Mass Hysterics

The holiday episode of NBC’s sitcom “Just Shoot Me” is titled “How the Finch Stole Christmas,” and it was written by Stephen Engel--sort of. In the world of situation comedies, where writers are variously called co-executive producers, story editors and consulting producers, “written by” is a malleable term.

Indeed, on a sitcom, writing isn’t even always writing, at least not the kind that involves a person, a blank page and the limits of the imagination. Instead, it often entails this: 12 people in a room, alternately eating, chatting and trying out jokes--what one veteran wearily calls “hanging out till 5 in the morning to figure out whether the sight gag should involve a pickle or a doughnut.”

In the case of “How the Finch Stole Christmas,” Engel wrote the outline and first two drafts. But even that has to be qualified, because the idea for the episode wasn’t his--it was hatched by some of the dozen members of the “Just Shoot Me” writing staff (i.e., “the room”), who worked out what writers call the A story and the B story (the episode’s major and minor plots), at which point Engel went away and did an outline, came back to the room and got more notes, went away and wrote the first draft, got more notes from the writers, went away again and wrote a second draft, which he then brought back to the room for page-by-page punch-up and revision.

The next draft went to the show’s cast for a Monday morning “table read.” After that, executive producer Steven Levitan got brief notes on the script from a network executive and a studio executive (NBC’s Flody Suarez and Brillstein-Grey’s Becky Jackson), at which point the writers retreated to the room to do revisions.

As the week progressed toward taping day on Friday, there would be more run-throughs, more note-giving, more punch-up, until “How the Finch Stole Christmas” was shot before a studio audience--still carrying “written by Stephen Engel” in the credits, but not without the input, both major and minor, of some two dozen people.

A veteran sitcom writer whose credits include HBO’s “Dream On” and NBC’s “Mad About You,” Engel, 37, is a believer in the process.

“By plotting it out in advance, you prevent the wholesale destruction of the script,” he says. A good sitcom script, he adds, is like a house: Start building without a blueprint and you end up having to tear everything down and start over.

Of the nearly 50 sitcoms airing on the six major commercial broadcast networks, most are run in this writing-by-committee manner. Depending on whom you talk to, this is either a time-honored way to survive a grueling 22-episode season or a ponderous, too-many-cooks approach that is antithetical to the creative process--and the reason so many shows have the same formulaic, watered-down feel.

“When shows are written by committee, they sacrifice a percentage of their originality,” says Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, creator and executive producer of the sitcom “Designing Women” (1986-93).

Unable to find writers who could give voice to what she calls “a female, estrogen-riddled show set in the New South,” Bloodworth-Thomason wrote more than 100 episodes of the CBS show herself. That left her exhausted and sputtering creatively. Still, she maintains, “all the really great series have been the vision of one or two people working together creating the show.”

But that argument fails to account for any number of highly regarded sitcoms that were written by committee--from “The Odd Couple” to “Cheers” to “Frasier.” The 1995 Emmy-winning “Moondance” episode of “Frasier,” in fact, was a script whose individual scenes were farmed out over one weekend to different members of the writing staff, the finished product then cobbled together when everyone reconvened on Monday.

“One of the things about group writing is, you become an audience,” says David Lloyd, a longtime sitcom writer (“Mary Tyler Moore,” “Cheers”) who consults on “Frasier.” “You can gauge pretty well if something is working or not.”

Networks and studios seem to agree with that premise, filling up writers rooms on the theory that 12 or 15 funny heads are better than one.

Meanwhile, veterans of the business can’t help but notice how, with the proliferation of sitcoms, present-day rooms have gotten larger and less focused, run by young writers who bring nothing to the table but their knowledge of other television shows.

Peter Mehlman wrote for several seasons on “Seinfeld” and watched as executive producer Larry David and star Jerry Seinfeld wrote or rewrote every script during the show’s formative years. The Seinfeld-David model now serves as the centerpiece of everyone’s argument against doing a sitcom by consensus.

“To me, your show is not going to be good unless it has a singular voice,” says Mehlman, who is eschewing the room and doing much of the writing himself on “It’s Like, You Know. . . ,” a show he created that’s tentatively slated to debut on ABC in March. “Ultimately, I feel everything has to come through me, just as everything went through Larry David at ‘Seinfeld.’ . . . I just can’t imagine people sitting around a table shouting out jokes like some massive overpaid Willy Lomans. It sanitizes the show.”

“That’s not a bad hypothesis,” says Tim O’Donnell, executive producer of UPN’s “Clueless.” But then O’Donnell presents what he says is a much better hypothesis for the dearth of good comedies on TV, in which he singles out a particular layer of the creative bureaucracy--people at networks. People at networks, he says, “who insist we all develop the same shows.” People at networks, he goes on, who give the same three sets of notes no matter what: Can you start the story earlier? Is there enough at stake at the act break? Could the resolution be heightened?

The ironic thing, says Boyd Hale, whose credits include ABC’s “Full House” and “The Jeff Foxworthy Show,” is that “whether [the script] has been rewritten by 20 people or one person, it’s basically the same because of the formula. The crowd [at the taping] is still laughing. The only person not laughing that night is the guy who spent two months writing the draft.”

