Magic Hours (28 page)

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.