Sitcom Writers Talk Shop by Paula Finn

Author:Paula Finn [Finn, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Tim Allen and Patricia Richardson. ABC / Photofest © ABC

Do you have any favorite episodes or scenes from that show?

One is where he’s out drinking with the boys, and unbeknownst to him, Jill has prepared this very romantic dinner with candlelight and has put on a slinky black dress. Now, men and women speak different languages, right? So she’s talking about him coming home, and he says, “Oh yeah, I’ll be right there.” Well, he stays at the bar for three hours. So when he comes in, she’s pissed off, the dinner’s cold, and they get into an argument. “You said I’ll be right there.” “If you’d said it like that, I would’ve known what you were doing!” Women are subtle. And they give hints. Men need to be hit on the head and told blatantly what to do. So that was a really fun episode exploring the semantics of male/female.

How did you find premises?

Everything on Home Improvement usually started with, “Oh God, you’re not gonna guess what happened in my house today.” Or “Do you know what Angeline and I fought about last night?” It usually started with some incident that we would then turn into a story. And the process was generally, “What is this episode about? What are we trying to dramatically illustrate?” And then, “How do we activate our characters and keep them funny?” What drove 201 episodes of Home Improvement was not Tim blowing up toasters. The premise of the series for David, Carmen, and myself was, “Men and women should never live together. Ever. But they do—and every week we’re going to explore how a male and a female live together.” Because Deborah Tannen’s book had come out at the time, You Just Don’t Understand. And its thesis was that men and women speak a different language, and they think differently; men are hierarchal, and women are connective. And when I read that book, I understood every argument I had ever had with my wife. So that was our premise. And when you look at Home Improvement, the tools and the grunting and all of that—all from Tim’s act—that was the icing. It wasn’t the cake. The cake was, “Take anything on earth and run it through that premise of male/female.” It’s just a constant conflict of two worldviews that you can make funny.

Generally speaking, what do you feel are the elements of a strong episode premise?

It’s gotta be active. And it’s gotta be specific. So let’s say the premise for an episode is, “Paula wants the world to be happy.” OK, that’s general. “Paula is determined to give her mother the best day possible.” You see how active that is? You’re determined to give your mother the best day of her life. And of course, if we’re going to find comedy, then it’s got to be the worst morning your mother’s ever had in her life, right? So the more difficult your quest or objective is, then the more active you

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