I call the three P’s: the people, the process, and the product. It’s a rarity to work on a show where all three Ps are consistently satisfying. You’re lucky if you get two out of three. More often, you settle for one.

  The people, process, and product are the factors that determine any employee’s happiness. Here’s a breakdown of Hollywood’s unique spin on office culture:

  People

  Every show starts off a delight. The first week is like a group date with writers sharing well-honed stories about former jobs, nightmare relationships, and bouts of diarrhea. Fathers talk openly about their children while mothers often downplay theirs. If asked whether I have kids, I usually reply: “I’ve got two sons, but I’m blanking on their names right now.” As work gets more pressured, the ease of the early casual weeks falls away. Personalities clash, factions form, and every day feels like Thanksgiving with your dysfunctional family.

  The showrunner sets the tone, which bakes a potential problem right into the free bagels. Most showrunners begin their careers as writers, spending a lot of time in their heads. As they move up the production ladder, writers expand their skill set, learning how to cast, edit, approve wardrobe, etc. At no point are writers taught how to manage people. Eventually, the writer who was good at ordering around characters in his head ends up in charge of actual human beings. The Writers Guild recognized this oversight and created a Showrunners’ Training Program to help teach management techniques to members. But not all the necessary skills, like empathy and generosity, can be easily taught. Good luck trying to explain personal boundaries to a showrunner who starts a Monday morning meeting with, “The weirdest thing happened this weekend. I had a wet dream and woke up with a load in my pants.”

  Now this showrunner has every right to share his touching story. That’s not just my opinion, it’s the ruling of the California Supreme Court. In 2006, a Friends writers’ assistant charged that lewd talk in the room constituted sexual harassment. The Friends writing staff denied the charge and argued that lewd talk was often part of the creative process. The justices sided with the writers and dismissed the suit. Every TV writer breathed a sigh of relief. Writers need to feel safe and comfortable enough to push boundaries and find comedy. If someone wants to divulge that his father is a chronic masturbator, that’s fine. The only risk that information should carry is when his father visits the office and shakes everyone’s hand, there will be lots of Purell jokes.

  Still, there’s a difference between allowing people to share personal information and forcing them to. The same showrunner who talked about his wet dream once went around the table and asked all the writers to reveal the age at which they lost their virginity. I declined. The question wasn’t relevant to the show and the context wasn’t work-related. The lower-level writers all answered even though some seemed reluctant. Then the showrunner launched into his own tale which was more horrifying than amusing. That white, straight, male showrunner missed the irony that the discussion that made him feel safe and comfortable might make a more vulnerable person feel trapped and targeted.

  Fortunately, I witnessed early on how a great showrunner operates. My Coach boss Barry Kemp displayed the five qualities that you hope to find in a leader in any field.

  A great leader . . .

  understands the mission better than anyone in the room and can communicate it.

  is the hardest working person in the room.

  is the most generous person in the room, not just with compensation, but also with praise and credit.

  allows dissent and even invites it.

  listens and learns.

  Barry hit all these points while still being the funniest person in the room. He was also flawlessly polite. If a joke fell flat during a table read, Barry would make a small question mark in the margin. After the read, we’d return to the room and start the rewrite. When we got to the page with a “?” next to a joke, Barry would ask for new pitches. Sometimes, the writer would blame the actor for blowing the line and lobby for a second shot. Barry would nicely, but firmly say, “Let’s try something new.” This went on for months until one day I figured out the code: Barry’s question mark meant, “No.” But where most showrunners don’t think twice about slashing a line through dialogue or “X”-ing an entire page, Barry even respected the work that goes into a failed joke.

  Coach writing staff, Season 4: (back row) Scott Buck, Warren Bell (middle row) Bruce Ferber, Bob Bendetson, me (front row) Eric Horsted, Art Everett. Missing: Executive Producer Barry Kemp. Also missing: Any diversity of skin color.

  Courtesy of the author

  Barry’s decency and thoughtfulness made him an outstanding mentor. When I was running Sabrina, I struggled to find ways to keep the room energized so I sought Barry’s advice on how to motivate a staff.

  “I like to treat the writers’ room like a cocktail party,” he told me. “I start with a funny story and warm people up and then shift to work and they don’t even notice.”

  Ohmigod, that’s exactly what he did! I sat in his room for over two years and never noticed the elegant and sly manipulation. The only problem was that the cocktail party blueprint suited Barry, who is a natural raconteur. His advice wouldn’t work for me so I sought out a second opinion from Korby Siamis, my equally wonderful boss at Murphy Brown. Korby had a slightly different take.

