Multiple-Camera Sitcoms

The plots for these types of shows tend to be broad and simple. The show may have a major plot line (A story) and a minor plot line (B story), and may or may not have a runner.

Each act tends to be between three to five scenes. A single camera sitcom can jump around much more, with shorter fragmented scenes that get cut together in post-production to make a coherent, thematic whole. A multi-camera sitcom is usually shot in front of a live audience, in chronological order, more like a stage play. A single-camera comedy is like a little feature film every week.

The locations in a multi-camera sitcom are more basic and constant. According to 2 Broke Girls showrunner Michael Patrick King, who’s worked on both multi-camera and single-camera series, multi-camera sitcoms are harder because of the limitations of locations. On 2 Broke Girls, they always need to figure out character entrances and exits within scenes, whereas on a single-camera series, like his Sex and the City, you could just CUT TO: the next scene.

On 2 Broke Girls, Michael Patrick King and his writing staff map out the full season (twenty-four episodes) arcs at the beginning of the preproduction cycle. “We dream up three basic plotlines for the season: broke stories, girl stories, and diner stories,” King said. Then they break down those larger arcs into individual episodes that are assigned to individual members of the writing staff (unless it’s a writing team duo). And there’s a lot of story packed into what will be a twenty-one-minute episode “with a top, middle, and underneath [which I interpret to mean theme and subtext],” says King.

The writers’ room at 2 Broke Girls is utilized to figure out larger story arcs for the characters, but King prefers for the actual script writing to be done by each writer outside of the writers’ room to honor the individual voices of each talented writer.

Single-Camera Sitcoms

Single-camera sitcoms generally have more freedom to visit multiple locations, with a couple of regular sets. There are fewer locations and longer scenes on a multi-camera sitcom, necessitating more jokes on every page of the script. In a multi-camera sitcom, the live audience is expecting a joke or something shocking to come out of the mouths of your characters with virtually every line of dialogue—silence on a multi-camera sitcom is just dead air, whereas silence on a single-camera sitcom could make us cringe—but in a good way. On a single-camera sitcom, the audience has a different expectation and the rhythms of the comedy are more nuanced, with less emphasis placed on “jokes” and more reliance on visual gags and intercutting between scenes.

On Parks and Recreation, showrunners Mike Schur and Dan Goor break stories as a group, but then each writer peels off to go write their individual episode. Schur (an alum from The Office writing staff) feels that group writing an entire episode doesn’t make the best use of each writer on staff. “After a while, it becomes the law of diminished returns,” Schur said.

Showrunner Mindy Kaling from The Mindy Project (and also an alum from The Office writing staff) feels that having the first drafts of each episode crafted by individual writers (outside the collective writers’ room) makes for a “wonderful patchwork of voices.” Kaling runs her writing room in a similar fashion to the way her former boss, showrunner Greg Daniels, ran The Office. They use good old-fashioned index cards and a white board. At the beginning of their pre-production cycle, they’ll pitch three to four episode ideas at a time to the network for approval, and then assign each script to a member (or two) of the writing staff. After the first draftgets turned in by the writer(s), “then the script becomes [the] communal property of the whole room.”

Parks and Recreation also works according to this model. The first draftof the script will be dissected and new lines of dialogue and jokes will be pitched—these new lines are referred to as “alts” in the writers’ room. According to Schur, they’ll throw everything in at once, so that the teleplay will often balloon to fifty to sixty pages with alts, and then they’ll cull the draftdown to the requisite thirty pages.

Greg Daniels also did this and coined the phrase “the candy bag” for all the discarded jokes and bits that would then be saved for possible inclusion in future episodes. Michael Patrick King calls his version of the candy bag “the whipped cream.” At the same time though, you don’t want to save the juiciest plot lines, funniest lines and situations for later because, as Mike Schur points out: “Loyal audience members are a precious commodity. You need to make every episode strong or risk losing people.” Or as Greg Daniels would tell his writing staff: “Pack the sausage [the episode]; put it all in.”

Basic Formula Overview

Most broadcast network sitcoms adhere to a basic formula and utilize the same narrative storytelling models as feature films and one-hour dramas— so you can readily apply the first twenty chapters of this book to your sitcom pilot.

