Magic Hours (29 page)

Lorre's first prime-time break came with
Roseanne,
on which he worked from 1990 to 1992. The first time Lorre set foot on the
Roseanne
set, he experienced a sudden, confidence-building epiphany. “Roseanne was doing a scene with Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman,” he told me, “and I turned to one of the writers and I said, ‘They're saying what we wrote!' I was stunned. They were big stars.”

Lorre's work on
Roseanne
impressed the show's prolific and influential producers, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, who offered him the chance to create a show about, in Lorre's words, “a fifty-year-old middle-class woman coming into her own.” Why you? I asked him. “I was the perfect choice,” he told me, deadpan.
Franny's
Turn
premiered in 1992 and was cancelled after five weeks.

Nevertheless,
Franny's Turn
inaugurated Lorre's long, incongruous stint developing sitcoms about women of a certain age. His next project,
Grace Under Fire,
also for Carsey and Werner, brought Lorre to Elgin, Illinois, in order to gather research for a show Carsey and Werner envisioned as revolving around a struggling single mother. In Elgin, Lorre met with nurses, factory workers, and women living in the local YWCA—one of whom he asked if she would even
want
to watch a show about a single mom working in a factory. The woman needed to know one thing: What time was it on? Her job, you see, left her too wiped out to stay up very late. Lorre returned from Elgin thinking that the show, which became
Grace Under Fire,
was about “the hero's journey.” He was particularly pleased with the pilot, which, he said, “managed to bring in some elements that I don't think had ever been in a sitcom before,” including domestic violence. Much of that material was drawn from the stand-up act of show's star, Brett Butler, with whom Lorre often battled. “She was dissatisfied with almost every line of every script,” he told me. “It was an impossible situation. I began writing defensively,
which isn't writing. It's predicting the future.” He left the show after one season.

In 1995, Lorre created a vehicle for Cybil Shepherd that explored an erstwhile ingenue's identity crisis when she learns of her impending grandmotherhood.
Cybil
had a hugely successful first season—Christine Baranski won an Emmy for her role as Shepherd's rich, alcoholic friend—but, once again, Lorrie found himself struggling with a show's star. One legend holds that Shepherd had Lorre fired because he clapped too enthusiastically for Baranski at the Emmys. Lorre says this is not accurate, and characterizes his removal as being more about Shepherd's displeasure with “how the humor was being apportioned out” in the second season. (Shepherd demurs: “Chuck knows why he was fired.”) Whatever the case, Shepherd's power play took Lorre “a long time to wrap my head around,” he told me. And now, he knew, the soot of several burned bridges had darkened his reputation.

A television show provides hundreds of people with steady employment in an industry not celebrated for its stability, and successful shows are defined by their longevity. Television is thus a more or less congenial industry. A brooding artiste or tantrum champion may thrive within a short-lived film production, but television rewards those who are able to meet deadlines while also getting along with their coworkers. In 2007, an
Entertainment Weekly
profile that emphasized Lorre's combative history described him as “the angriest man in television.”

The characterization still irritates him, and yet, to hear Lorre tell it, anger drove him through much of his early career. The success of
Dharma and Greg,
his sitcom about a mismatched couple that ran from 1997 to 2002, helped him learn to relax. For the first time, Lorre's distinctive sitcom voice was not forced through the mediating comic funnel of a headlining star. But it was not until
Two and a Half Men,
a show about a womanizing ruin of a man
and his fussbudget brother, that Lorre found comic focus: men behaving like idiots.

When I first met Lorre, he told me what he had been “slowly learning” during these last eight years: “If I'm not frightened and angry and obsessed with anything other than doing good work, then maybe an environment gets created where people can do good work.” But Lorre has fun with his hammerhead reputation. Visitors to his office building on the Warner Bros. lot, for instance, will encounter the heraldic crest of Chuck Lorre Productions. The crest's motto,
Humilitas Ficta
, or “feigned humility,” is wreathed by the following sub-mottos: NEUROTIC ANXIETY, UNFOCUSED RAGE, SELF—OBESSION.

Lorre remains annoyed about one thing, though—his shows' lack of critical recognition, especially where
Two and a Half Men
is concerned. He once said of television critics, “They hate our success and believe that if they martyr themselves they'll wake up in show business with real jobs.” He does not say such things any more, at least not publicly, and prefers not to talk about television at all, if he has the choice.

Lorre's standing among critics is not helped by his staunchly traditional approach to the sitcom. He is well aware of the shifts that have taken place in sitcom writing during the past twenty years, but he does not care all that much about them.
The Office
and
Modern Family,
two of the most formally adventurous contemporary sitcoms, use a mockumentary framing device that, increasingly, seems as mannered as the three-walled rooms of a traditional, proscenium-style sitcom—a word that Lorre resists using to describe his shows. “The comedies we really love,” he said, “they're not situational at all.
The Honeymooners
was just a man struggling to get respect in the world. Archie Bunker was a man out of touch with the culture.” In place of
sitcom
, Lorre uses “character-com” or “half-hour comedy.”

By whatever name, the sitcom is an oddly purgatorial form of entertainment. The same characters appear week after week, displaying the same tics, and having the same arguments, in the same rooms, hallways, stairwells, and offices. Within the traditional sitcom, there are complications but rarely solutions; challenges but rarely triumphs. Indeed, when sitcoms attempt to do more dramatic stories, a show can come unmoored, as Lorre learned on
Dharma and Greg.
Faced with pressure from ABC to feature “promotable” storylines, Lorre eventually capitulated, which he regards as “one of the more regrettable actions in my career.” At one point Dharma toyed with an extramarital relationship; at another, an accident consigned her to a wheelchair for several episodes. “I couldn't have been dumber,” Lorre said. By listening to ABC, he told me, he undermined “the very nature of what's great about a four-camera, audience show, which is an opportunity to get to know these people.” Lorre believes that the “magic trick” of the traditional sitcom is that the characters “make very small, incremental progress without ever really changing.”

