Character Building, TV-Style

For Michael Richards, bringing “Seinfeld’s” Cosmo Kramer to life takes more than merely clowning around.

“It’s hard work,” the actor explains, in a low, smooth voice that bears little resemblance to the jittery breathlessness of his comedic alter ego. “Deep down I always enjoy the process, but I find you have to work very hard to get to the moments where you surprise yourself--spontaneous moments where something comes through that wasn’t in the script, the table reading or any discussions. That’s always exciting. It feels holy.”

The two-time Emmy winner laughs and adds: “There’s always been something like that going on with Kramer--I work to a certain point, and then the divine takes over.”

Short of divine intervention, the key to a successful television comedy series may well be found in the sublime synthesis of writing and acting that Richards’ embodiment of Kramer exemplifies. Story lines keep a show moving, punch lines get the laughs, but it’s strong, well-constructed characters that keep an audience watching.

What does it take to build a character that audiences will want to watch, though? And who among a show’s actors, writers and producers should get the credit--or the blame--for the “people” viewers love, hate or ignore week after week?

Those involved in such work say it’s a collaborative process akin to a rocket launch: Get it right and you’ve got liftoff; get it wrong and the best you can hope for is to fizzle out fast.

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Series creators usually begin with a keen sense of the comic tone they want their show to deliver, as well as a definite sense of where and when the show’s action takes place. But characters, and the relationships between them, are often more ephemeral constructions, and a pilot script’s protagonists, villains, straight men and fall guys cannot be fully realized until actors inhabit them for a while.

“It’s a very important process,” says Steve Levitan, who has worked as a writer and executive producer on “Wings,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “Frasier” and has recently created “Just Shoot Me,” a midseason replacement series for NBC. “When you sit down and come up with ideas for characters, it’s really easy to say, ‘He should be like this. She should be like that,’ because they’re strictly on the page and mostly one-dimensional. When you have an actor come in, it’s very important to adapt the character toward the actor. If an actor finds a new way to make a character funny, it’s silly to say, ‘Funny, yes, but that’s not the way I envisioned the character.’ ”

Levitan believes that the blend of a character’s traits and an actor’s talents is much more important in series television than in other dramatic forms: “In movies or plays, there are a finite number of lines and a definite character with a beginning and end for an actor to assume. But on television, an actor and a character may live together for five years--they can’t help but start to grow closer to each other.”

“Absolutely true,” says George Segal, who will be returning to regular series work on Tuesday as the star of “Just Shoot Me.” (In 1987, he starred in the short-lived “Take Five.”) “You can see in long-running shows how rich the characters become in later episodes as opposed to how raw they seem in earlier episodes. The actor and character really have something close to a marriage, and we know there are all kinds of marriages. You just hope for a good one.”

Kramer’s kinetic presence in NBC’s “Seinfeld” is a particularly hilarious example of what can happen when the right actor gets hold of a well-written character.

Richards was originally hired by Jerry Seinfeld and former executive producer Larry David with the idea that the actor would have freedom to find his way with the part. Once Richards got a handle on the character, the show’s writers began writing to Richards’ strengths. Richards says it took the better part of “Seinfeld’s” first season to get to that point.

“The real key came about eight or nine shows in. I had been playing Kramer as if he were slow-witted--always one step behind what everyone else was saying. Then I learned to play Kramer as if he were blocks ahead of what everyone’s saying, and I had him.”

While Richards speaks proudly of his work developing Kramer, he is also quick to point out that the character is not simply the result of letting him cut loose on the “Seinfeld” set.

“A lot of the little physical things in each episode are improvised, but I always work with the material,” he says. “As we build toward a show through a week of rehearsals, we find things we can play with, and I’m free to suggest that Kramer should say a line this way rather than that way. But for the most part we stay very close to the script. The words are there, and they’re usually very good. It’s my job to bring the character to the language.”

Kristen Johnston is thrilled with her current job: bringing life to the character of Sally, the comely alien-in-woman’s-form on NBC’s “3rd Rock From the Sun.” But it wasn’t clear to Johnston when she first read for the part that it would offer much satisfaction.

