Shoot first, ‘write’ later

There were no table reads, no laugh tracks, no rehearsals, no live audience, minimal blocking and no scripts as Bravo’s new comedy series “Significant Others” made its way to the small screen.

Instead, the show’s creator, Rob Roy Thomas, relied on one-page episode outlines and eight quick-thinking actors who improvised their own dialogue for this series about four married couples in and out of therapy.

Then came the hard part: condensing 70 hours of videotaped performances into six half-hour episodes.

Thomas, an intense Missouri native who directed TV commercials and reality TV segments for eight years before making his series debut with “Significant Others,” says, “A big part of our process is what we call the particle accelerator -- we throw an idea out there, it hits the wall and goes to a million pieces and the scene sucks, but you go: ‘That one part, that’s at the heart of it.’ So you throw everything else away and focus on that one idea.”

There’s nothing new about spitballing ideas for sitcoms, but the brainstorming process that separates the wheat from the clunkers traditionally takes place in writing rooms. There, plotlines are hashed out and eventually hammered by wordsmiths into fully scripted teleplays complete with dialogue and act breaks.

In the “Significant Others” alternative sitcom universe, punch lines are incidental to a more spontaneous brand of character-based humor sparked by the friction between performer/characters. And here, the auteur-as-editor rules the roost. Thomas says, “For us, postproduction is like a jigsaw puzzle where you can take things that weren’t meant to go together and make them go together. You say, ‘Well, this story wasn’t meant to be like this, but if she said that, then boom! the story can turn this way.’ We always end up painting ourselves into a corner when we shoot, and in here, it’s a matter of painting our way out of it. That happens all the time.”

The ascent of storytellers who shape their programs after the cameras have stopped rolling isn’t unique to Bravo’s series. HBO’s award-winning “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is another comedy that eschews script writing in favor of improvisation. More significantly, it’s an idea borrowed from the so-called reality shows that are dominating network prime time. “The Apprentice,” “Survivor,” “American Idol” (particularly the early rounds, before viewers vote) and “The Simple Life” all succeed because of efforts made in the cutting room, where hours of footage are carefully formed into comedies or dramas that match what the high-priced writers provide.

So a recent afternoon found Thomas ensconced in a Burbank editing bay with his partners Peter Tortorici and writer-producer Jordana Arkin, reviewing 50 minutes’ worth of improv that needed to be whittled to a 1-minute, 45-second segment.

The scene involves actor Brian Palermo as the controlling businessman James, with Andrea Savage playing his ever-provocative wife, Chelsea. She confronts him in their kitchen after discovering photographs in which he’s cut off the heads of his old girlfriends. Palermo and Savage, both graduates of the Groundlings improvisational troupe, invent their characters’ response to the predicament, which had been summarized on index cards and handed to them just moments before cameras started rolling.

In take after take, they perform variations on the scene’s theme, guided and goaded by Thomas, who’s shouting suggestions off-screen in his dual role as director-”therapist.” To Palermo, he shouts: “Now you’re embarrassed.” New take, completely different dialogue. To Savage: “OK, let’s try it where you think what he did is cute, it shows he has feelings.” This prompts another new performance about the same subject but with revised dialogue and a completely different emotional subtext.

In another scene, the recently married Ethan (Herschel Bleefeld) insists to his wife, Eleanor (Faith Salie), that his brother is not gay. “When we shot it,” Thomas explains, “we went in with one idea and then it got real heavy, and we thought, ‘What if we don’t want it to be that heavy?’ So then we flipped it over and shot it the other way where it got ridiculous. And then in post, I cut the two together so the scene starts off being ridiculous and turns into being heavy.”

“We always have to write something to hang the improv on,” says Arkin, who’s written for “South Park” and a number of other cable comedies. “Otherwise you’d just have people standing in the street talking.”

Adds Thomas, “We write it to a point, but where most people would keep polishing and refining and table reading and rehearsing, we break and go shoot the beginning of a story. Then we take a hiatus period and go ‘What was that about?’ ”

The show’s shoot-first, ask-questions-later creative process required a nonlinear mind-set in the editing suite. Before hiring Jon Bachmann, who’d previously worked on the reality series “Meet My Folks,” “Who Wants to Marry My Dad” and “For Love or Money,” Thomas tried cutting the show with an editor who had a traditional sitcom background.

“We had to part ways because he was always going ‘Where’s the circle take?’ And we’re like, ‘Dude, there are no circle takes.’ This show is not something where you shoot five takes and circle the best one, and then the editor cuts that circle take with this circle take, and there’s your episode. We shoot like a reality show, but then we use that format for a theatrical endeavor. For us it’s less about writing than it is discovering what we’ve created. My main thing is that the doodling and crafting happens in here.”