As for basic sitcom formulas, here’s a quick overview:

• Set up the ordinary world: show the main characters in a bit of their daily routine, and then disrupt this relative normalcy with a problem (which provides the initial catalyst to the main plotline known as the A story). The A story is a problem that the central character of this episode has to overcome. It’s typically called the “cold open” or “tease” and is followed by the opening credits. The stakes of this problem don’t need to be super high on the life and death scale, but they should feel vitally important to the character. I’ve heard this referred to in the sitcom biz as a “tremendous trifle.”
• Act 1 in a sitcom begins after the opening credits. Now the character is looking for a solution to the problem. In the early stages of the act, the problems for the B and C stories also arise for the supporting characters. And then your main protagonist must decide on a game plan in order to deal with the problem.
• Link A, B, and C stories by a unifying common theme (there is often a moral at the end of the story).
• Midpoint plot reversal with escalating stakes: in a feature, this occurs in the middle of act two. In a two-act sitcom, this occurs at the end of act 1; in three-act structure, at the end of act 2. This is when the bigger problem comes up that takes the action into a sudden and unexpected direction. The goal may change. A new goal may be added, but your character is now on the horns of a major dilemma. Basically, in trying to fix the smaller problem, a bigger problem was (inadvertently) created. The best metaphor I’ve heard for this is that in act one your protagonist is being chased by a vicious dog and forced to climb a tree to escape, and then in subsequent act(s), bystanders throw rocks up at your protagonist in the tree.
• When the show comes back from the mid-point break, the central character works to solve the bigger problem, but things go awry, and they will reach a point where it looks like they will never be able to succeed. That’s the low point of the story where failure seems imminent. In a sitcom, this low point/all is (seemingly) lost moment comes near the end of the second half of the story.
• By the end of the second (or third) act your character(s) overcome(s) the problem—usually through honest communication and/or making amends. In movies, the climax = the truth. I think this rule applies in sitcoms, too. After the climax, there’s usually a commercial break.
• After the break, there is sometimes a very short “tag” to resolve any lingering conflicts. No matter how unruly the problem was, the viewers want to see that the main characters are safe and content in their ordinary world. There’s usually one last laugh, and then the credits.

But, please note that with the prevalence of You Tube video shorts, web-sites like Funny or Die, sketch comedy shows like Portlandia,³ and innovative comedy series such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community, Louie, Veep, and Girls, the reliance on the tried-and-true sitcom formulas are becoming less essential for some viewers. Outrageous characters and envelopepushing, surreal situations are becoming more accepted and desirable to this niche, but rapidly expanding audience.

NL: I’m very interested in how you constructed the show from the beginning, particularly the use of voice-over and intercutting from family to family with the documentary style built into the more traditional structure of the sitcom. Once you decided you wanted to tell these stories about the new untraditional family, when did you decide and/or how did you decide that you wanted to have this direct address to the camera—documentary style?

CL: It was early on. We wanted to do a family show, but as you say, how are we going to do a family show that’s different from the thousands that have been on television already? The first thing we thought was, “Okay, we haven’t seen the documentary version of the family show—that will make it different, that will give the audience a way in that you may not have had in previous family shows. The direct address to the audience and the interviews give it a little bit more of a voyeuristic feel. It feels a little bit more captured than say in a traditional sitcom where you’re laying it all right out there in front of the audience. It was an early decision, but even so, the question was, “If that’s the way in, who is this one family we’re looking at? How are we going to pick one family that’s going to encapsulate the American family today?” So then we thought, maybe we’ll do three different families and hope to catch the essence of the American family by triangulating one traditional family with two less traditional families. Then, we thought, “Well, that seems a little bit disparate. If we’re just going to be looking at one family for two minutes here and then another and another, it’s going to feel like we’re telling three shows all in one.” We tried to find a clever way to unite them, so that we felt like we really had a series, which led us to having them all be related which was the surprise revealed at the end of the pilot. We’re telling a story about one extended family, but within it very different forms of the American family, which was a little bit different, and we also happened to use a different stylistic technique—documentary style. All of that added together made us feel like it was a different way to do a family sitcom. We can be somewhat traditional in the storytelling and in the jokes, but there’s enough that is different that will intrigue people.

NL: Do you map out season arcs in advance? In other words, do you have an overall plan of where you want to take these characters each season?