“I read for the pilot, and Sally was very one-note--just establishing the basics. But it’s been my experience with pilots--which is about two years of reading for everything in town--that the people who create the shows really don’t know what they want beyond the basics. You have to come in and tell them what they want. With Sally, the producers were looking for ‘a funny woman,’ and someone who could play with male strengths and female neuroses. But that’s all they had, and when I auditioned they were looking at every type in the world. I just decided I would show them I was the right one.”

That process isn’t unique to comedies. When Gordon Clapp auditioned for a part on “NYPD Blue,” he made an inspired performance choice that won him the role of the somewhat bumbling Detective Medavoy.

“There wasn’t much of a character on the page,” Clapp recalls. “I think [creators-producers] Steven Bochco and David Milch just wanted to fill out the squad room and use this guy to set up a joke with Sipowicz. I hadn’t had much time to prepare, and I made the last-minute decision that, in dealing with Sipowicz, this guy Medavoy got really nervous. So I started to stutter and stammer. I guess I figured that if I said everything twice it would feel like a bigger part.”

Not only did Clapp become Medavoy, the stammer was actually written into subsequent scripts.

To distinguish Sally among the ensemble of “3rd Rock,” the show’s writers have followed Johnston’s lead in developing the she-alien, tailoring her scenes to Johnston’s comic abilities. And the actress says that as scripts are being readied, she is free to speak up as the cast’s “Sally expert.”

“If I make a suggestion for a line or a movement--and it’s funny--it’ll get in the show. But the greatest thing is that the producers don’t look to the actors first if a scene isn’t working--they look to the writing. They trust us so much with the characters, they know that if a scene isn’t working, the script needs to be changed. So at this point the character has become a very happy marriage of work from me and the writers.”

The marriage is not always happy. Each TV season brings forth a few new tales of creators, writers or actors leaving shows because they are unhappy with the creative chemistry. There have been some well-documented battles between star and executive producers/head writers on the set of “Roseanne,” and David Rosenthal, creator of the Arsenio Hall sitcom that premieres Wednesday, recently left the show over differences with the star.

But “Just Shoot Me” producer Levitan says that raised voices in the writers’ room are not always a sign of trouble.

“Arguments can be a sign of a healthy show,” he says. “From a creator’s point of view, it’s actually kind of rewarding to hear writers and producers arguing passionately over whether a character would or wouldn’t do something--feeling very strongly about a person who was just a basic idea in a pilot script not that long ago.”

As “Just Shoot Me” was cast, Segal’s character changed from a cold businessman into a warmer “schmoozer” type--a character more fitted to Segal’s personality. But Segal was attracted to the role even before the changes were made.

“If the writing is good, it speaks to you,” he says. “And I knew from the first script that my character on this show was someone I could really lose myself in. It’s really like taking a great vacation when you jump into a character that fits. And that fit only improves when the writers begin to write specifically for you, and you begin to suggest things back to them. When the fit is right, the work feels very easy.”

Dave Foley concurs. Accustomed to outlandish parts when he was in the sketch-comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, he’s found he sometimes forgets he is in fact playing a character in the soft-spoken, easygoing Dave Nelson of NBC’s “NewsRadio.”

“Dave Nelson feels fairly close to me, so I really don’t think about him at all until I have to deliver lines,” Foley says. “But there are times during rehearsal when I’ll say, ‘I don’t have a problem doing this, but I don’t think Dave Nelson would do this.’ That’s when I think, ‘Hey, maybe I do have a character.’ ”

Rhea Perlman is still in the process of character-building. The actress spent 11 seasons as the sniper-mouthed barmaid Carla on “Cheers” and this season decided to return to sitcom action with a new character. She executive-produces and stars in CBS’ “Pearl.”

Perlman says it was important for her not to leap too far from what worked for her “Cheers” character:

“At this point, people saw me as Carla, and I wasn’t going to fight that. I wanted a character who was still tough, still street. But on a TV show you also need to stay close to yourself in some way. It’s important to have a character that at least seems kind of like you. Basically,” she says with a laugh, “I just took the really bitter parts out of Carla, added a little more of myself and ended up with Pearl. We’re still waiting to see if it works.”

