Opening Day

For baseball fans, this is the greatest day of the year. OPENING DAY – when hope burns eternal, even for the Phillies. It's especially meaningful this year.  After such a harsh winter in the Midwest and East, baseball means spring is here in only three more months.

There’s always great pomp and circumstance and the stadium is always filled. For some teams it’s the only time that happens all year. If they had “Free Car Night” in Tampa I don’t think they could sell out a game in May.

For many years I would always go to opening day at Dodger Stadium. And then of course, as a broadcaster, whatever team I was working for generally insisted I be there.

My biggest opening day thrill was calling the first game ever at Jacobs Field in Cleveland. I was doing the radio for Seattle, describing all the ceremonies (Clinton throwing out the first pitch and 102 year-old Bob Feller throwing with more velocity) and unbeknownst to me at the time, the CBS radio network picked up our feed and I was broadcasting all around the world. I'm so glad I didn't know.

My first year with Baltimore, Vice President Dan Quayle came in the booth and I interviewed him my first inning. Not a lot of comedy there. It was like playing tennis against a blanket.

My first year in Seattle the team was down 9-0 by the time I made my debut in the third inning. Since no one gave a shit about the game at that point I spent the inning discussing the stupidest ROCKY movie.

The next year we opened on the road and by the time we returned to Seattle we were 1-5 so that was a festive home opener.

Now that I’m no longer with a team my great joy is not going to opening day. Along with the tradition comes massive traffic congestion, long lines at the concession stands, and idiots who are smashed by the national anthem. As an LA fan, I now much prefer to sit home and watch the great Vin Scully call it on television.

A couple of years ago he had a bad cold and missed opening day. You would have thought the city suffered an 8.5 earthquake. There was near panic and crying in the streets. Good luck to the guy who replaces Vin Scully.

The important thing, whether you’re there or not, is that baseball is back. And not just for seven episodes like MAD MEN. It’s back every day for the next six months. There will be amazing highlights, spectacular fielding plays, one of your favorite players busted for PED’s, unlikely heroes, no-hitters, bench clearing brawls, bobbleheads, controversy, a blizzard of statistics, blockbuster trades, two managers fired, thirty pitchers needing Tommy John surgery, and some stupid Alex Rodriguez distraction.

PLAY BALL.

This post is dedicated to Lon Simmons, the longtime play-by-play voice of both the Giants and the A's who passed away yesterday.  He was 91.  Not only was he a great announcer with a spectacular voice, he was wickedly funny.  No one could make me laugh... or boo like Lon Simmons (I was a Dodger fan remember).  He is deservedly in the Hall-of-Fame. 

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What Easter means to me

Easter is not one of my big holidays. I’ve never gone to the Hollywood Bowl for the Sunrise Service. The closest I’ve come was the Universal Amphitheater for a production of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR.

In grade school we used to paint hardboiled eggs. But who could we give them to? What kid ate hardboiled eggs? We might as well have painted prunes.

And I never got the point of an Easter Egg hunt. When I was a disc jockey at WDRQ in Detroit we had an Easter Egg hunt at a big local park and there were five stabbings.

What Easter meant to me was candy – the good and the bad.

The good was Yellow Peeps. These were chick shaped marshmallows covered in some yellow sticky crusty sugar coating. I have no idea what I was eating. But I loved them. It’s been years since I sampled a Peep. I wonder what I would think today. My guess – I’d gag at how sweet the first bite was… then finish the whole thing.

The bad candy was the chocolate bunnies. Sometimes solid but most of the time these too were marshmallows coated in chocolate. Except it wasn’t chocolate. It was wax. Even at six years-old I thought they were disgusting.

My guess is there are enough preservatives in Easter candy to last until the next century. After all, starting tomorrow all stores carrying Easter candy will sweep it out and get ready for Halloween. What happens to all those leftover Peeps and bunnies? Are they just going to be thrown out? What do you think?

I suspect they go back to the warehouse and wait until next year. Or the year after.  Or the year after that. 