CL: We have a loose plan. We’ve never mapped out anything close to a whole season at the beginning. If we’re lucky, we map out half of them. That’s our goal in pre-production. If we can have twelve of our twenty-four stories figured out in some detail before we start shooting them, then we feel like we’re in good shape. We maybe had eleven this year. We don’t do tight story arcs because there’s not a particular romance that we’re following or any of those stories that lend themselves to a serialized approach. But, for example, Gloria [Sofia Vergara] is pregnant. We know that she’s going to give birth right around episode 11 or 12, so if we’re going to do a baby shower episode or her family comes to see her before the birth, we know that we have to pop those in around episodes 3, 6, and 9 and be ready to have her give birth at episode 12. When we had Claire [Julie Bowen] involved in running for city council, we had to think about the big moments and where we wanted them to fall. Do we want the election to happen somewhere around episode 20? Then, let’s have a debate prep episode right around 15. These are far from fully figured out stories, but it just gives us points to aim toward that we’ll have to hit when we get to them.

NL: Will your characters ever change? I always felt that it was the Golden Rule of Sitcoms that characters don’t change, but their situations do. Or am I wrong about that?

CL: There are aspects of the characters that audiences love and don’t want to see change. That is on our show and many other shows. There are dynamics that work for us. You want to be rooting to see Phil [Ty Burrell] finally gain Jay’s [Ed O’Neill] acceptance. You want to see a loosening of the tension between Claire and Gloria. At the same time, those conflicts are sources of a lot of humor for us, so we don’t want to have them go away all together, but you can’t have the same story week in and week out. We want to see some movement. It’s a difficulty in doing a long-running series. You want to be showing some progress, but you also don’t want to completely undo the thing that made people fall in love with your show in the first place. In terms of personal growth, sure we would like to see Claire, for example, be a little bit less uptight and find some outlet for her creativity. We’ve explored that from time to time by having her go out and get drunk with the gay guys and winding up with the straight guy that she took to be gay and letting her hair down a bit. We’ve seen her at a shooting range. These are things that you probably wouldn’t have expected from Claire early on. Same with Phil. We’ve established him as this goofy dad, but there are many moments where we’ve seen a very sensitive side to him. Same with Jay. We have Jay this year, for example, letting us know that he’s going to a psychiatrist. I don’t think that’s stuff that you would have anticipated from the Jay of season 1. It’s a matter of expanding the characters, giving new dimensions to them, that you may find interesting, but don’t stand in too much contrast to what we know of the character’s traits. So that you don’t say, “This just doesn’t make sense. How could he be both A and B?” It’s a challenge.

NL: Do you think of different plot lines as A, B, and C stories—or does each family just have their own letter to represent them in each episode? Any in-house rules to breaking story?

CL: It shifts. In some episodes, it might be one family who has more of a dominant story.

NL: Is theme important to you when you’re coming up with stories in terms of how to unify and connect with three stories?

CL: The big theme is not to become predictable and formulaic, so we do occasionally say, “Let’s tell an entire episode that’s about jealousy or about forgetting things or the road not traveled.” We couldn’t do that every week because people would start to say, “This is going to be the one about X.” We don’t want to do that. We want to do a show that’s about completely different stories that the three families are engaged in that have nothing to do with one another or a show that brings all the families together for the larger part of the entire episode, but has a different feel from the other two parts of the episode.

As far as A, B, and C stories, we tend not to because we’re trying to service all of our characters. In order to do that, we usually apportion them about the same amount for each episode. The distinction we’re more likely to make is: which will be our more emotional story with more of a heart aspect to it and what might be our sillier story within the episode? We try to keep a balance there too.

The number of pages we give a story is almost always dictated by what’s the best way to tell the story. If we say, “Wow, we told a story here with Phil and Claire that’s very economical and has reached a nice moving place, but it’s going to take fourteen pages to do it. Now, we’ve also got this really funny farcical Mitch and Cam story that’s also seeming like it’s going to be fourteen pages, which doesn’t leave us much for Jay and Gloria. We would probably just take one of those stories out and put it in a different episode rather than give some of our other characters short shrift.

NL: I want to talk about the way your writers’ room works. Do you break stories and pitch jokes as a group, and then does one person go off and work on that episode individually or do you assign different story lines to different people?