Saving the “doodling” for the editing suite translates into an extraordinarily labor-intensive postproduction phase for “Significant Others,” compared with the roughly one-week turnaround for regular sitcoms.

In the process of condensing all that footage into six “Significant Others” episodes totaling 2 1/2hours, Thomas once went on a sleepless 43-hour editing binge as he spliced and diced various slivers of character development into interconnected story lines and subplots.

Real not written

The fractal narrative stitched together in editing seems at times to have more in common with chaos theory than show business, but for industry veteran Tortorici this was a chance for him to scratch his itch for a fresh approach to TV comedy. Though he served as president of CBS Entertainment in the mid-’90s and later oversaw “Cosby” and “Grace Under Fire” as an executive at Carsey-Werner Productions, Tortorici says he’d grown weary of the sitcom artifice when he came across Thomas’ short film about a couple in marriage counseling. “I was sick of the same applications over and over again,” Tortorici says. “As a producer, I was looking for another way to tell a story and to be funny that felt more real than what we’re used to. That’s why Rob’s material sparked something in me.”

“Significant Others” is just one of several comedies seeking to revitalize the half-hour format by borrowing a few moves from reality-based programs.

Scripted series like Fox’s “Arrested Development” and BBC America’s “The Office” deploy hand-held cameras to evoke a “real” visual texture that encourages audiences to see the characters as real people rather than actors.

“Reno 911!,” which has no “written by” credits, started as a parody of “Cops,” complete with that show’s trademark shaky cinematography. The Comedy Central series, which begins its second season in June, features hapless law enforcement officers portrayed by cast members who improvise their dialogue based on story points jotted on index cards by the show’s creator-actors Kerri Kenney, Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. And Larry David’s red-hot “Curb Your Enthusiasm” series on HBO has earned two consecutive outstanding comedy Emmy nominations by encouraging innately funny actors like Wanda Sykes and Cheryl Hines to improvise within scene structures outlined by the star-creator.

If semiscripted TV comedies catch on, the very definition of “comedy writer” may morph into something broader, and that could be a good thing for Writers Guild of America membership. WGA West Assistant Executive Director Grace Reiner points out that Thomas, Arkin and Tortorici are signed as guild-registered writers for their work on “Significant Others” and says she welcomes the prospect of a more comprehensive role for the writer. “Maybe we have to define writing a little more loosely, meaning it’s something that can be done in an editing room, it can be done on index cards. We try to define it clearly enough to be the person whose job it is to come up with the ideas, put them on paper, and then sit in the editing room and structure it into an actual sitcom episode. All of that together would be (what it means to be) writing an episode.”

On the downside, fewer writers might be needed on shows that depend on performers to come up with their own dialogue and character traits.

The sole writing credit for “Curb Your Enthusiasm” belongs to Larry David. “Seinfeld,” which David co-created with Jerry Seinfeld, employed 41 writers over the course of the show’s eight-year run.

“I’m not particularly perturbed if people find a different way (of creating a TV comedy) that changes the requirements of the number of people you need,” Reiner says. “The point, more importantly, is that on all of these shows, whether it’s one or five or 10, you need at least one writer who sees how to shape a story.”

Experiment’s fate uncertain

It remains to be seen if the quirky cable comedies strike a broad enough chord to overtake conventionally created mainstream sitcoms.

But there’s at least one Hollywood power player who thinks sitcoms are anything but old hat: “Survivor” producer Mark Burnett. “As far as I’m concerned, anybody who thinks differently is crazy. It’s stupid, because all that will happen is that unscripted drama will coexist alongside great drama and comedies. Unscripted won’t replace anything.”

Burnett’s current hit, “The Apprentice,” requires 300 hours of footage to create a one-hour episode. Steered by outlines written by a story editor, “The Apprentice’s” production team spends an average of 12 weeks in the editing suite, making about 3,000 cuts for each show, about double that of the normal hourlong drama.

But for Burnett, how and when a story is put together are moot points as long as he can come up with “gold dust moments” and put them on screen. Says Burnett: “The only difference in what we do is in getting the subject matter to deliver their lines, unscripted. There’s no difference whatsoever apart from the fact that our writers are writing the story after the action happens.”

Anyone who doubts his sincerity should consider that Burnett, the man who invented the network reality genre five years ago, will be producing a traditional sitcom for the WB. His production company is also developing two scripted dramas, one for the WB, the other for NBC.

“I am leading the way in unscripted drama, yet I am also actively involved now in scripted products,” Burnett says. “I just love storytelling. I don’t care if it’s written or it’s not written.”