It’s possible an Ed Snowden will reveal the company making those chocolate bunnies went out of business in 1956 and this is just the unsold inventory. In another 34 years we’ll see the last of the brown wax bunnies.

But for those of you who do celebrate Easter, have a wonderful day.   Stay out of Detroit parks, set your alarm for 4:00 AM, use the chocolate bunny as a hood ornament, and save me a Peep. 

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One of the great high school reunion pranks ever

This ties in with two posts from earlier this week -- my April Fool's joke and the B100 reunion.    One of my USC students, Andrea Wachner, pulled an inspired prank.  She hired a stripper to pose as her for her 10 year high school reunion.  And it gets more elaborate than that.   Andrea filmed the whole thing and made a movie of it.  Here's the short version.  Check it out.  You will love it.

Andrea, you are a disturbed individual. And I admire you for it.

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Good Friday Questions

Here are Good Friday Questions.

Dan Ball starts us off:

After your epic tirade against ONE BIG HAPPY, how pissed and/or disillusioned are you that TV comedies haven't evolved more in the years since MASH, CHEERS, and FRASIER? I know a lot of show business is about getting lucky with the right audience among other things, but do you get frustrated that making good TV is just a vicious cycle of discovery and ignorance instead of just steady evolution--like science or technology? We know you get bummed as a viewer, but as a person who's contributed to the betterment/evolution of good TV, what are your thoughts on this matter? How do you explain/reconcile it?

I wouldn’t say I’m pissed or disillusioned; just annoyed maybe.

In general I don’t think art evolves. It advances in spurts. There are periods of progress when the planets come together and then there are dry spells. TV comedy had a golden age in the ‘70s and by the early ‘80s people were predicting that sitcoms were dead.

But contributing to today’s comedy malaise, I think there are several factors. Broadcasters aren’t making television shows anymore. Mega corporations are. Same with the film industry. Gone are showmen like Darryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer, replaced by Fortune 500 companies only concerned with the bottom line. I get no sense of love and pride for making good entertainment.

When William Paley owned CBS it was called “the Tiffany Network.” The same network that gave us THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW, MASH, ALL IN THE FAMILY, THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, and THE BOB NEWHART SHOW now airs 2 BROKE GIRLS. And NBC’s Must-See-TV line up of shows like CHEERS, FRASIER, and SEINFELD has given way to ONE BIG HAPPY. Character, depth, and wit has been replaced by crass vagina jokes.

There’s no one at the top saying, “We can’t put that shit on the air. We’re the National Broadcasting Company for Godsakes!”

Also, networks now chase young audiences exclusively. Those classic “Must-See-TV” shows probably wouldn’t get on the air today. Certainly not with casts all in their 30s or older. And certainly not with sophisticated storylines and references to literature instead of pop culture.

I also worry that many of today’s showrunners aren’t experienced enough. I don’t think they receive the mentoring that we fortunately did and at times it feels like they’re trying to reinvent the wheel. I certainly believe today’s young writers are the ones who should be writing most of the network pilots, but they need to be ready.

At some point this will change and comedy will have a renaissance. I just hope it’s soon.

From Matt:

I attended the CHEERS filming of "Dinner at Eight-ish," and when they finished they announced that audience members were welcome to stay while they filmed scenes from an episode they started the prior week. We were shown a rough cut of the first half of "One Last Fling," and then they filmed the remaining scenes. Was this a common practice? I figured they were trying to shorten the production schedule and saw the logic in it as those scenes were all bar/office with no costume changes and went pretty quickly.

There are several reasons for doing that. Sometimes we went back and re-shot scenes that didn’t work. Other times we tried to get ahead.

In season three Shelley Long was pregnant. To avoid having Diane pregnant we planned that she and Frasier go off to Europe for vacation. We filmed those scenes before Shelley was showing. Generally, we did one a week on top of the episode we shot. Once Shelley started showing we inserted them into the episodes to keep her in the show.