Bill Prady, who has worked with Lorre since
Dharma and Greg,
told me that Lorre hates stories of unnecessary—or any—narrative intricacy. What Lorre loves are stories in which the driving force is one character buying a birthday present for another. “And he's right,” Prady said, “because a sitcom is now down to about twenty-one minutes. If you're going to fill [a show] with plot, with events that
must
occur, there's no room for people to talk.”

“I was sitting in a club recently,” Lorre told me, “in Hollywood, listening to different people get up and play. I thought to myself, ‘They're all playing the same song.' It's a fundamentally very simple medium, the blues.” He was, I guessed, making a point about the sitcom. “Yeah,” he said, “and I fought against that for a long time, until I realized: it's like a haiku. It's very simple and very structured.”

Visiting the set of a sitcom you enjoy is like witnessing the exposure of a large and organizationally complex lie. The familiar and comfortable sets, once you are standing within them, seem cramped and flimsy. Touch a door and the wall shakes. Carpets turn raggedy wherever the cameras do not reach. Behind every wall is a world of chicken-coop fencing stapled in place and dark, narrow passageways somehow redolent of asbestos. Someone says, for the purposes of lining up a shot, “Lose the wall,” and suddenly half the set is folded away upon undetectable hinges. The area between the sets and the audience seating area is called “the floor,” but it is more like an alley What little floor there happens to be is marked with inscrutable pieces of tape.

During tapings of
The Big Bang Theory,
the audience sits at an angle from several of the sets, which means that it watches a good deal of the live proceedings on television monitors. Meanwhile, Lorre and his battery of writers and producers—hidden from the audience by long black curtains—sit crammed within one of the sets, watching their own monitors, holding scripts and wearing earpieces whose tightly coiled cords looked like black fusilli. Everything that is not part of the set, not bipedal, and not a chair, has wheels, because throughout the night it is continually being moved to whichever of the sets is not being used.

The Big Bang Theory
is Lorre's best show to date. (
Two and a Half Men
, though funnier than its detractors admit, too often allows its characters to stand there and trade unrealistic sitcom barbs that in just about any other imaginably fictional context would get someone punched.) If sitcoms at the top of their game can feel like verbal ballet, sitcoms working the middle register are often insult rodeo. Lorre calls this phenomenon “selling out characters for a joke,” and even very good sitcom
writers resort to it, especially when, in his words, “you're tired and exhausted and you're trying to make something arrive at a level of comedy”

Big Bang
's main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, are physicists, and not in the way that Ross, from
Friends,
was a paleontologist, a subject with which he seemed as conversant as a randomly selected eleven-year-old boy. Leonard and Sheldon drop references to Richard Feynman and Asimov's three laws of robotics; explain how Schrödinger's cat is applicable to dating; and open episodes with lines like, “Here's the problem with teleportation,” before going on to reveal what, from a physicist's perspective, the problem actually is.

Lorre and Prady's first attempt at a
Big Bang
pilot was rejected by CBS (the network, unusually, encouraged them to have another go), and it was not an immediate hit. I happened to catch the pilot the night it aired, in September 2007, and heard, in the first three minutes, references to Papa Doc Duvalier and Vladimir Nabokov. Its prospects appeared to me valiantly doomed, like those of a dog walking a tight rope. When the 2007 writer's strike crippled production, CBS wound up running
Big Bang
's first batch of episodes several times, which played to the show's gabby strengths. Before long, it had earned a huge and devoted following.

In the show, Leonard and Sheldon live across the hall from a beautiful aspiring actress named Penny, for whom Leonard pines. Leonard wants more from life, which is his tragedy. Sheldon does not, which is his tragedy. A man of unfeelingly Vulcan arrogance and deeply hidden vulnerabilities, Sheldon discusses his childhood by saying he did not have imaginary friends; he had “imaginary colleagues.” Not many sitcoms would permit Sheldon's unpleasantness to be so emphatic, but CBS maintains a relatively hands-off approach to Lorre and his shows. Dave Goetsch told me that the “edges that get sanded over in other network sitcoms” become, in
Big Bang,
the “cornerstones of comedy.”

Although
Big Bang
is unquestionably a traditional, multi-camera sitcom, it does not always feel like one. One explanation for this is that its writers love to violate core sitcom rules, such as when they resort to what Prady calls “the ‘Are you my mother?' structure, like the children's book,” in which a similar scene is done two or even three times in a row. It is most useful when “Sheldon's bothering everybody,” Prady said, because it is fun to explore how different characters react. Plot, in other words, is never a concern. “We say the number of things that occur within a
Big Bang Theory
scene is one or zero.”

A typical episode of
Big Bang
takes around four hours to film, with lulls that can last twenty minutes or more. The many things that slow the process down include the frequency with which Lorre and his writers send the actors revised or new jokes; the banter among the actors between takes; the announcement of a guest star like Mayim Bialik (tonight playing Sheldon's girlfriend, Amy), whose appearance was applauded by the audience for two dozen seconds while she stood there and waved back at them uncomfortably; the patter delivered by a stand-up comedian (“Which side of the room is having a better time? This one or...
this
one?”) thanklessly tasked with keeping the audience's energy up; the number of times what is called “the bell” rings out, even though it sounds like a buzzer and nothing a bell; and, finally, how long it takes to move the production's four cameras, which look less like cameras and more like precision-laser, deep-earth-mining devices.