Especially early in your career.
Most writers I know had big viewing parties for their first episode. David Isaacs and I did. Of course, in our case, the script was heavily rewritten and not for the better. So it was awkward for the guests as they tried to politely laugh through lame material. We acknowledged that we had been rewritten, but as I said at the time, “I can’t invite a bunch of people just to see the two seconds our credit is on the screen.”
But as we moved our way up and had shows that did reflect our actual work and were proud of, we occasionally would still have viewing parties. And in all cases, if a show of ours was scheduled I cleared the decks that night to be sure to watch it live (even with commercials).
However, once you get on staff things change. I saw very few of my CHEERS and FRASIER episodes live on the air. For both shows’ schedules, Thursday night was rewrite night. So we’d be working through. Now you could say, why not take a break for a half hour to watch the show? That was rarely, if ever, done. No one wanted to stay an extra half hour at 1:00 in the morning to make up that time. Besides, by then we all had VCR’s. (Not to mention we’d all seen every episode multiple times in editing).
So it was not unusual to be in the midst of a rewrite and have someone look at their watch and casually say, “Oh, we’re on right now,” and everyone nods and goes right back to the line they were addressing.
But looking back, it seems strange to be so blasé when something we wrote was being seen by 30,000,000 people at one time. No show today gets those kind of numbers. On the face of it, what an extraordinary experience for a writer. And the irony is, once this pandemic is over, I’m happy to travel across the country to see a production of one of my plays for an audience of 99.
from By Ken Levine
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