Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  When I first met Lorre, he told me what he had been “slowly learning” during these last eight years: “If I’m not frightened and angry and obsessed with anything other than doing good work, then maybe an environment gets created where people can do good work.” But Lorre has fun with his hammerhead reputation. Visitors to his office building on the Warner Bros. lot, for instance, will encounter the heraldic crest of Chuck Lorre Productions. The crest’s motto, Humilitas Ficta, or “feigned humility,” is wreathed by the following sub-mottos: NEUROTIC ANXIETY, UNFOCUSED RAGE, SELF—OBESSION.

  Lorre remains annoyed about one thing, though—his shows’ lack of critical recognition, especially where Two and a Half Men is concerned. He once said of television critics, “They hate our success and believe that if they martyr themselves they’ll wake up in show business with real jobs.” He does not say such things any more, at least not publicly, and prefers not to talk about television at all, if he has the choice.

  Lorre’s standing among critics is not helped by his staunchly traditional approach to the sitcom. He is well aware of the shifts that have taken place in sitcom writing during the past twenty years, but he does not care all that much about them. The Office and Modern Family, two of the most formally adventurous contemporary sitcoms, use a mockumentary framing device that, increasingly, seems as mannered as the three-walled rooms of a traditional, proscenium-style sitcom—a word that Lorre resists using to describe his shows. “The comedies we really love,” he said, “they’re not situational at all. The Honeymooners was just a man struggling to get respect in the world. Archie Bunker was a man out of touch with the culture.” In place of sitcom, Lorre uses “character-com” or “half-hour comedy.”

  By whatever name, the sitcom is an oddly purgatorial form of entertainment. The same characters appear week after week, displaying the same tics, and having the same arguments, in the same rooms, hallways, stairwells, and offices. Within the traditional sitcom, there are complications but rarely solutions; challenges but rarely triumphs. Indeed, when sitcoms attempt to do more dramatic stories, a show can come unmoored, as Lorre learned on Dharma and Greg. Faced with pressure from ABC to feature “promotable” storylines, Lorre eventually capitulated, which he regards as “one of the more regrettable actions in my career.” At one point Dharma toyed with an extramarital relationship; at another, an accident consigned her to a wheelchair for several episodes. “I couldn’t have been dumber,” Lorre said. By listening to ABC, he told me, he undermined “the very nature of what’s great about a four-camera, audience show, which is an opportunity to get to know these people.” Lorre believes that the “magic trick” of the traditional sitcom is that the characters “make very small, incremental progress without ever really changing.”

  Bill Prady, who has worked with Lorre since Dharma and Greg, told me that Lorre hates stories of unnecessary—or any—narrative intricacy. What Lorre loves are stories in which the driving force is one character buying a birthday present for another. “And he’s right,” Prady said, “because a sitcom is now down to about twenty-one minutes. If you’re going to fill [a show] with plot, with events that must occur, there’s no room for people to talk.”

  “I was sitting in a club recently,” Lorre told me, “in Hollywood, listening to different people get up and play. I thought to myself, ‘They’re all playing the same song.’ It’s a fundamentally very simple medium, the blues.” He was, I guessed, making a point about the sitcom. “Yeah,” he said, “and I fought against that for a long time, until I realized: it’s like a haiku. It’s very simple and very structured.”

  Visiting the set of a sitcom you enjoy is like witnessing the exposure of a large and organizationally complex lie. The familiar and comfortable sets, once you are standing within them, seem cramped and flimsy. Touch a door and the wall shakes. Carpets turn raggedy wherever the cameras do not reach. Behind every wall is a world of chicken-coop fencing stapled in place and dark, narrow passageways somehow redolent of asbestos. Someone says, for the purposes of lining up a shot, “Lose the wall,” and suddenly half the set is folded away upon undetectable hinges. The area between the sets and the audience seating area is called “the floor,” but it is more like an alley What little floor there happens to be is marked with inscrutable pieces of tape.