  “You want to know the best way to keep writers motivated?” she said. “Tell them they’re fucking lucky to have jobs.”

  Barry offered a carrot. Korby offered a stick. I ended up somewhere in the middle. (A carrot stick?)

  Process

  When writers who work on different series get together, their first question is always, “How are the hours?” Long hours are a sure way to make a fun job less fun. I enjoyed my three freelance assignments at Monk in part because showrunner Andy Breckman ran the room so efficiently. The de
tective show was shot in LA, but the writers’ room was located near Andy’s home in New Jersey. Arriving for the first time at the offices via PATH train, I thought I’d come to the wrong place. The building also housed a medical lab and I had to step over metal specimen containers to reach the elevator. Operating outside Hollywood’s sphere gave Monk a different feel. No one was reading the trades and the small staff buckled down and stayed focused.

  Andy also ran one of the funniest rooms that I’ve ever sat in. Once, the subject of time travel came up and Andy tossed out a perfect sci-fi story, “What if . . . what if I went back to kill Hitler in Germany but when I arrived, he was in the middle of a speech and I had to wait. And as I listened, I started thinking, You know, he’s making some good points. The Rhineland is pretty nice. And next thing I know I’m goose-stepping with the army and saying ‘Sieg Heil’ and that’s when I realize that the whole Third Reich is made up of time travelers who came back to kill Hitler and decided to join him instead.”

  I always enjoy tangents from funny storytellers, but some rooms spend so much time ordering lunch and watching videos that it’s suddenly three o’clock and the script has barely been touched. And sometimes staying late has nothing to do with work at all. One showrunner, who was single, used to keep writers around so he had company while he watched Letterman. Even worse, this was back when Dave was on at 12:30 AM.

  After inquiring about work hours, writers will inevitably ask each other: “And how’s the network treating you?” Entire books are devoted to cataloguing ridiculous script notes from executives. When I assumed the helm at Sabrina, showrunner Eileen Heisler advised me to get good at nodding my head and saying, “I’ll take a look at that.”

  “Don’t argue with the network,” Eileen warned. “You will never convince them that you’re right and they’re wrong.”

  She shared her trick for dealing with these situations.

  “I just keep asking questions. ‘Why do you think that? Where did the scene start feeling off to you?’ Make them pinpoint the problem so you can solve it. Sometimes it’s just one line that needs to change.”

  I’ve also worked with some insightful and inspiring network executives who make every project better. CBS’s steady success over the past twenty years can be largely credited to longtime Entertainment President Nina Tassler. I’ve worked on several pilots with Nina, including a light drama, which was pitched to me as Clueless meets CSI. After reading my first draft, Nina called to give notes. Her voice sounded upbeat without a hint of disapproval. She had loved the A (main) story, but had problems with the B (secondary) story.

  “It just didn’t grab me as much,” she said. “And I’d love for you to come up with something else because I just want the B story to be as good as the A.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I totally get it.”

  We batted around some other ideas and after landing on one that Nina liked, I thanked her for the feedback and hung up the phone, smiling. A minute later it hit me: Nina had just tossed out my entire B-story. And I had thanked her. That’s how good she is.

  Stars are another major variable in the production process. At Charmed, the writers would watch dailies—scenes filmed the previous day—in shock as one actress openly insulted the writers with the cameras rolling.

  “I’m not saying this line,” one witch said. “It’s stupid.”

  So first, had she seen the show? And second, creating a character works best as a symbiosis between actors and writers. When that relationship breaks down, the product suffers. Of course, writers can be tone-deaf with actors, too. At NCIS, I got called to set once when Mark Harmon had an issue with some dialogue I’d written. Mark is a consummate professional and that show is a massive success not just because of what he does onscreen, but because of what he does off. When I arrived on set, Mark (Lt. Gibbs) was holding his “sides”—the pages from the script being shot that day.

  “Maybe you can help me,” Mark said. “I’m stumbling over this scene, specifically this line.”

  He pointed and I peered. The director hovered, anxiously. This discussion was eating up precious shooting time. I asked Mark if I could hear him say the line. He gamely complied.

  “That sounds fine,” I said, genuinely not seeing the problem.

  “Really?” Mark said. “It doesn’t feel right to me. Sounds a little weak.”

  “I don’t think it’s weak,” I said. “It’s vulnerable. Gibbs even admits that he’s ‘puzzled.’ ”

  Mark frowned a bit. The actress in the scene was a semi-regular and joined the conversation.

  “I think it sounds fine,” she said helpfully.

  Mark glanced over at the director who was eager to roll camera. Mark came to a decision.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll give it a try.”