The writing by committee, or “gang writing,” that goes on can quickly render authorship a murky issue at best. Sometimes episodes are written, line by line, scene by scene, by everyone in the writers room; sorting out credit is then up to the whim of the executive producer.

Cautionary tales of the sitcom writing life come in various forms (“We spent two hours arguing about which was a funnier number, eight or six”), but they’re all variations on the same theme: If you want to have pride of authorship, go write a novel. (Although there are fewer writers in the mix on TV dramas, writing in that genre has its ownership pratfalls too, less to do with dialogue than story.)

The Writers Guild of America nevertheless attempts to impose meaning on the crediting process. Guild rules stipulate that, gang-written or not, no more than two writers (or two writing teams) can receive the written-by credit. Any more than two and the script goes to an automatic credit arbitration. This is more than a matter of pride, since the credited writer of a sitcom episode gets a minimum of $17,000, and additional checks every time the episode airs in reruns or syndication (this comes in addition to the weekly salaries that staff writers draw).

Among writers, too, there’s an etiquette--albeit sometimes violated--that the writer of the first draft should get the credit, no matter how much has changed by the time the episode airs.

“Garry [Marshall] was very strong about the staff and head writers not taking credit away from the first writer,” says Lowell Ganz, who worked under Marshall on “The Odd Couple” and “Happy Days.” “It was just part of the process that by the time the script got on the air, it was unrecognizable from the first draft.”

“The way we view it,” says “Just Shoot Me’s” Levitan, “is that the writer gets several opportunities to write the script they want to write, and hopefully the room is a useful tool to making that script better.”

It’s Monday, heading toward noon, and the twenty- and thirtysomething “Just Shoot Me” writers have returned from the table read to their bungalow on the CBS Studio Center lot, settling in for a day of rewrites on “How the Finch Stole Christmas.”

An ensemble comedy set at a fashion magazine called Blush, “Just Shoot Me” stars David Spade, George Segal and Laura San Giacomo; now in its third season, the show has enjoyed success both critically and in the ratings, though this year it’s been trailing time-slot rival “Spin City” on ABC.

On a bad week, Levitan says, the table read will reveal that a story line isn’t working, sending the writers back to the drawing board, hunkered down for a long day’s journey into the night. But this is a good week--the stories are making sense, and Levitan’s copy of the script is full of check marks next to jokes that got big laughs at the table read.

Still, the script is four minutes over, and some jokes need beefing up. And so, for the next seven hours, the writers sit in the room, staring at twin TVs on which Engel’s script is projected, puzzling for 10 minutes or an hour over problematic scenes and lines that need punching up.

As executive producer, Levitan runs the room, keeping things relatively convivial and relaxed. (When a writer pitches an especially vulgar joke, he’s sent off the lot to DuPar’s to buy pie for everyone. This is called a “pie run.”)

At 36, Levitan has a resume that includes seasons spent on acclaimed sitcoms like “Frasier” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” but there’s another, equally important quality that recommends him as a show runner: He has a family, and he wants to go home at the end of the day. The laborious, 16-hour workdays that sitcom writers often endure can have as much to do with the vagaries of a show runner’s personal life as anything--what former “Cheers” executive producer Phoef Sutton calls being “trapped in someone else’s bad work habits.”

One of the places where Engel’s script isn’t working is on Page 11, an exchange between Maya (San Giacomo) and her father, Jack (Segal). In the draft, Maya goes to FAO Schwarz to buy a fictitious doll called Sneezing Charlie for the kids she tutors, only to discover that her greedy father has bought out the store’s supply.

Jack’s explanation: “I persuaded some nice fellow to let me clean out the entire inventory.”

“That’s halfway to somethin’,” Levitan announces to his writers.

In other words, it’s time for the dozen people in the room to start pitching jokes, with Levitan the ultimate arbiter of the winning line. You expect a cacophony, something out of Neil Simon’s play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but what happens is far less dramatic: Three or four people pitch ideas while everyone else sits mute. Scanning the faces in the room, you realize how writing on a sitcom requires something else entirely--the willingness to humiliate yourself in a roomful of peers.

“You have to be willing to be a performer of some kind, which isn’t necessarily why people get into writing,” says Jay Kogen, supervising producer on “Frasier.” “In that sense, it’s a different skill.”

It’s a skill that Danny Zuker has at “Just Shoot Me.” There’s at least one Zuker in every room--the joke machine, a line at the ready no matter the circumstance. Zuker, a former stand-up comic and gag writer on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” suggests a joke that has Jack telling Maya, “I greased some palms at FAO Schwarz.”

Not a great line, but it gets the ball rolling. Soon, the writers have Jack talking about VIP hours at FAO Schwarz.

“Mia Farrow was there with her kids. The place was packed,” says a writer.

“It looked like the cast of ‘Miss Saigon,’ ” says another.

Levitan listens for a while, not satisfied; some lines, he says, are “wait-until-tomorrow jokes.” It’s part of the function of a show runner to move things along when 12 people think they have the very joke a scene needs.