  During tapings of The Big Bang Theory, the audience sits at an angle from several of the sets, which means that it watches a good deal of the live proceedings on television monitors. Meanwhile, Lorre and his battery of writers and producers—hidden from the audience by long black curtains—sit crammed within one of the sets, watching their own monitors, holding scripts and wearing earpieces whose tightly coiled cords looked like black fusilli. Everything that is not part of the set, not bipedal, and not a chair, has wheels, because throughout the night it is continually being moved to whichever of the sets is not being used.

  The Big Bang Theory is Lorre’s best show to date. (Two and a Half Men, though funnier than its detractors admit, too often allows its characters to stand there and trade unrealistic sitcom barbs that in just about any other imaginably fictional context would get someone punched.) If sitcoms at the top of their game can feel like verbal ballet, sitcoms working the middle register are often insult rodeo. Lorre calls this phenomenon “selling out characters for a joke,” and even very good sitcom writers resort to it, especially when, in his words, “you’re tired and exhausted and you’re trying to make something arrive at a level of comedy”

  Big Bang’s main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, are physicists, and not in the way that Ross, from Friends, was a paleontologist, a subject with which he seemed as conversant as a randomly selected eleven-year-old boy. Leonard and Sheldon drop references to Richard Feynman and Asimov’s three laws of robotics; explain how Schrödinger’s cat is applicable to dating; and open episodes with lines like, “Here’s the problem with teleportation,” before going on to reveal what, from a physicist’s perspective, the problem actually is.

  Lorre and Prady’s first attempt at a Big Bang pilot was rejected by CBS (the network, unusually, encouraged them to have another go), and it was not an immediate hit. I happened to catch the pilot the night it aired, in September 2007, and heard, in the first three minutes, references to Papa Doc Duvalier and Vladimir Nabokov. Its prospects appeared to me valiantly doomed, like those of a dog walking a tight rope. When the 2007 writer’s strike crippled production, CBS wound up running Big Bang’s first batch of episodes several times, which played to the show’s gabby strengths. Before long, it had earned a huge and devoted following.

  In the show, Leonard and Sheldon live across the hall from a beautiful aspiring actress named Penny, for whom Leonard pines. Leonard wants more from life, which is his tragedy. Sheldon does not, which is his tragedy. A man of unfeelingly Vulcan arrogance and deeply hidden vulnerabilities, Sheldon discusses his childhood by saying he did not have imaginary friends; he had “imaginary colleagues.” Not many sitcoms would permit Sheldon’s unpleasantness to be so emphatic, but CBS maintains a relatively hands-off approach to Lorre and his shows. Dave Goetsch told me that the “edges that get sanded over in other network sitcoms” become, in Big Bang, the “cornerstones of comedy.”

  Although Big Bang is unquestionably a traditional, multi-camera sitcom, it does not always feel like one. One explanation for this is that its writers love to violate core sitcom rules, such as when they resort to what Prady calls “the ‘Are you my mother?’ structure, like the children’s book,” in which a similar scene is done two or even three times in a row. It is most useful when “Sheldon’s bothering everybody,” Prady said, because it is fun to explore how different characters react. Plot, in other words, is never a concern. “We say the number of things that occur within a Big Bang Theory scene is one or zero.”

  A typical episode of Big Bang takes around four hours to film, with lulls that can last twenty minutes or more. The many things that slow the process down include the frequency with which Lorre and his writers se
nd the actors revised or new jokes; the banter among the actors between takes; the announcement of a guest star like Mayim Bialik (tonight playing Sheldon’s girlfriend, Amy), whose appearance was applauded by the audience for two dozen seconds while she stood there and waved back at them uncomfortably; the patter delivered by a stand-up comedian (“Which side of the room is having a better time? This one or... this one?”) thanklessly tasked with keeping the audience’s energy up; the number of times what is called “the bell” rings out, even though it sounds like a buzzer and nothing a bell; and, finally, how long it takes to move the production’s four cameras, which look less like cameras and more like precision-laser, deep-earth-mining devices.