  I can still see Mark shaking his head slightly as he walked back into the set.

  Now some actors will purposely tank a line to prove a writer wrong. Not Mark Harmon. He delivered the line as written and 100 percent made it work. Still, I look back on the way I acted that day and cringe. The same way Barry used to put a question mark that meant “no,” Mark was being respectful. Without demanding a new line, he made it clear that’s what he needed. I’m ashamed that I was too locked into my own intention and too worried about the time. I had listened to respond, not listened to understand.

  Product

  No TV writer ever admits to working on a bad show and will bend themselves into paperclips to justify their time and effort. “The show’s dumb, but fun!” they’ll say. Or “The first drafts are great but the network’s noting us to death.” Some even blame the space-time continuum: “I just don’t think the audience is ready for this show yet.”

  I would like to break this pattern by admitting that I’ve worked on bad shows. Maybe even terrible ones. And yet despite their badness, some were very popular. You don’t always get to work on shows that suit your personal taste, and the shows that do suit your taste, don’t always work out.

  I fell hard for The War Next Door. a sitcom created by Chris Viscardi and Will McRobb, Originally titled Kill, Kill, Kill, the show centered on a clean-cut CIA agent who retires to a quiet life in the suburbs until his arch-nemesis moves into the house next door. I’d met the showrunners at a one-day punch up session on their hit movie Snow Day and was thrilled when they asked me to write a freelance episode.

  The War Next Door had an absurdist, Get Smart vibe. We broke the story in a group and I happily fleshed out scenes where grown men tried to strangle each other with garden hoses. That episode, “And Baby Makes Death,” turned out well and Will and Chris asked me if I wanted to tackle the two-part season finale. I said yes, and poured my heart into the scripts. The episodes were cleverly produced, and I was truly proud to have my name on them.

  USA cancelled the show before that two-parter ever aired.

  I’ve had the opposite experience, too. In 2007, I was part of a three-writer tag-team working on an NCIS story about a killer car developed by DARPA. There are times that scripts are written quickly and turn out fine. This was not one of them. We all shared writing credit, but when the episode aired, I didn’t alert my family or my agent. It seemed better to let that one pass unnoticed.

  “Driven” turned out to be the highest-rated program on TV that week. In my entire career, it’s the only time my name has appeared on the week’s number one show.

  All Together Now

  Murphy Brown, starring the sublime Candice Bergen, was the only time in thirty years where all three Ps came together. When my contract at Coach was up, I wanted to jump to a new series, preferably one with more female voices onscreen and off. Murphy showrunners Gary Dontzig, Steve Peterman, and Korby Siamis read my material and called me in. When I walked into their airy office on the Warner Bros. lot, Korby was seated, her skinny legs casually flung over the side of the armchair. She waved hello but made no move to stand. Steve was behind the desk and Gary sat on the couch. The meeting was fun and rela
xed. When I got up to leave, Korby stood to shake my hand and that’s when I noticed she had a basketball under her shirt. Weird, I thought. Why would someone put a basketball under their shirt?

  Korby noticed my confused expression because she gestured toward the basketball and said, “Oh, yeah. I’m pregnant.”

  Of course! My brain hadn’t been able to make sense of the obvious. Korby explained the baby was due over hiatus so she’d be back in the room by the time the sixth season started. It was a life-changing moment for me. An Executive Producer was not just pregnant, she was nonchalantly pregnant.

  “I want to be nonchalantly pregnant someday, too,” I thought while getting into my car.

  Murphy hired me as Supervising Producer. When I walked in the first day and saw three other women sitting at the table, my heart leapt. After years at Coach and Late Night and Newhart and Smothers Brothers, it felt so good to be on a staff where I didn’t have the additional role of representing all women. I could just be me.

  Murphy Brown writers’ room (left to right) Eileen Heisler, Rob Bragin, Gary Dontzig, Korby Siamis, DeAnn Heline, Steve Peterman (seated) Bill Diamond, me, Adam Belanoff, Mike Saltzman aka (left to right) Blackie, Professor, Gary, Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong, Blondie, Steve, Babyface, Noodles, Kid Mumbles, the Worm.

  Courtesy of the author

  Like Mark Harmon, Candice Bergen set the tone on the stage. She was professional, generous, and respectful to all. At Murphy, scenes were automatically shot twice in front of an audience. One night, Candice nailed 95 percent of her dialogue on the first try, but fumbled one joke. I’d cowritten the episode with Rob Bragin and we were standing on set, trying to decide if it was worth mentioning the bobble to the director. Just then, Candice strode by.

  “I blew that line,” she said as she passed. “Watch me go get it.”