Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  —2010

  A SIMPLE MEDIUM

  Chuck Lorre and the American Sitcom

  Soundstage 24 on the Warner Bros. lot, in Burbank, California, is a sand-colored, pyramid-like hangar identical to the many stages that surround it, as though the pharaohs had developed an air force. Some time ago, Stage 24 was designated the “Friends Stage” in honor of the decade-long residency by Rachel, Phoebe, Joey Chandler, Monica, and Ross, and their improbable Manhattan apartments. According to an engraved plaque near one of the entrances, Blade Runner was filmed there too, in 1981. So was the ABC sitcom Full House, which ran from 1987 to 1995. The ghosts of actors, directors, and audiences past linger in these curious structures, and, when a new show is assigned its stage, cast, crew, and visitors alike can sense them.

  One afternoon in mid-August, the latest production to occupy the Friends Stage—Mike and Molly, a new CBS sitcom created by Mark Roberts and executive produced by Chuck Lorre—was having a network run-through. This is a weekly rehearsal attended by various studio and network executives and representatives from CBS’s Standards and Practices department, and it takes place relatively early in the production process. The show’s cast members were still carrying their scripts, which they had first seen three days earlier. The actors would finish a scene, hustle to the next set, finish a scene, hustle to the next set, all while being trailed by various supporting camera haulers and cable draggers. It looked a bit like speed-dating, but with a pit crew.

  Watching the proceedings was Lorre, a fifty-eight-year-old man with a lean, bearded face and mussed, curly hair some stalemate shade between black and gray. He was wearing a soft-collared dark-green shirt, gray jeans, and blue-gray running shoes. On set, Lorre is unfailingly calm, but it is the intensely focused calm of, say, a model builder or a calligrapher. Lorre is the kind of person of whom one is always aware, even in a crowd, just as one is aware of the presence of fire, even if it is far away.

  Mike and Molly is the sixth sitcom to go on the air that Lorre has produced, created, or co-created. His two most recent shows, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, are currently the number-one- and number-two-rated comedies in America, and have been for some time. Not since Norman Lear—who revolutionized the American sitcom in the seventies, with shows like All in the Family, and who, at one point, had seven hit shows on the air—has one man so dominated the genre. When Big Bang was picked up by CBS, in 2007, Lorre went to see Lear and asked the man whom he had long idolized, “How do you do more than one show at a time? How do you prioritize?” Lear warned Lorre he would probably not like what he was going to say. “His answer,” Lorre told me, “was, basically, you run around like a madman.”

  Once a television show has become successful, most executive producers ascend to a cloudier level of day-to-day involvement. As Suzanne McCormack, Lorre’s assistant, told me: “If his name is on it, he’s involved.” He runs the writing rooms of Two and a Half Men and Big Bang and is volubly present for every table read, network run-through, camera run-through, pre-shoot, live taping, and sound mixing for all three of his shows. The camera run-through, which takes place on the day an episode is filmed and serves as a final rehearsal, exemplifies Lorre’s meticulousness. At this point in the process, Lorre sits in the soundstage section reserved for the live audience and watches the rehearsal through the studio monitors in order to ensure the quality of every shot. Many shows do not bother with a camera run-through; for someone in Lorre’s position to take an active part in one is basically unheard of.

  As one might expect, Lorre’s daily agenda, which he refers to as “Chuck’s Inferno,” slots in five-minute pauses to pee, identifies potential nap opportunities, and issues a final, joking directive to GO HOME. Most shows, Two and a Half Men included, operate on a Monday-through-Friday schedule. The production schedules of Big Bang and Mike and Molly, however, are stacked and staggered through the week, which essentially creates a Lorre workweek made up of nothing but Mondays and Fridays. During the month of August he had only two days in which he was not tied up in some aspect of production.

  When I asked Lorre how long he could expect to maintain such a pulverizing pace, he waved the question away. “There were a couple moments last week where I thought I was going to cry” he said, “but it’s all going all right.” Later in the day he would tell me, “Come back in six weeks and I might be on a catheter.”

