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03/29/2006: I Heart TV


Hi, everyone! I'm back from my trip to New York City. Wow, that's a fun town! I saw three Broadway plays, how cool is that? If you want to see how to create lovable, strange and sympathetic characters with great economy, check out The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Funny and sad and funny again. So many characters drawn so precisely, wonderful little oddballs and overacheivers. You get who they are instantly... and then you learn more. And it has audience participation that doesn't make you cringe. I loved it.

Something else I did in New York: I took the NBC Studio tour. I wonder if I'm the only working writer/producer out there who still loves to do this kind of thing. I took the Burbank NBC tour again a few years ago, too. It's the strangest thing; I still love to peek backstage. If I'm early for a meeting on a studio lot, I'm not above wandering past the soundstages for shows I admire, angling for a glimpse of the set. When I took the Burbank tour as a kid, I got to see the original Hollywood Squares grid and the set of CPO Sharkey-- that kind of thing sticks with you. Years later, I was kicked off the Frasier set on the Paramount lot by a security guard who didn't understand that I was writing a Frasier spec and needed to check out how the living room felt. (I can't recommend this procedure. If you tried this today, you'd be arrested and raise the national security alert level. Back then, I was politely asked to leave the set.)

Anyway, the New York NBC tour is short but rewarding -- the SNL stage, the Conan O'Brien stage, the Dateline sets and thank you very much. But what you do see is pretty darn neat. The Conan stage is laughably small. I work in TV and I was shocked. Really, I had high school classrooms that were bigger. Even studio 8H, where SNL lives, is smaller than you expect. The audience sits in a sort of gallery for this one, like spectators in congress. I looked down on the stage, thinking: "Gilda was here, Gilda was here..."

It was great. The tiny little studios were built for radio shows! Studio 8H was built for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC symphony orchestra. Milton Berle! Bob Hope!

Love television!

Lunch: the $4 "snack box" on the airplane home. Surprisingly good. Cookies and cheese and crackers and raisins. It was like a tiny gift basket!