Friday Questions

Hello from somewhere in Japan.  Still, I never stand down from answering Friday Questions.  What's yours?   Kansha.  (Thanks in Japanese... I think.) 

gottacook leads off.

What a wonderful thing that MASH DVDs allow viewers to choose to omit the laugh track. Did you ever imagine, when working on the show, (i) whether such a thing might be possible one day for home video, and (ii) whether there might eventually be comedies (such as the "single-camera" type) that were laugh track-free?

At the time we wrote MASH we had no clue the show would still be so popular thirty years later. We were just thrilled when THREE’S COMPANY stopped kicking our ass in the ratings. I also never thought someday you could own the shows for your own home library. By the way, they look better on DVD than they ever did on the air.

But I fully expected that at some point a single-camera show could escape the laugh track shackles. Hour dramas that had comedy sprinkled in like MOONLIGHTING helped the cause.

On MASH at least CBS allowed us to do O.R. scenes laugh track free. “Let it go, Hawkeye. He’s gone.” (ha ha ha ha ha ha).

willie b wants to know:

We're all familiar with how cheap networks and studios are. So why are writing partners or rooms of writers the norm in TV? Seems to me the networks/studios would be happy paying just one writer instead of a whole roomful.

They would. The trouble is very few writers can write 22 episodes of television a year by themselves… and not wind up in the drooling academy. All the more reason why Larry Gelbart, Aaron Sorkin, and David E. Kelley are Gods.

From Brendan DuBois:

On Frasier, at what point were the title cards written, the ones that used puns and such to introduce different scenes? Were they part of the original script, or were they added on later?

Both. They were a stylistic choice from the get-go. In the pilot, Peter Casey, David Lee, and David Angell employed them to help introduce characters. E.G. -- Before Niles’ first scene a card appeared that read “the brother”. For the FRASIER scripts my partner and I wrote we included several card suggestions. Some they used, some they didn’t, some they did themselves that were better.

And finally, from Chris Ayers:

In the episode where BJ is making Charles think he's gaining & losing weight, were you the "Beanpole Levine" whose pants made Winchester think he'd gotten fat?

Even though I pronounce it “La-Vine”, yep. A little inside joke to amuse maybe three people at the time. Now four. Thanks for noticing.