On TAXI one season they did a two-parter where the cab company went under and each cabbie had to get another job. Those individual scenes were filmed after shows. It saved the production company two full weeks.  And were two great episodes. 

cd1515 asks:

It always strikes me as lame when on a TV show, there's about 5-6 people standing there when one says to another "we need to talk privately," and then they step 18 inches to the right where EVERYONE COULD STILL EASILY HEAR THEM.

is that a blocking thing, like is it too hard to get those 2 people further away?

Ah, the dreaded “cone of silence” – a creative license staple of multi-camera shows. The sets aren’t very large and it takes too much time for people to cross into an office. So the compromise is taking someone off to the side. A smart director will stage it so that those five or six extras are not in the shot.

But this isn’t an exclusive convention to TV. I’ve seen this on the stage where the two actors step off a few steps and the other actors are still quite visible. But like I said, it’s creative license. Just like there always being parking spaces right in front of the building and window tables at restaurants.

And finally, a couple of quickies from Michael:

M*A*S*H and CHEERS both had significant cast changes over the years. Which characters do you think were truly irreplaceable - just Hawkeye and Sam?

Yep. Maybe include Eddie on FRASIER.

Especially interested if you think M*A*S*H could have survived the loss of Hot Lips?

Yes. Nothing against Loretta Swit, who was terrific, but you could find other nurses. Personally, I think the show sacrificed a lot of the fun of the character once she slept with Hawkeye. But that’s me.

What’s your Friday Question?

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Speeding up sitcoms

Back in the old days of Top 40 radio, some stations would adjust the turntables to play 45's at 47 or 48 RPM's.  The point here was to make the records seem brighter and faster.   And in comparison -- duller and slower on the competition.

Eventually this got out of hand.  The other station started playing their records at 48.  To keep up, the first station began playing them at 49, and all of sudden songs were going out of key, singers were sounding like the chipmunks, and the audience began to notice -- and dislike.

And now television is doing the same thing -- very slightly speeding up the playback of syndicated sitcoms -- not to make them brighter or funnier or enhance them in any way.   They're doing it to squeeze in more commercials.  TBS and TNT are two culprits.  By compressing the show they can add two whole minutes of spots to shows like SEINFELD.

Here's an article from SLATE along with a sample. 

Personally, I think this is insidious, and it will prove to be yet another nail in the coffin of broadcast networks.   When you can stream SEINFELD, when you can buy SEINFELD, when you can see SEINFELD on local channels, and you know the show is distorted on TBS, why would you watch? 

These networks are insulting you, and being patently dishonest.  Subliminal advertising is not allowed.  Why should this be okay?   Are there disclaimers warning viewers that the shows are compressed?    When radio was exposed for speeding up records it just sent listeners fleeing to FM and contributed to the downfall of the Top 40 format.

Networks like TBS are mortgaging their future and the future of broadcast television.  Is the mistrust of your brand and eventual audience exodus worth the revenue of those two extra minutes?    My guess is the people in charge would say yes.  They're not going to be in those jobs in five years so what do they give a shit?

So what if they speed up their demise -- by four minutes an hour? 

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A GREAT April's Fool joke

On tonight's James Corden show.  Katie Couric gets him good.  Check this out.

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My big announcement!

Happy to announce, that as of this date, April 1st, I will become the president of Ellen DeGeneres Productions. After meeting with Ellen and determining that we are absolutely on the same page creatively, we agreed to work together.

My first assignment is to retool ONE BIG HAPPY and make it more like MASH. It turns out Elisha Cuthbert’s character was in the Army Reserves and is called to active duty in Afghanistan. And coincidentally, Kelly Brook was in the British Reserves and is also deployed to the same base as Elisha. And Nick Zano tags along because… well, I haven’t worked that out yet. This is just my first day.  But look for this new direction beginning episode seven. 

I do have my first great joke. Elisha says, “This must be V-Day.” Nick says, “Victory Day?” And Elisha says, “No. Vagina-Day.” Am I the right guy for this job or WHAT?

Also, as part of my duties I will be filling in for Ellen hosting her show while she goes on vacation or continues her campaign to become a judge on THE VOICE.

Mark it down – April 1 – the day Ellen DeGeneres and I change comedy forever.

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