Magic Hours (30 page)

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:

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 nonfictional 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.

Look at the characters of
Cheers
, Lorre said. “Society would judge them to be losers, but they created a family with each other. That was the hope of the series.” A lot of sitcoms are, in fact, darker than you realize. At its core,
Two and a Half Men
is about loneliness.
The Big Bang Theory
is about alienation.
Mike and Molly
is about self-hatred. You would never know it from the shows themselves, but you do, sometimes, feel it while watching them. To laugh at these things with our mental families may allow us to cope with out own loneliness and alienation and self-hatred. It may be that the sitcom's consistent avoidance of any final, dramatic catharsis is its accidental strength. If so, that would make this least lifelike form of entertainment the most comfortingly similar to real life.

 

 

I arrived at the
Mike and Molly
taping, a few days after the network run-through, to learn from a smiling Lorre that the live audience had loved the show's pilot. There was always a risk, Lorre said, in showing something new to an audience. “These are brand new faces, and they really responded.”

Early in the taping the audience laughed hard at things that were not even intended to be funny. I wondered what might have happened if the bowling-ball gag had survived into the live shooting and asked Lorre if an audience can ever be wrong. “Sure, they can be wrong,” he said. “We need to ask if the experience will translate to a person sitting alone on their couch. And that's a judgment call.”

Lorre's attention was soon consumed by another editorial legacy of the run-through, namely when Standards and Practices refused to allow Molly to call Mike a “dick.” Molly's line had now become: “You big knob!” It got a laugh from Lorre during the camera run-through earlier in the day, but, hearing it now, he seemed frustrated. Nothing about it worked, he decided, because
Molly's motivation did not line up with her reaction. “She's been charming,” Lorre said of Molly. “It's his problem; he's an asshole. But CBS won't let us call him an asshole.”

“Or a dick,” one of the writers said.

After several minutes of fretting, Lorre looked up. Why doesn't Molly insult Mike's bowling ability? That, he said, was a convincingly nasty thing for her to zero in on. Mike hurt her; she is now going to hurt Mike. A line, Lorre's, was rushed out to Melissa McCarthy: “You bowl like a girl!” What made the line so funny came from the explosively vicious way McCarthy delivered it. She seemed surprised by her anger, which was exactly what Lorre had intended.

The evening's most interesting dilemma surfaced when Mike retreats to his friend Carl's house after his date with Molly While Mike and Carl chat, Carl's grandmother, played as an aging sexpot by Cleo King, comes downstairs, has a seat, tells Mike that he was threatened by Molly's intelligence, and advises him to go back to her, since there is “nothing sexier” than a man being honest. At the end of this lesson, a male voice calls Granny back upstairs. She smiles and crosses the set. “That man is as honest as the day is long,” the script has her say of her upstairs lover. “And vice versa.”

The joke utterly died in performance, which stunned Lorre and his writers. “I would have bet the mortgage on that one working,” Lorre said. “But it's a thinker. There's too many steps.” I suggested that the joke's problem was internal: the payoff laugh after the audience's initial, instinctive laugh never came because the implicit comparisons between “day” “long,” “honest,” and “man” did not find each other in the mentally swimmy period during which the joke was processed. The
real
joke was about an old lady going upstairs for a shafting. My cogitation on this matter was of approximately no interest to the writers, who all stared looked blankly at the floor.

Suddenly, one of them, Don Foster, began nodding. He had something. This was what he had: “That man is as honest as the day is long, and if he wasn't honest I never would have found out he was long.”