Because I am a character actor, I thought I would be the fourth or eighth banana on a sitcom, and that would be OK.
I’d like to do a sitcom.
America has gone from the Obama Years to the Trump Years, like going from the ‘West Wing’ to a sitcom where the incidental music involves a tuba.
You simply cannot do a sitcom by committee. It will not work. You’ve got to have one or two clean, creative voices in charge, and there’s got to be some faith by the studio and network in those people to make the right choices.
I like playing characters that are complex, that are intriguing, that come from left field, that do things that are unexpected. I don’t like people who just follow one line and that’s it – that’s why I could never be in a sitcom, I don’t think. They’re not intriguing enough for me.
I always thought, as a kid, if you – and the reason that I sort of stayed away from doing one character on a sitcom is – if you’re doing one thing all the time, the audience is going to come up to you and say the one thing all the time.
It used to be that if you were on a sitcom you couldn’t get work in film because it was so different. Now it’s almost like you have to be on TV to do other film work.
A part of me wants to rely less and less on comedic visuals and make more substantial standalone music. And get a sitcom on TV where I can let my comedy do the talking there.
We look at ‘MyMusic’ as the future of the sitcom.
Now and again I’ll bump into people and say, ‘I’m a big fan of yours. Would you like to be in my sitcom?’ And they say, ‘Oh yes,’ but when it comes to the booking, they don’t want to do it.
I really enjoy doing sitcom television. It allows me to stay in Los Angeles and spend more time with my husband and kids.
Getting to be the ‘weird roommate’ on a sitcom was a dream come true.
You’ll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.
Nothing’s as easy as it is on a sitcom. Issues that we take care of in 20 minutes on the show can stretch out over years in real families.
Every sitcom needs their straight man or straight woman.
I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom – with little success.
Definitely not a sitcom, that’s my first condition. No sitcoms.
The key to any good comic strip or television sitcom is to reset the board at the end of the episode because people like familiarity.
You don’t really see sleepwalking in films that often. It’s weird; I feel like in popular culture we have the perception of sitcom, arms-in-front-of-your-body sleepwalking, and then maybe Olive Oil and Popeye when she sleepwalks through the construction site. But it’s all very cartoonish, in some cases literally.
It’s been an interesting progression, going from soap to a sitcom with ‘How I Met Your Mother’ and now being a series regular on ‘Homeland.’
My experience tells me that any time you hear people laughing on a sitcom, it’s the writers who happen to be closest to the microphones – not the audience.
I try to make a great sitcom that would make my heroes proud of me.
Yeah, the sitcom world is dead. It’s all reality.
I’ve always liked the idea of writing a workplace sitcom that was set somewhere where the stakes were really huge and yet you would still have those normal, everyday office moments that everyone can associate with.
If you look at any sitcom that you watch, if it takes place in, say, a small town in Massachusetts, and it’s about the dynamics of the people in that town, the showrunner probably grew up in a town like that, witnessed things, and created content.
The thing you can’t let go of is gravity. The reality of gravity in writing. If someone says something really mean in a sitcom, and the next wave isn’t a reaction to the reality of that, you start losing relatability. In a lot of romantic comedies, they throw out the rules of life.
Getting under the surface of real-life humans’ poker faces humans is hard in a sitcom, even a drama.
‘I Love Lucy,’ the first classic, really belonged more to the Wacky Woman genre than the domestic sitcom; ‘My Little Margie’ and ‘I Married Joan’ were among the shrill, coarse imitations.
When I first started out, I kinda just wanted to do comedy stuff, and thankfully, I had a fair amount of success. I’ve been able to be on, I think, almost virtually every American sitcom.
Of course ABC and its parent company Disney were right to cancel the sitcom ‘Roseanne’ after its eponymous star, Roseanne Barr, wrote a racist tweet.
I feel like one thing that messed me up was living in a homophobic and transphobic society, and just being the object of mockery and disgust in your average sitcom or movie or person at school.
I loved comedy, but I never saw myself as a sitcom guy. I envisioned myself doing an hour drama or doing movies.
I would really like to do a really cool one-hour show, maybe on, like, HBO or something like that; or something that I’ve spent a couple of years developing so it would be exactly the character and exactly in with a huge push behind it; or I would maybe want to do a sitcom; something light and funny.
When my sitcom ‘Miranda’ first became successful, I was so in the thick of working and I was so stressed that I didn’t really enjoy the moment. You suddenly look back and go, ‘Gosh, you’ve just got to enjoy every day.’ And now I wake up and literally pinch myself every day.
A sitcom. I hate that word.
I can remember when I was a baby and my mother was there watching the show. I went and bought 100 episodes and watched them. I respect it so much that the sitcom itself and Ed Norton; I’m not playing Ed Norton but my version of it, cause I’m a black man.
I always wanted to be on a sitcom.
Looking back at that now I shudder at my naivety: while ‘Men Behaving Badly’ remains a brilliant sitcom, how did I ever aspire to Gary and Tony’s eternal adolescence?
People would say, Can we develop a sitcom around you? and I would say, Not interested. I’m very happy doing standup and writing and taking my kids to school.
Five years is a good run for a sitcom; seven is good, but usually, it’s a couple years of staying past your welcome.
Sitcom storylines are usually incredibly contrived.
I would love to do a sitcom. I see myself as an older woman, getting married, and her stepchildren, who are in their twenties, move back home.
I never wanted to do a regular sitcom, because I’d be incredibly bored doing the same character week in, week out. But the beauty of ‘The Simpsons’ is that it’s 15, 16, 17 characters. It’s the variety that keeps it interesting. And hey, they’re all my children.
Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom – it doesn’t have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations – but that doesn’t explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.
I would like to direct a sitcom like ‘Sumit Sambhal Lega.’ It was interesting. It had a great script also.
When I was younger and studying acting, I never ever saw myself in the sitcom world; it was drama that really turned me on and still does.
Like most comics, I tried to come up with a sitcom idea that was based around my life. And it didn’t work out. But maybe because it didn’t work out, that’s why I ended up on ‘Breaking Bad;’ I don’t know.
The whole experience of doing a sitcom is… Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it’s also terrifying.
Every comic is taught that you’re supposed to have a great seven-minute set and then get a sitcom. And I don’t want to get the sitcom.
When I was growing up, I watched every sitcom imaginable.
Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners alike sharing the same ‘Love Boat’ voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana.
I’m not a movie guy, I’m not a TV sitcom guy, but whatever seems to fit and is funny is good for me.
Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted.
My desire for my own sitcom began as a little girl – I spent hours lying on my belly on the shag carpeting getting lost in the world of the ’70s sitcom. All I wanted to do was run away to the Brady house, The Partridge Family bus; even the project on ‘Good Times’ seemed better than Clark, NJ.
Even before I got on ‘SNL’ I assumed I would do some type of sitcom; I kind of thought that was how I would start. I don’t mean to sound arrogant – I just thought I would be best suited to the form.
I’m not sure sometimes if it was because Will was gay or it was a sitcom. But that combination does make it hard to become the new lead on the ‘Sopranos.’
I had kind of an attitude, which was not uncommon in New York. Theater people who went to Hollywood to do sitcoms were selling out. That was the attitude. And I didn’t really relish the idea of being cast in a sitcom, because I shared that attitude.
I don’t like the idea of being a human being, existing, talking to my friends, and having these real human conversations, and then getting to work on a sitcom and turning that part of my brain off.
