Word: dreyfuses
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...There aren't many times when network execs are so open to out-of-the-box ideas, and so Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has spent the past four years raising her kids and living on fat Seinfeld royalties, is jumping in with hers. "It's not like I was dying to leap back into this," she says. "I was just excited by this idea." Her new sitcom, Watching Ellie, which debuts on NBC at the end of next month, is innovation packed. In addition to nixing the laugh track, using a single camera that follows the characters around, inserting songs...
...watch it and we go, 'God, it feels like a cable show,'" says Louis-Dreyfus' husband and Ellie creator Brad Hall. He means that in a good way. Not, as he says, like "God, it feels like a local public-access show." Says Louis-Dreyfus: "It's a reinvention of storytelling, which a lot of the HBO shows are. [NBC entertainment president] Jeff Zucker realizes that he needs to do something different or else he's out of a job." Zucker was so enthusiastic about breaking the rules that he originally suggested not having commercials interrupt the show. Then...
...other words, is 21st century TV. Therein lie its pleasures and its risks. The real-time concept is a dramatic answer to reality TV's aesthetic of immediacy and edge. (Next year NBC will air a real-time Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitcom, tentatively titled 23:12 for the average length of a sitcom minus ads.) But the format is a pain to pull off. The tight time frame means the first few episodes cement choices that will be hard to reverse if the creators have second thoughts. "We had to lay out a map, literally, of where people were...
...consultant Don Staley--caught the eye of comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, who owned some Peterman clothes. "We used to laugh about it all the time," David says of the prose. "When I knew we had to get Elaine [the character played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus] a new job, I thought the guy who wrote this kooky stuff would be great for her to work...
Benjamin W. Dreyfus...