CL: It’s always done by one person or a couple of people. We sit together and we very thoroughly break a story, and my rule of thumb is that it takes us three days to do that. That’s six or seven or eight writers in a room— sometimes even more—pitching away at something. It may start with an amusing thing that happened to one of us, and we try to build around that. Or it may start with a theme. It may start with a holiday that we want to do or with one of the markers of the season. We need to do the show where Gloria gives birth. What’s a funny way to do that? Whatever the starting place is we pitch on that for a solid two to three days until we have a lot of notes accumulated and a pretty good idea of what our lead story is going to look like. We have cards that we put up on the board, so that we can see every step of it all the way through. Once we’re convinced we’ve got a whole episode that works—stories with beginnings, middles, and ends with lots of opportunities for fun with this component of heart as well—we say, “Okay, it’s ready to be written.”

At which point, one person or a team of writers from that group will go out and write an outline. After a few days with the outline, which is just an expanded version of what we talked about with sentences, sample dialogue and some jokes, then we all come back and read it again. In the interim, we’ve been off on other episodes and figuring out other stories. It’s usually a week or two later by the time we come back to the outline and we have a fresher perspective on things. You look at it and you say, “Alright, I like this part or maybe we can work on this part or maybe we can put a better joke here or maybe we can move the act break up in the story.” And maybe take about a half a day or less giving notes to the writer. Then that writer (or writers) goes off and writes the script. He comes back two to three weeks later—at which point the staff sits with it and does a rewrite on it. It usually takes a day or two—and that should be just for refining jokes. You shouldn’t be changing story at that point because that should have happened at an earlier stage. It should just be a matter of finding some better jokes, sharpening up some speeches, maybe giving a little contour to the scenes. Then we have our script that’s ready to be read at the table which is the actors coming in for its first performance out loud which, of course, gives a whole new life to the script because you’re actually hearing the characters’ voices and you’re able to say: “That speech, that line is great for that actor,” or “That didn’t sound quite right, or “That scene felt a little slow,” or “That moment seemed a little bit rushed.” With the new information from the table read, we go back and do another rewrite, which is a day or two, and then we have our final script which is what we shoot.

NL: Given that you’re a single camera show and don’t shoot in front of a live studio audience—providing an immediate reaction—what’s your personal barometer to know if something’s funny?

CL: The table reading gives you a certain measure because, in addition to the writers and actors, there’s the department heads and other invited guests. We have a room of about a hundred people to listen to it, so we have a pretty good gauge right there. When you’re on stage and you’re shooting it, then you’re trusting your own instincts. There are again people on stage while we’re rehearsing—lighting people, hair people, makeup people, electricians—who do watch. They laugh or they don’t. You get a little bit of feedback right there, but at that point, you’re trusting your own instincts. The nice thing about doing single camera is you can stop and you can say, “We need a better joke here or a little bit more going on between these two actors. Let’s take a minute and see if we can polish up this speech.” And you sit down for fifteen to twenty minutes and you can change it and get it the way you want. That’s not a luxury you have in front of a live audience because you’re taxing their patience. The benefit in a multi-cam is you’ve gone to rehearsals all week—you’ve seen it performed at least three or four times in front of a big group of people laughing. All of these jokes have essentially been auditioned. Going into a multi-cam with an audience, you’re almost always sure it’s all going to work, but you can’t stop. With a single cam, we take eight or ten hours to shoot four minutes worth of a show, so we can stop and refine it.

NL: I once heard Larry Gelbart talk about running the writers’ room of M*A*S*H, and he said that his golden rule was, “Never be afraid to say something stupid,” because it might spark something smart and valuable from someone else in the room. Do you and Steve have any governing rules of how to run a functional, successful writers’ room?

CL: We have many different kinds of writers on our staff. Some are more extroverted, some more introverted. I wouldn’t want to have a room where everyone was the same, where everyone was pitching jokes in the same way. So we try to encourage quieter, more thoughtful writers to come forward, and sometimes need to butterfly net the more aggressive ones.

NL: What are the best and worst aspects of being a showrunner on Modern Family? I would imagine all the Emmys and critical acclaim and high ratings must feel great. Everybody loves Modern Family…

CL: Well, I’m sure not everybody—

NL: Everybody I know, anyway. All ages. It must be incredibly gratifying for you.

CL: The best part of running this show is that, even though I’ve been in this business for a long time, this is my first hit as a series creator. I ran Frasier, but didn’t create it. And I get to go to work with smart, funny people and laugh really hard every day. It’s also rewarding to see how well the show is received by audiences. Back in the days of Frasier, the series would get reviewed at the beginning of the season, and maybe a paper would write something about it during or at the end of the season. But with Modern Family, we get immediate feedback from viewers from social media—hundreds of reviews sometimes even before a full episode has finished airing. We get a lot of feedback.