  All of Lorre’s shows are multi-camera sitcoms (also known as four-camera sitcoms). The genre is distinguished by a few core features, such as the obviousness with which they are staged, how heavily they favor the written over the improvisational, and the fact that most are taped before a live studio audience. This is in contrast to audience-less, location-shot, “one-camera” shows like Arrested Development or 30 Rock. If single-camera sitcoms are effectively short films, the multi-camera sitcom is more like a short play, and it is the baseball of network television: old-fashioned, American, rule-bound, and deeply resistant to change. (I Love Lucy and Everybody Loves Raymond are, formally, about as different as their titles suggest.) The critically acclaimed sitcoms of the past half decade have tended to be single-camera shows with niche audiences (such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office), and many television critics regard the multi-camera sitcom as a retrograde, even defunct form. At the same time, mass audiences have been deserting comedy altogether for shows like C.S.I. and American Idol. Twenty years ago, eight of the ten top-rated television shows in America were multi-camera sitcoms. By 2006, only one was even in the top twenty: Lorre’s Two and a Half Men.

  The apparently unstoppable success of Lorre’s multi-camera sitcoms in an inhospitable television climate seems mysterious, but Lorre’s belief in the format is boundless. “It’s a very intimate genre,” he told me. “There’s no music. There’s no camera magic. There are no editing tricks. It’s not a visual medium. It’s about people and words.”

  Mike and Molly is about a police officer and grade school teacher who meet in the pilot and, in subsequent episodes, fall in love. The show’s sets are familiar variations on the Midwest Proletariat décor of Roseanne: charmless diner, dreary bowling alley, knickknack-infested living room. Less familiar was Roberts and Lorre’s decision to cast as the show’s leads Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy, two relatively unknown actors of a size rarely seen on television in leading roles. (It was Lorre’s idea to have their first encounter take place in an Overeater’s Anonymous meeting.) Soon after Mike and Molly was commissioned, people began calling it “that show about fat people.” An excellent way to make Lorre mad is to mention this.

  The network run-through had come to a crucial, mid-episode scene in which Mike takes Molly to a bowling alley, where he hopes to impress her with his skill. Mike’s plan does not go well, and he ends up humiliated. Roberts had originally written the scene as taking place in a movie theater, where Molly displays a knowledge of film that intimidates Mike. Upon reading Robert’s script, Lorre said, “What if it’s bowling?”

  In Roberts’s revised script, Molly rolls two strikes in a row, after which a now nervous Mike steps up to the lane, begins his elaborate pre-roll ritual, swings his arm back, and loses hold of his ball. Even though Mike’s bowling ball was a squishy prop bowling ball and the sound effect used to simulate its crash landing was a shattering-glass cliche, Roberts, Lorre, and the episode’s director, James Burrows, all burst out laughing. These men had seen thousands of sitcom rehearsals between them. Hearing them laugh at such easy slapstick felt like encountering Henry Ford, near the end of his career, whistling in awe as another Model T rolled off his assembly line. Lorre’s laughter was the most distinctive: high-pitched, desperate, I-may-be-dying laughter. It had chord changes and movements, sometimes turning into a coughing fit, other times terminating with a foot stomp.

  Lorre laughs like this all the time, during every run-through and rehearsal and filming, take after take, joke after joke, even when it is a joke he heard just moments before, in a previous take. Because Lorre’s
shows are taped before a live audience, his laughter frequently winds up somewhere in the final broadcast audio mix. My first thought was that Lorre was laughing for the benefit of the network people who were there to watch a new, untested show. When I asked him about this later, he maintained that his laughter is completely sincere. At the same time, he said, it “serves a double purpose. It’s a timing mechanism to get [the actors] to imagine the audience. But it’s got to be genuine. If you laugh and there’s no laugh there, you’re preparing them for disaster.”

  It was somewhat surprising, then, that the moment Lorre finished laughing, he began to question whether the bowling-ball moment needed to be included at all. The point of the scene was not to stress Mike’s oafishness but establish his feeling of unanticipated inferiority to Molly, and he’s defeated, dramatically speaking, the moment Molly rolls her strikes. “What is it gonna get us,” Lorre asked, “to see him bowl?” No one had a good answer, and the sequence was cut.