David Angell and his producer partners, Peter Casey and David Lee, didn’t have that problem in transferring Perlman’s former “Cheers” co-star, Kelsey Grammer, to a show of his own as the same character, “Frasier.” But Angell believes that even with a character as well-known to audiences as Frasier Crane, the key to keeping him funny has been allowing Grammer and his supporting cast the freedom to explore their roles.

“I think Kelsey likes Frasier more now than he did at the beginning--mainly because there’s more to like,” Angell says. “Going from ‘Cheers’ to the new show, we didn’t want to change the things that made Frasier Frasier--but we were taking a funny supporting character and making him a central character, which really changes the way you write for him. At this point, the writers really know the character so well that we rarely need to change more than a sentence, but Kelsey and the rest of the cast have the gift of being able to take the material to a level we couldn’t even anticipate. The lines of the script aren’t really alive until they’re coming out of the actors’ mouths.”

Making sure those lines belong in the actors’ mouths is a particular concern for executive producers, and developing scripts that stick to the characters’ established voices is especially important for long-running shows that have built a measure of goodwill with their audiences. As “Murphy Brown” winds through its ninth season, executive producers Rob Bragin and Bill Diamond are charged with keeping the characters true to themselves, no matter what the story arcs bring.

“In terms of character, this show is established enough that not a lot of fine-tuning has to happen,” says Diamond, who has been with the show for the last five years. “The trick really has been to find writers who ‘get it’--who really can hear and write with all the characters’ voices. Mimicry is actually an important talent to look for in our writers. Then the challenge becomes moving the stories along in ways that give the characters some interesting things to do while staying true to who they are.”

Bragin, who joined the show four seasons ago, says the cast members of “Murphy Brown” are the ones who serve as the final arbiters of what’s right for their characters when story possibilities are being considered: “Any time there’s going to be a major change for a character, we run it by the actor. Usually they’re delighted because it means they’re going to get something to really sink their teeth into. They get tired, as do the writers, of doing the same thing over and over again.”

Story lines drive dramatic series like “Chicago Hope” and “NYPD Blue” to a greater extent than on comedies such as “Frasier” or “Murphy Brown,” but the stories still don’t hold viewer interest by themselves--they have to be built around great characters. One of the most enduring dramatic characters of prime time is Lenny Briscoe, the cheerfully hangdog detective of NBC’s “Law & Order.” Actor Jerry Orbach knew from the start that he could be comfortable with Briscoe over a long run.

“I thought I could become Lenny naturally,” Orbach says. “One of the considerations for a character like this is that it’s got to be somebody you can live with for a long time. You tend to mold yourself into the character, so you want a mold you’re comfortable with. And now, I think I know more about Lenny than anybody. I don’t claim to be a writer--but the writers don’t claim to know Lenny any better than I do.”

That closeness to the character has fostered no small degree of affection for Briscoe on Orbach’s part.

“Hey, Lenny is me,” the actor says with a laugh. “He’s tougher than I am, and has a few more problems, but he’s a bunch of facets of me. I don’t live within the character, but he’s inside of me all the time.”

And for “Seinfeld’s” Richards, a multidimensional Kramer remains a foremost concern.

“I’ve tried to make him a full, very human character all along. I didn’t want to play a caricature. I’ve always tried to find a certain truth as the basis of everything Kramer does, which means a lot of asking myself, ‘Could I do that?’ It’s very important to maintain the kind of credibility the show has. I don’t want to play a cartoon or a character out of sketch comedy. My satisfaction comes from playing a real human being who’s right up on the edge of becoming a cartoon.”

Turning a character into a human may bring satisfaction to the actor, but for “Frasier” executive producer Angell, the satisfaction comes in reverse. He knows that his show has succeeded when he sees humans turn into characters.

“I still turn into a fan of ‘Frasier’ when I watch an episode get taped,” he says. “By that point, my job is done and I’m free to laugh. All the hard work behind the scenes disappears, and it just becomes fun. And at that point, I’m not watching Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce--I’m watching the Crane brothers, just like everybody else.”