NL: Does that feedback influence you and your writing staff, or do you pretty much try to shut it out and write the stories you’d like to tell?

CL: We generally write what we want because even though there are hundreds blogging and posting, that’s still a small fraction of our audience. So we try not to let those online views dictate what we’re doing. On the other hand, if there is a big, loud consensus about a new character or plotline that people just don’t like, then that might influence us going forward.

The most challenging part of running this show is that it’s a grind. We have an incredibly talented group of writers on our show right now, and fortunately they’re all staying put—so that helps a lot. But we do twenty-four episodes per season. That’s a lot of pressure. And because the show is so successful, that sets the bar high; we don’t want to repeat ourselves and be formulaic. But we also need to come up with many, many stories that are fresh, unpredictable, and hopefully generate a few laughs. And each story we tell means we can’t tell that story again, so there’s always the challenge of coming up with new material—new ways in to stories. But the positives far outweigh any negatives, and this is a great experience.

NL: How did you originally come up with the concept for How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) in terms of its signature style: use of V.O., flashbacks, and intercutting between characters and time periods?

CB: I think initially we wanted to write a single-camera show, but the wisdom at the time was that single-camera comedy wasn’t working (this is nine years ago, remember), so we took a lot of elements from that style—like more scenes, more edits, more cinematic camera work—and shot it with four cameras and added a laugh track. The style developed naturally out of that.

As far as flashbacks and intercutting and all that, our style is probably just a hodgepodge of the film and TV that inspired us enough for us to want to rip it off. I mean, Annie Hall, is the Tigris and Euphrates of modern romantic comedy. Turn to any page of that script and you’ll find something that we and a hundred other people have co-opted over the years, wittingly or otherwise. The split-screen therapist sessions, the subtitled first date subtext, the story told out of sequence … the artistic message of that movie is that there are no rules. The audience is sophisticated enough to buy in on a little magical realism here and there, if they connect with the characters and the story you’re trying to tell.

For what it’s worth, my favorite part of Annie Hall’s nonlinear storytelling is the fact that you hear the end of the story right at the beginning: “Annie and I broke up.” There’s something beautiful about that, and looking back I think the ending of our first episode—“That’s how I met your aunt Robin”— is an homage to that moment, and by homage I mean we totally stole it.

CT: Carter and I love packing as much story, as many ideas, into an episode as possible. (That’s either ambition or poor attention span, depending on how you look at it.) We love twists and turns and reveals and mysteries and setups and payoffs, so our episodes can get pretty intricate. Traditional multi-cam shows often have fewer scenes per episode, and the scenes are longer. Some might have fifteen to twenty scenes in an episode. HIMYM sometimes has eighty scenes in an episode, and rarely fewer than forty to fifty. We wanted to take the multi-cam form and impose a single-cam (or even a feature film) editing style onto it, which meant shooting over the course of three days instead of the more conventional recipe of a live audience show with a few pre-tapes cut in. The fact that our entire series is a guy telling a story to his children informed this style—when you tell a story, you tend to stop, start, jump back, jump forward, digress (not to mention embellish a few details!). So that’s built into the DNA code of the series.

NL: I love your show, but I’m wondering if you were worried about it being too limited as a construct (perhaps too much of a gimmick?) to sustain a series for so many seasons, or did you plan to break out of this style and reboot (such as revealing the mother sooner) as part of your original plan?

CB: Maybe it’s me, but I love a good gimmick if it’s well executed. The problem is, there’s this feeling with TV where you can’t enjoy a high concept show even from the first episode, because you’re just sitting there thinking, “This is great, but how are they going to sustain this?”

But as far as our gimmick goes, it felt like it was incidental to the real meat of the story, which is the friendships of these five characters. For that reason, we always wanted to see if we could stick to our guns and take the concept as far as we could take it, and wait till the very end for Ted to meet the mother. Our feeling was, when it feels like the audience is going to start getting sick of what we do week to week, we’ll have Ted meet the mother, end the series, and move on to another show. As it turned out, the audience didn’t get sick of it. I mean, some did for sure, but the numbers continued to hold up, and we never felt like we were running out of story, so we kept going with a show about these five characters and their lives before Ted’s wife showed up. We had eight very happy years like that. But once we started discussing the possibility of a ninth season—taking the show past its two hundredth episode—the conversation became, “What would we like to write? What would excite us?” And that’s when the idea of meeting the mother before the series finale first took hold. So we kind of made a deal with our past selves: we’re going to keep going with this rule that Ted can’t meet the mother until the last episode … but in the meantime, we’re gonna meet her first. And we’re gonna play every variation we can think of around that idea without breaking the central rule.

