Smoke gets in the CBS eye

Here’s a Friday Question that became a whole post with a special guest to answer it. Because if I don’t know the answer I often try to flag down the person who does.

Dave Wrighteous has the question.

Hey Ken! Never saw it while it was on, but I've been watching Becker in reruns and am LOVING IT! It's hilarious and Ted Danson is terrific! Anyway, my question is: did creator Dave Hackel or you or the network ever get complaints about Becker's smoking? You hardly ever see that on TV anymore, and I heard that NBC's late, great show Constantine had constant network battles about the smoking of the lead character.

Thanks and best wishes.

I went to Dave Hackel who graciously provided the answer.

Before we started shooting “Becker,” I asked for a meeting with Les Moonves so that I could get his thoughts about the tone of the show. Specifically, I wanted to see if I might get some sort of assurance that, once past the pilot, CBS wouldn’t suddenly start giving us notes aimed at softening the character to make Becker more traditionally television friendly. I thought it best to at least start by being on the same page with the head of the network.

Moonves was great. He’d read the script again before we met and assured me that he was willing to let us go for it.

But he did have one concern: Becker’s smoking. He didn’t ask me to take it out, but he wanted my assurance that we wouldn’t glamorize it in any way.

Not problem, I promised. In fact I told him that my plan was to constantly have other characters tell Becker how disgusting his habit was. Also we did things like showing his own doctor admonishing him about smoking, depicted him unable to exercise because of his habit, had him wrestle with trying to quit and even had him start a fire by flicking a lit cigarette on the ground.

In my opinion, the show was able to send a far better anti-smoking message by having our main character smoke than had we not. And, to his credit, Les kept his word.

We continued to speak negatively about smoking and CBS allowed us to have the character behave as conceived. If the network or studio received complaints about Becker smoking cigarettes they handled them without getting me or the staff involved.

Again, my thanks to Dave Hackel. And Les Moonves.

from By Ken Levine