Agree on a joke? “We can’t even agree on a restaurant,” says Judy Toll of the dynamic in the room at NBC’s “Conrad Bloom.”

Toll, who is also a stand-up comedian, has been writing on sitcoms for years and has worked in her share of dysfunctional environments. Her goal as a sitcom writer? To care less.

“If it’s not a show that you created, and you can keep that in mind, you can detach from it and not care as much. It’s almost like the less you care, the happier you’re going to be when they rewrite your script.”

The community writing, it should be noted, is hardly a new phenomenon. Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” was an ode to his years as a writer in such an environment on “Your Show of Shows,” which aired from 1950 to 1954.

Conversely, Nat Hiken was a Larry David-like virtuoso during the first two seasons of “The Phil Silvers Show” in 1955 and 1956 (the show’s title was changed to “Sgt. Bilko” when it ran in syndication).

Back in the days of “Mary Tyler Moore,” remembers writer Bob Ellison, the room was never bigger than six, and that was on major rewrite nights. These days, Ellison works as a creative consultant on as many as five sitcoms at a time, often finding himself in rooms where you need to bring your own chair.

“Sometimes you just get people yelling [jokes] out because they want to be heard,” he says. “By the time it goes around the room, you’ve lost the joke and the urge to write the next one.”

Ellison also comes from an era in sitcoms when writers were more likely to stick with a particular show; he spent years at MTM working alongside a core group that included David Lloyd, Stan Daniels, Ed. Weinberger, Allan Burns and James L. Brooks during “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Rhoda” and “Phyllis.”

Now, Ellison says, with so many sitcoms moving through the pipeline, staff defections are a seasonal reality.

“As soon as you do a year as a story editor, you get a [development] deal,” he says.

And the scripts that get writers those deals can carry dubious authorship. For it stands to reason: If drafts are routinely rewritten wholesale in rooms, how much can a writer honestly say a finished script reflects his best work?

“It’s talent by association. I don’t even think DreamWorks did a good job researching me,” observes Mehlman of the development deal he landed at that studio after his tenure on “Seinfeld.” “They didn’t even know how much of the scripts I had written.”

Aaron Sorkin has been making sure there’s little room to mistake who’s been writing “Sports Night,” his freshman ABC comedy that takes place behind the scenes at a sports show much like ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”

New to television after spending his writing life in theater and film (he adapted his play “A Few Good Men” to the screen and wrote the script for “The American President”), Sorkin has been a much-discussed figure among sitcom writers this year. Where executive producers normally toil behind the cheery buzz commanded by their show’s star, Sorkin has been the featured attraction of “Sports Night’s” publicity machine--pitched as a “fresh voice” from the movie world, a kind of writer-in-residence gracing the sitcom game.

Sorkin, meanwhile, has found that authorship in TV comedy has its limitations. Early on he lost two battles--one to do “Sports Night” without a laugh track and another, less-publicized one over the size of his writing staff. Forced by his network and studio, Disney, to take on a gang-sized staff of 12, Sorkin says at first he “denied the problem by closing my door and writing the scripts and letting the 12 [writers] eat potato chips and drink soda.”

Since then, Sorkin has cut the number of writers on the show in half and is learning how breathless it can be to crank out a full season of shows without the benefit of a writers room. Of the season’s first 12 episodes, Sorkin has solo credit on half and has taken shared credit on half.

“If you do television in England, it’s like a six-episode season,” he notes. “When there’s another idea, you do another show, and that would be great. But as my friend Tommy Schlamme [“Sports Night” executive producer] says, we’d all be living in smaller houses.”

Interviewed on a Wednesday, Sorkin had a new script due in five days and admitted he wasn’t even sure what it would be about. He planned to roam the halls and “compose the episode in my head,” at which point he could get down to writing the script, which typically takes him anywhere from 48 to 72 hours, he says.

“But right now,” he joked, “you’re as qualified to write the script as I am.”

So why not have a writers room, if for no other reason than to lessen his workload? “I wouldn’t know how to run a [writers] room or participate in it. For me, writing is something you do by yourself in a little room.”

Sorkin may have a room of his own, say observers, but his show--which combines comedic and dramatic elements much the way David Kelley does on Fox’s “Ally McBeal”--hasn’t exactly been tearing it up in the ratings. And besides, they say, “Sports Night” is a different animal from most sitcoms.

On most sitcoms, the mandate is to make people laugh, not to be an auteur.

To be sure, creativity is a lot more communal at “Just Shoot Me.”

By Friday, when the cameras roll on “How the Finch Stole Christmas,” Jack and Maya are still talking about those Sneezing Charlie dolls, which Jack bought during VIP hours at Toy Town (research has suggested it wouldn’t be legally prudent to say that FAO Schwarz takes bribes).

“Oh my God, that was you?!” Maya says.

“Well,” Jack says, “me, Michael Jackson and that cute little fella on the WB.”

“I feel like it’s representative of my [first] draft,” Stephen Engel says later of a script in which many of his lines didn’t survive. “The house is still the same house that I built. It’s just been renovated.”

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“Just Shoot Me” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC. The “How the Finch Stole Christmas” episode is scheduled to air Dec. 15.