CT: We pitched it as “a guy’s hundred best stories about his crazy twenties.” Ironically, we are now approaching our two hundredth episode and our characters are all in their thirties. So it went further than we ever imagined! And that’s because the audience connects with and cares about the characters and the actors, not the title or the gimmick. The construct of the future narrator telling the story also provided a sort of safety net to do realer, darker, emotional stories—the tacit implication being that, by 2030, even if there was some turbulence along the way, things all worked out okay for Ted and by extension, his friends.

NL: Where did your core ensemble characters come from—based upon people you knew or purely from imagination or both?

CB: There was a lot of autobiographical stuff in the pilot. I was single and coming to that crossroads, and Craig was in his first few years of marriage and still figuring out how to be a grownup. And we were newly living in Los Angeles after five really fun years in New York. We were homesick. We had been hired to write for Letterman right out of college, so we were kind of cannonballed into this whirlwind of living in New York City, working and hanging out with a bunch of really entertaining folks, and drinking and running around and taking cabs and kissing unlikely people and making huge mistakes and being young enough to wake up the next day and not be all that hung over. It was a great time, much more fun than high school and college, and after a year or so in Los Angeles, we really missed it. It was the first time in my adult life that I understood what nostalgia was, and that newly discovered feeling went right into the pilot script.

CT: Our core characters are a mix—some are based on people we know, some are more original inventions. Marshall and Lily are based on my wife Rebecca and I—we’ve been together since the very beginning of college. When we wrote the HIMYM pilot, Carter was single and in his twenties and still searching for “The One,” so that was the inspiration for Ted: A guy who really wants to find the right girl and whose two best friends have been an old married couple since they were eighteen years old. Barney is more of an original invention, although some aspects are inspired by dudes we used to hang out with in New York in our twenties. Robin was also not literally based on any one person, although certain traits of Robin are based on Cobie Smulders—her Canadian-ness, for example, or her independence. Over time, the characters—no matter how much you originally based them on known entities—become their own people, a collaborative construct between actors and writers. Still, it’s important to us to hold on to what’s fundamentally human and recognizable about each character. So we’re always stealing from real life.

NL: Do you map out the season arcs in advance so you’re building to “sweeps” episodes or cliffhangers—or do you generally break stories episode to episode?

CB: We always map out our seasons. It makes the writing easier, and while I also think there’s some value in figuring it out as you go along—making an improv game out of it—in our case, we have a narrator who knows how this story ends. And everything he says is pertinent to that story, so we need to know where he’s going with it. As far as “sweeps” goes, it’s funny, we’ll still reflexively say things like, “Oh, that’s a big idea, we should do that in sweeps,” even though, from what I can tell, nobody cares about sweeps anymore.

The big thing we try to do is to structure the storytelling around the gaps in the season. There are usually a few multi-week stretches in the late winter and spring when we’re not airing new episodes. It’s nice to have a good cliff-hanger going into one of those stretches, to entice the viewers to come back three weeks later.

CT: HIMYM is very arc-ed out each season, almost more like a drama. We like the show to have a memory of itself week to week—events have consequences, one thing leads to the next. Again, that’s just how we like to write. Yes, we’ve done plenty of stand-alone episodes along the way, but we look at those as fun pieces of candy to be consumed between larger, more nutritious meals! And we like to write drama within the comedy. Each season we try to come in with an overall shape—what are the big emotional milestones we know we’ll hit, what is this season about, what do we want the characters to go through, where do we want them to end up?—and remain as faithful as we can to that plan.

NL: From where do new episode ideas emerge?

CB: The best episodes always come from real stories. Like, 100 percent of the time, without fail. And conversely, the worst episodes are the ones that have never happened to anyone ever. We try not to make those episodes, but sometimes they slip past the goalie and get on the air.

