jayabramowitz

This is controversial.

One day, we writers were in the office of our showrunner, Liz Sage, going through a script and minding our own business.  The director, Don Corvan, burst in, and told us they’d shut down production and we weren’t going to believe why.  According to Don, Chris Hewitt — Mr. Belvedere — had been in the previous weekend’s Christmas parade.  Chris had been standing in a car waving to his zillions of fans when the car broke suddenly.  Chris lost his balance — the man wasn’t particularly steady in the first place — and toppled awkwardly, crushing his cubes in the process.  Ever the trouper, he’d come in for rehearsal anyway, but the pain in his manly member became too much and he had to take to his bed.

Whether he ever passed out or not is, sadly, beyond the scope of my knowledge.

5th grade would be generous. But it’s not like we were “told” to write to a certain level — we just knew. When the big punchline is DUH! as spoken by a 5-year-old, the mission is clear.

When I was writing FULL HOUSE my daughter was 3. I WROTE FOR HER. And she figured out that when the treacly music started it meant the show was almost over. That music signalled what we called the “heart scene,” when one of the brats would get lectured by an adult about how to live their TV lives and the edisode would get tied up in a simplistically near knot.

The way the Olsen Twins performed on Full House was strange and, to me, disturbing.  I think they were 7-years-old the year I worked on the show.  Although they’d perform in the tapings, most of what was used for air was shot in pick-ups, which meant that after the audience left we’d shoot those scenes again.  The woman who worked as the twins’ wrangler, coach, whatever you’d call her, would kneel under the camera, recite the kid’s line and perform a gesture.  The kid would then ape the way the line was spoken as closely as she could.  I don’t know if that was why we sensitively referred to them as the Monkey Girls, but I found it discomfiting that the girls were in effect acting like little robots, or performing seals.  Sure made them rich, though.

They're there... everywhere you look.

I don’t believe they do, certainly not in my experience.  But you have to give TV writers some slack on that.  It’s very hard to come up with what was then 26 episodes in a season, some of which have to be written very quickly.  That’s a lot of stories.  And after a show hits 100 episodes, 200 episodes…. The Simpsons is something of a miracle, but the reason they go on strongly isn’t only that the writers are terrific.  The cast does not age. That takes a huge story burden off the writing staff.