Word: lear
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Each of their shows run before a live audience. Yorkin and Lear then leads the cast through a ruthless rehash session, and another performance is taped before a second audience. The show that eventually goes on the air combines the best of the two performances. This system provides a TV equivalent of the Broadway theater's "tryout experience," says "Family" Producer John Rich "We're doing a play a week and we're trying to be entertaining every minute. We don't have a Hartford or a Boston for tryouts...
...shows on TV are more heavily rewritten than Yorkin and Lear's. Whether a script originates with their staff or is one of the 60 percent that come from freelancers, Yorkin and Lear usually see that it gets torn to pieces. The story line acquires new twists, the dialogue is recast, sometimes new characters are added...
...When a writer says, 'I'd like to see Edith Bunker in menopause,' I know we can peel back layers of Edith and Archie," says Lear. "When I hear an idea like that, I'm like a dog hanging on to a bone. I'll hang on forever until the show is right." One of this season's early "Family" episodes, about Archie's infatuation with the brassy wife of an old Air Force buddy, was conceived in June1971. After eight major rewrites, it was scheduled for taping last February. Lear withdrew it at the last minute for more work...
...This is where Yorkin and Lear's flair for casting shows up ? in picking seemingly unlikely performers who will grow their roles and shape them with their own temperaments. Veteran Comic Foxx won his "Sanford" role partly on the strength of his only other dramatic appearance ? as a junkman in the 1970 "Cotton Comes to Harlem." He and Co-Star Demond Wilson now work with "Sanford's" Producer and Chief Writer Aaron Ruben, who is white, to "translate the scripts into spook," as Foxx puts it. "The writers are beginning to learn black is another language." (Meantime, Ruben is training...
...Lear thought of Carroll O'Connor or Archie because he recalled O'Connor's "outrageous but likable" general in the 1966 movie "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" O'Connor's participation in the development of Archie's character has become so passionate that it frequently causes tension on the "Family" staff. At times he flatly refuses to perform a script that does not conform to his conception of the role. An example was last season's episode about Archie's being trapped in a stalled elevator with a middle-class black and a Puerto Rican girl about...