  After the run-through, the network people approached Lorre with their notes, or rather their note. (“One of the biggest things you notice,” Dave Goetsch, a writer and co-executive producer on Big Bang, told me, “is that Chuck doesn’t get notes from the network and the studio.”) The network’s note was a suggestion that Molly seem “more flirty” with Mike during the bowling scene. Lorre agreed that this was a good idea. Next, a representative from Standards and Practices approached him. In the middle of the episode, Molly calls Mike a “dick” in a moment of anger. Before the Standards and Practices representative could even speak, Lorre asked her, “We gonna get the ‘dick’ or are you gonna turn on us at the last minute?”

  The Standards and Practices representative shook her head. “You’re not gonna get it.”

  Lorre seemed genuinely surprised. “Why? It’s really funny.” It had, in fact, elicited from Lorre the rare triple-play combo—laugh, coughing fit, and foot stomp—that was most cherished by his actors. But the Standards and Practices representative did not budge.

  Lorre claims to have learned how to work hard from his father, who ran what Lorre describes as “an eight-seat luncheonette” in Bethpage, on Long Island, that fortified commuters with pre-work scrambles and post-work burgers, and he does not remember his father ever taking a day off. Lorre was born Charles Michael Levine in Brooklyn, in 1952, and by the time he was twelve, he was working in the luncheonette as a short order cook and soda jerk. At night, he and his father watched television together, usually comedians like Jackie Gleason, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope. One of Lorre’s “most formative” television moments occurred while watching The Ed Sullivan Show. “Henny Youngman came on and said, ‘I went to the doctor and said, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” And the doctor said, “Don’t do that.”’ It was the funniest thing I ever heard in my life. Don’t do that. The logic of it was astonishing.” Despite their mutual love of television and comedy, Lorre’s relationship with his father was often strained. He especially regrets that his father, who died in 1976, did not live to see what he calls the “ongoing miracle” of his television career.

  After high school, Lorre enrolled at SUNY Potsdam, but dropped out to play the guitar professionally. Photographs of Lorre around this time show a young man with the smeary mustache of a 1970s porn stallion and stupendous head of black curls more cowl than hair. At the age of 28, he changed his name to Chuck Lorre. “My mother hated my father’s family,” Lorre explained. “‘You’re no good; you’re a Levine,’ was routinely thrown my way.”

  Lorre admits to having lived hard and unwisely during the seventeen years he spent playing cruise ships, bat mitzvahs, weddings, and “Big Daddy’s Lounge in Long Beach from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.” He did manage to write a pair of songs that stuck to the sneaker sole of American pop culture: the theme song for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series, which he cowrote; and “French Kissin,” Deborah Harry’s biggest non-Blondie hit, which Bill Prady, who co-created The Big Bang Theory with Lorre, has described—accurately—as “remarkably average.”

  Lorre turned to television writing in the mid 1980s. Although he claims that his only ambition was to get health insurance for his family, it was, in some ways, a natural outgrowth of his music career. Many of the songs Lorre wrote were dark-edged, purposefully comic “story” songs. “I was enamored of Randy Newman,” Lorre told me, especially the persona songs in which Newman sang in the voice of an ugly, unlikable person, but with empathy rather than anger. In Lorre’s mind, television had something else going for it: it appeared to be easy. In music, Lorre said, “the bar seemed much higher. I mean, McCartney and Lennon and Springsteen and Stevie Wonder and the Rolling Stones—just in pop music!” He now admits his confidence “was arrogance fueled by stupidity. I had no idea what I was doing when I started.”