  At the taping I attended, lines that the actors had grown visibly sick of during the camera run-through, lines that even Lorre had stopped laughing at, were getting huge laughs. Everyone seemed lightly narcoticized by the audience’s presence, the audience included. Lorre’s shows are sometimes condemned for using a laugh track, a charge that infuriates him. His shows, Lorre insists to anyone who will listen, never use laugh tracks. When, later, I sat in on a sound edit for Two and a Half Hen, I witnessed several occasions in which Lorre requested that the laugh be brought down from its recorded level. When one laugh wound up swallowing a joke’s payoff line, Lorre, visibly frustrated, asked the sound engineer why on earth the audience was laughing at the joke’s least funny part. The sound engineer shrugged. “That’s what they did,” he said, to which Lorre responded with a sigh.

  For much of the night the rewriting tasks were mild. Sheldon, for instance, had a brief tangent on the relative merits of the Empire from the Star Wars films, telling Leonard, “Despite their tendency to build Death Stars, I’ve always been an Empire man.” The line did not get a huge laugh, and the writers began throwing out new spins on it: “Despite their tendencies to build Death Stars that blow up at the drop of a hat...” “Despite their rather shoddy human rights record...” Later, a Tinman reference—used to describe Sheldon’s lack of emotion—was discarded for a more audience-appropriate Star Trek: The Next Generation reference.

  I asked Lorre whether I was seeing a lot or a little rewriting tonight. I was seeing the usual amount. “You keep tweaking until you run out of time,” Lorre explained, adding that he found working this way nerve-racking. “I like to write in a room, privately, not in here with two hundred people waiting for us to finish. The danger is you might come up with a new line that gets a big laugh not because it’s better, but because it’s new.”

  We came to the episode’s central scene. Sheldon and his girlfriend Amy, a neurobiologist, sit down with Leonard and two other friends in the physics department cafeteria. Sheldon explains that he has brought Amy to see his work, which Amy concedes is “very impressive,” before adding, “for theoretical work.” Sheldon asks Amy if she’s being condescending. Amy responds, “Compared to the real-world applications of neurobiology, theoretical physics is... what’s the word I’m looking for? Cute.” What follows is an argument that Prady, who worked on it, described to me as “very technical” and “jargony.” He first showed it to Lorre to see if it needed to be shortened. “No,” Lorre told Prady. “This is great. In what other comedy do you see this?”

  Sheldon asks Amy how a neurobiologist like Joseph Babinski could ever “rise to the significance of a physicist like James Clerk Maxwell or Paul Dirac.” Amy’s scripted response:Oh, Sheldon. My colleagues and I are mapping the neurological substrates that subserve global information processing, which is required for all cognitive reasoning, including scientific inquiry, making my research ipso facto prior in the ordo cognoscendi. [TO THE OTHER GUYS] That means it’s better than his research, and by extension of course, yours.

  In the script, Leonard responds to this Latinate avalanche with a curt, startled, “Sure, I got that.” The audience’s response, meanwhile, was a restive and uncertain chuckle. And so the writers went to work. First came the dead spot of Amy’s opening “Oh, Sheldon.” Steven Molaro quickly came up with a line for Amy that had Lorre quite literally slapping his knee: “I’m stating it outright. Babinski eats Dirac for breakfast and defecates Clerk Maxwell.” Next came Leonard’s “Sure, I got that,” a line of which Lorre said, “There’s nothing there.” Every writer’s head lowered, and a few moments later the rewritten line—Molaro’s, once again—was sent out to the floor. Now, when Amy finished her rant, and turned to Leonard, his line became, “I’m still trying to work on defecating Clerk Maxwell.” It got the biggest laugh of the evening. I asked Molaro how it felt to experience something like that. He said that changing jokes on the fly, working under all the lights, and before a live audience, had a definite “athletic” component. He then added, “It’s the only athletic component.”

  As we moved to another set, I asked Lorre whether single-camera sitcoms suffered from not having this audience-writer feedback loop. Lorre was hesitant to say yes, but pointed out the biggest danger for sitcom writers whose material was not vetted by an audience: “You never find out if you’re wrong.”

  Lorre’s house is one of his neighborhood’s more modest and his car one of its least obviously Viagral. Most of the homes nearby stand behind walls. Lorre’s home can be seen from the street.

