Sitcom Production Quotes

The great thing about a sitcom is that you're in front of a live audience, so you really get in touch with what audience reaction is, but also there are lots of elements of film that you're dealing with, and there's kind of a great boot camp or graduate school mentality to it, because you're going to suck.

What's great about having the live audience is you know immediately if you're funny or not. That always helped when we were doing 'Hannah Montana;' it teaches you if something worked or didn't.

I've sold shows based on my standup twice to CBS, but they've never gone past the script stage. TV is very competitive.

I actually think film and TV are sort of the same thing now. To me they're all motion pictures. There's a camera, a script, other actors and a director. Doing a sitcom is a little different. It's kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion - the camera's on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.

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.

[Make a sitcom] was really the idea of Executive Producer Joe Roth who owned the property over at Revolution Studios and said he was thinking about taking it to TV. And after he said that he already had [writer/director] Ali Leroi on board, and that he was going after Terry Crews, to me it was a no-brainer. I said, "Let's put this together!"

Writing humour certainly involves pain. A sitcom is 6 months of writing pain!

The whole experience of doing a sitcom is... Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it's also terrifying.

The live performance aspect of shooting a multicamera sitcom is wonderful. You have that instant audience reaction.

Sitcoms are like summer stock. You put it up in three days, and then you do it in front of an audience, so it's a really great transition from theatre into camera work.

I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format.

Sitcoms are more like stage drama than anything else on film - more than a one-hour and certainly more than a movie. You get a script on Monday. You rehearse all week. And on Friday, you're on.

It would be interesting if this sitcom works, so I could be doing one thing all the time instead of going back and forth between all this different media which I sort of thrive on, I'm a bit of a moving target in that way.

I'm often asked for advice on how to go about making comedy shows like the begrudgingly accepted 'IT Crowd'.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

I think I'm sort of locked into the sitcom genre.

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.

As much as I loved Pacino and De Niro and wanted to be a dramatic actor, I also grew up on sitcoms. I grew up on 'M*A*S*H' and 'All In The Family' and 'Cheers.' And then around this time - this would have been '95, '96 - I was so into 'Friends' and 'Mad About You,' the idea of being on a sitcom became a very real thing that I wanted.

I'm ridiculously fortunate to get a chance to experience the sitcom world. The schedule is extremely easy, and you get fed as an artist because you're not only working on a project, but you get to work with cameras, and you get the audience there.

Sitcoms are usually given short shrift by the acting profession, but it's quite an amazing job.

There's no audience to wonderfully get in your way when you're doing a single-camera anything, whether it's a sitcom or drama or film. And I do mean that in the best way.