  Lorre’s first steady television jobs were in animation. At Marvel Comics, he wrote fifteen drafts of Muppet Babies scripts (“I didn’t write that many drafts of the Two and a Half Men pilot!”) and was fired from My Little Pony (“I didn’t have that Pony voice”). At night, he wrote spec scripts for prime-time comedies and used what few connections he had to get them read. Lorre managed to get a Golden Girls script into the hands of Betty White, for instance, whose neighbor he knew. White told Lorre she liked the script, which prominently featured her character (“I’m not an idiot. If you know Betty’s neighbor, write for Betty”), and also that she would take it to the show’s producers. Looking back, he does not care to imagine the looks on the producers’ faces when White presented them with a spec script written by her neighbor’s associate. “It couldn’t have gone well,” he said. The script was returned with a form letter but led to freelancing work for lesser sitcoms such as Charles in Charge and My Two Dads.

  Lorre’s first prime-time break came with Roseanne, on which he worked from 1990 to 1992. The first time Lorre set foot on the Roseanne set, he experienced a sudden, confidence-building epiphany. “Roseanne was doing a scene with Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman,” he told me, “and I turned to one of the writers and I said, ‘They’re saying what we wrote!’ I was stunned. They were big stars.”

  Lorre’s work on Roseanne impressed the show’s prolific and influential producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who offered him the chance to create a show about, in Lorre’s words, “a fifty-year-old middle-class woman coming into her own.” Why you? I asked him. “I was the perfect choice,” he told me, deadpan. Franny’s Turn premiered in 1992 and was cancelled after five weeks.

  Nevertheless, Franny’s Turn inaugurated Lorre’s long, incongruous stint developing sitcoms about women of a certain age. His next project, Grace Under Fire, also for Carsey and Werner, brought Lorre to Elgin, Illinois, in order to gather research for a show Carsey and Werner envisioned as revolving around a struggling single mother. In Elgin, Lorre met with nurses, factory workers, and women living in the local YWCA—one of whom he asked if she would even want to watch a show about a single mom working in a factory. The woman needed to know one thing: What time was it on? Her job, you see, left her too wiped out to stay up very late. Lorre returned from Elgin thinking that the show, which became Grace Under Fire, was about “the hero’s journey.” He was particularly pleased with the pilot, which, he said, “managed to bring in some elements that I don’t think had ever been in a sitcom before,” including domestic violence. Much of that material was drawn from the stand-up act of show’s star, Brett Butler, with whom Lorre often battled. “She was dissatisfied with almost every line of every script,” he told me. “It was an impossible situation. I began writing defensively, which isn’t writing. It’s predicting the future.” He left the show after one season.

  In 1995, Lorre created a vehicle for Cybil Shepherd that explored an erstwhile ingenue’s identity crisis when she learns of her impending grandmotherhood. Cybil had a hugely successful first season—Christine Baranski won an Emmy for her role as Shepherd’s rich, alcoholic friend—but, once again, Lorrie found himself struggling with a show’s star. One legen
d holds that Shepherd had Lorre fired because he clapped too enthusiastically for Baranski at the Emmys. Lorre says this is not accurate, and characterizes his removal as being more about Shepherd’s displeasure with “how the humor was being apportioned out” in the second season. (Shepherd demurs: “Chuck knows why he was fired.”) Whatever the case, Shepherd’s power play took Lorre “a long time to wrap my head around,” he told me. And now, he knew, the soot of several burned bridges had darkened his reputation.

  A television show provides hundreds of people with steady employment in an industry not celebrated for its stability, and successful shows are defined by their longevity. Television is thus a more or less congenial industry. A brooding artiste or tantrum champion may thrive within a short-lived film production, but television rewards those who are able to meet deadlines while also getting along with their coworkers. In 2007, an Entertainment Weekly profile that emphasized Lorre’s combative history described him as “the angriest man in television.”

  The characterization still irritates him, and yet, to hear Lorre tell it, anger drove him through much of his early career. The success of Dharma and Greg, his sitcom about a mismatched couple that ran from 1997 to 2002, helped him learn to relax. For the first time, Lorre’s distinctive sitcom voice was not forced through the mediating comic funnel of a headlining star. But it was not until Two and a Half Men, a show about a womanizing ruin of a man and his fussbudget brother, that Lorre found comic focus: men behaving like idiots.