  “Welcome to the sitcom house,” he said, opening his front door. While he made us tea in his kitchen, he asked me to look at some text on the screen of his laptop. I instantly recognized what I was reading as one of Lorre’s vanity cards. Vanity cards are the production-company logos that TV producers flash up onscreen just after the credits have rolled. On the first episode of Dharma and Greg, Lorre pushed the name of his company, Chuck Lorre Productions, up to the top of the screen to make room for a message far too long to be read in its brief moment of screen time: “Thank you for videotaping Dharma and Greg and freeze-framing on my vanity card. I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my personal beliefs.” An eclectic set of convictions followed—“I believe that Larry was a vastly underrated stooge”; “I believe that my kids are secretly proud of me”—and continued on the card for the next episode, and the next, and the next. Soon, a vanity card announced that Lorre had run out of beliefs, and the texts started to range more widely.

  In the twelve years since, they have included elliptical fictions, rueful musings about his life and the state of the country, and jeremiads against CBS censorship. (Sometimes he relays obscene jokes that he was prevented from using in an episode, and sometimes CBS ends up censoring the card too, in which case he posts the unexpurgated version on his Web site.) If any single mode predominates among the more than three hundred cards Lorre has written, it is probably the rant, and it is hard not to see these compressed, intense utterances as rebellion against the constraints of TV writing—moments of id, on the run from the superego of network programming.

  The vanity card that I read on Lorre’s laptop was directed at television critics: “You have absolutely no power to affect ratings and the likely success or failure of a TV show. In that arena you are laughably impotent. You are not unlike a flaccid penis flailing miserably at a welcoming vagina.” Lorre had just decided not to use this vanity card for the first broadcast episode of Mike and Molly. I told him that I thought he had made an extremely wise decision. He wound up using it, minus a few genital references, on Two and a Half Men.

  We went out onto Lorre’s redbrick back patio, its small pool surrounded by a dozen deck chairs. When he was married, Lorre told me, there had been rose gardens outside and the house was much more elaborately decorated. He has been married twice, a topic about which he has sensibly little to say, and has two children from his first marriage. His daughter works with him on Big Bang, and his son is a nurse.

  We talked about what I had found surprising when I watched him at work. I mentioned having seen Kaley Cuoco, who plays Penny on Big Bang, sitting on the couch in Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment during a rehearsal, apparently checking her e-mail on an iPad. The sight of Cuoco engaged in nonficti
onal behavior within fictional surroundings, I told Lorre, was strangely distressing.

  “After all these years,” Lorre said, “when I watch the actors on one of my shows go on Leno or Letterman and talk about the funny thing that happened to them while they were building a sauna in their Beverly Hills home or whatever, it just breaks my heart. I want to protect the fiction. I don’t want to know what goes on behind the screen.”

  I asked if this accounted for his inability or unwillingness to delegate more of the responsibility for his shows. “I’ve had such a volatile career,” he said. “I quit Grace Under Fire. I got fired from Cybil. I left Dharma and Greg too soon. I made some tragic mistakes both in the writing of the show and leaving it before it had run its course. I don’t want to make those mistakes again.” He went on to say, “It’s a body of work. Whether you like the body of work or not, it’s a body of work that I have accumulated and I want to stay close to it and protect it.”

  Later, he expanded on the point: “This is the shot I’ve been given to communicate as a writer. This is my shot. This was the door that opened, and if I take it for granted then it’s ridiculous.” He went on, “When I started out writing in the late eighties, I heard guys say, ‘Aw, screw it. It’s just a sitcom,’ or, ‘It’s just TV We’ll add laughs to it in post, and it’ll be fine. No one will know.’ I heard guys talk that way and it was really offensive. It was really offensive.”

  Films, perhaps, show us who we want to be, and literature shows us who we actually are. Sitcoms, if they show us anything, show us people we might like to know. Because of this, the sitcom is a medium designed to reassure. The more reassuring the sitcom, the better its chances become at winding up in the financial promised land of syndication, where multi-camera sitcoms fare far better than their single-camera brethren. Most sitcoms are about families, and for the millions who watch them, a sitcom becomes a kind of mental family. Week after week, your couch faces the couch of characters you feel you know, characters whose problems can never quite get solved.