I would consider a half hour sitcom if the script was good.
One thing I won’t do in television is a sitcom. I find that world to be so neurotic and bizarre.
The fact that ‘Mom’ is not joke, joke, joke – and is investing in these characters and their lives, things that really happen to people – I think it’s resonating, and that’s why people are tuning into it and not just dismissing it as a multi-cam sitcom.
I love working in television and in comedy, so whenever there’s an opportunity to work on a TV sitcom, I’m like, ‘Yes please!’
There are quite detailed rules with sitcom. When people can leave scenes, act structure, joke rhythm. You can’t not have a straight man.
The hope is that you’re never pigeonholed, but at the same time I would have been content being a guy in the sitcom who walks in and has crumbs on his chest and goes, ‘Where’s the doughnuts?’ I would have been fine with that. It’s an honor to get paid to make people laugh on a sitcom.
I hope we can see African American characters as the diva, as the villain, and also as the praying mother. We are all of those things. We tended to only be the best friend or the neighbor in everybody’s sitcom.
One line on a Tom Selleck sitcom does not a career make.
I wanted to do a comedy. I’d been actively looking for a comedy. I wanted to do one that was different. Nothing against them, but I wasn’t interested in just your normal sitcom, boy meets girl.
Instead of improvisers who want to be funny by themselves, we aim to try and make the scene itself as funny as possible. As a creator, I think that’s someone you’d rather work with, whether it’s a movie or a sitcom; that kind of methodology is good for collaboration. People want to be with those kinds of performers.
I’m enjoying Channel Four’s ’10 O’Clock Live.’ I like the idea of putting together a dream team and seeing what happens. I also like ‘Not Going Out,’ the sitcom starring Lee Mack. It’s a sitcom packed with jokes. Not many of them as frowned upon as lacking kudos.
I’d like to explore the more abstract side of people’s minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don’t want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I’d want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.
When you’re doing a single-camera show, it’s more buying into a level of reality. I think a sitcom, a four-camera show, doesn’t require that so much. I think with a film show, you just need the characters to grow.
How long can you gloss everything over and give people the idea that life is a sitcom?
I wouldn’t consider myself a traditional sitcom actor or someone you’d even think would be in a sitcom.
When I first started I was always known as The Girl on the Sitcom with the Funny Voice.
In 1977, at age ten, I was cast on the TV sitcom ‘Good Times.’ My character was Penny, an abused child in desperate need of love. I really didn’t want to do the show. I didn’t want to be away from my family.
I’m very lucky to be on ‘Melissa and Joey’ because it’s a multi-cam sitcom, and it was a nice transition from theatre because it’s taped in front of a live audience.
But I was ready for it and I knew I could do it. I’ve just turned 40, I have a son and I feel more settled and driven than ever. I think my 40s will be my most prolific time. It’s a very rare life you get to lead as a sitcom guy.
I think a challenge with every sitcom is, how do you maintain things that people are attached to without becoming so reiterative that it just feels like you’re sort of watching a reenactment of previous episodes?
The general image of a man in an American sitcom is like a complete moron. You’d think the industry was run by a feminist cabal.
‘Caroline In The City’ was such an interesting thing, because I’d never been on the set of a sitcom or even auditioned for a sitcom when they gave me that part.
I taught myself English. My English teacher was the sitcom ‘Friends.’ Back in the days when I was, like, 15, 14, it was like a syndrome for Korean parents to make their kids watch ‘Friends.’ I thought I was a victim at that time, but now I’m the lucky one.
The key to sitcom success is miserable people. If you see a happy couple, it’s just gone, like when Sam and Diane got together on Cheers.
I’ve always tended to write comedy, but I’d hate to just write some kind of sitcom or a lighthearted series of jokes and slapstick. I wanted to talk about some deeper things within the comedy.
In Mexic,o the concept of a sitcom doesn’t actually exist – even if you do a sitcom, technically speaking, because it airs from Monday to Friday, they put it in the telenovela category. But, of course, I am from Mexico and grew up with the telenovela culture.
I use a method approach to all my sitcom work.
There is absolutely no way for a sitcom to be a challenge to me.
My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I’d look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.
I’d like to do a comedy, actually. I think it would be great to do a sitcom or something like that. I’m pretty much open to anything.
The family sitcom has been around forever, since the advent of television. I don’t need to reinvent it. But if you take something and you do it in a way that you haven’t necessarily seen before, that’s right where I live.
I need to write a sitcom, but something with warmth, not one where the dad comes home and he’s treated like an idiot.
I feel like I don’t mind acting in a sitcom because it pays well and is good exposure, but I don’t feel like, comedically, what I have to say I can say on a show that needs to draw 14 million each week.
I’ve been very busy working on the ABC Family sitcom, ‘Baby Daddy.’
I was on a sitcom called ‘Gary Unmarried’ for 37 episodes, and then I was in ‘Bad Teacher’ with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake.
I have to warn you, I’m not just some sitcom guy. I’m now an author.
Sitcom is the best gig in show business because it’s easy hours, nine to five.
I ventured into a world of sitcom, and I have no regrets. I loved it.
Flashback episodes are a tried-and-true sitcom device, but they always work!
Your average sitcom writer is a very intellectual person.
When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.
Sitcom writing is difficult because it’s not just about writing jokes – there’s a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.
My first venture into TV was a half-hour sitcom on Fox called ‘Roc.’
I thought The Office was good, though I didn’t think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.
The difference between doing a live show and a sitcom is that a sitcom can live on. If you do it well, it can leave a legacy, whereas most of our live work never gets repeated because it’s final, it’s done, you start again.
What sitcom’s brilliant at is identifying a social movement or type and skewering it.
Good actresses can often accomplish miracles, and it is possible to be someone you’ve never been or will be. But in a sitcom, there’s no time.
The hardest thing to write is sitcom.
It takes a week to do a sitcom in Hollywood. I do a show a day in my studio, three or four shows a week.
If I was married to a man, and I had the same life situation that I have, it’s the perfect recipe for a sitcom.
It was Christopher’s brilliant concept that he did not want this to become like every other sitcom where you do one take, and the audience gets bored with seeing it ten times, you know, over and over again.
I love the breadth and space you get to explore character in so-called serialized TV, the novelistic element of maybe being able to find out who people are. But I also very much like the sitcom discipline of having a self-contained episode that you could conceivably, I hope, be able to enjoy in and of itself.
Sitcom characters, my writing partner Sam Bain and I sometimes tell each other, are not normally self-conscious. Or not quite. The best sitcom characters are probably just a little self-conscious. Deep enough to feel pain and humiliation, but shallow enough that there are no hidden depths.
I started in theater. I would liken sitcom work more to theater work than I would, perhaps, to dramatic television. It’s so quick. It kind of feels like the pace of a play.
I’d like to do a show that’s not a sitcom.
What I love most is television, and I would love to work on a sitcom.
I like the variety of characters that you can play in films, rather than playing the same role for 10 years as you might on a sitcom.
When ‘Family Guy’ started, we wanted to make it more like a sitcom. And there was very little music.
Well, usually, when you’re doing a sitcom, you get a script and every word or for the most part, is written. So, you know, if it’s a 30-minute sitcom, then it’s a 35-page script or something like that.
I got into stand-up to get on a sitcom.
I probably would be continuing to do voice-overs, continuing to do cartoon shows, and at the same time I’d probably be on a sitcom or a dramatic television show.
Truly, with a sitcom and the rhythms of comedy… music is so helpful in that area of life.
On network TV, I’m still Phoebe to people, and it would be hard to convince them otherwise in the bright lights of a sitcom.