But the good ones come from someplace real. The original “Naked Man” was actually one of our writers, who was bold enough to share that story with the room. A friend of mine named Justin Dickinson gave me the story that became “The Three Days Rule.” Barney running a marathon without training, getting to the finish line, then sitting down on the subway and discovering his legs no longer work and not being able to get up so he keeps riding it all day long? True story, or so I’ve been told.

CT: The best ones are usually from real life, and then you build on that kernel of truth (I can’t not salute when I write “kernel of truth”—a joke stolen, appropriately, from real life!). Carter and I encourage our writers’ room to be as honest and therapeutic as possible—we want real life stories, dynamics, observations to ground the comedy. Even when something on HIMYM is insane, it usually originates from something recognizably human. That is to say, our best episodes usually do.

NL: What makes a worthy A story for you?

CB: Usually the thing that separates an A story from a B story is the emotional backbone. If it’s a story that’s dynamic enough to be more than just funny, and gives the actors somewhere to go other than comedy, it gets the headliner slot. If it’s too silly or stupid or weird to carry any emotional weight, we make it a B story.

CT: We love it when all there is is an A story. We never approach an episode with, “What’s the A, B and C story?” We love it when one idea can launch everyone’s story in an episode, so that even if several characters diverge, they’re all on one theme. Sometimes a story naturally takes an A-B-C theme, but we don’t seek that out and sometimes we even try to avoid it.

CB: Honestly, we do try to avoid it. The best kind of story to me is one that’s big and funny and variable enough to engage the whole cast. Since our show is a story being told by one guy, we like to structure it like a real story. And when you’re casually telling someone a story, you don’t break it up into A, B and C stories. You just tell one tale at a time. If I’m being honest, I think we were much better about doing that in our early seasons. “The Pineapple Incident,” “Drumroll Please,” and “The Naked Man” are all good examples.

NL: What is the comedy “sweet spot” of the series to you?

CB: I think we’re one of those shows that’s at its best when you relate to it as a viewer, and it illuminates something real in your own life. That’s what was great about Seinfeld. As much as it was “a show about nothing,” wasn’t really about nothing. On a tangible level, it was more about something that most other shows. You know, you take a show that’s “about something,” like The West Wing. It’s about the president. Have I ever met the president? No. Have I been put off by someone standing too close to me when they talk? Yes, absolutely. That’s something.

CT: Our sweet spot—to me, HIMYM at its best—is when we can create a tone that is silly and funny and stupid that then turns into something poignant or even surprisingly dark/real/honest. One of the themes of the series is that everything in life is happening at once. We knew from the pilot that our season 1 finale would be Ted finally getting the girl (Robin) and then discovering Marshall sitting alone in the rain, holding a returned engagement ring on the stoop. To me, that is HIMYM at its best—a guy at his high point silently putting his arm around his best friend, who’s at the worst moment in his life and wondering, where do we go from here?

NL: Do you work from beat sheets and outlines? If so, what’s the basic length for your show’s typical outline?

CB: There’s usually an eight- to ten-page outline that serves as the basis for the script. Plus many, many pages of room notes. But the outline is a good way to whittle it down into what’s important and fundamental about the episode. It’s a good skeleton.

CT: After breaking the story in the room on dry-erase boards, we go to a detailed outline (usually seven to ten pages) and then write the script from there. We like the story to be as clear as possible, the structure the themes, the emotions—we’re much more concerned about that than jokes. The jokes can come later.

NL: Do you group write episodes as a team, or assign and go write solo (unless a writing partnership) and then reconvene?

CB: No, we’ve never done the group-writing approach. There’s always a first draftthat someone has gone off and written independently. Room rewriting can be somewhat extensive, and often once we’re done punching it up as a group, there’s not much left from the original draft. But we always give people the opportunity to feel like writers, and go offand see what they can come up with on their own.

CT: We almost never group-write an entire script. Maybe once or twice in the entire series, and even then we were at least working off a rough draft. Carter and I both love being off on script—finding the quiet time to dig a little deeper and find an extra twist, an extra emotion, an inspired moment that could only be found by one person at a computer rather than ten people in a conference room. So we try not to rob our writers of that experience.

NL: How do you run your writing room? Do you and Carter each have a different leadership role on the show? How do you delegate and keep the room functional?

CB: It’s funny, I have no idea what Craig’s room-running style is! I assume he’s pretty good at it, since he’s been doing it for eight years and comes up with consistently amazing stuff. I’m not really sure what my style is either. It’s a pretty safe, non-confrontational environment, and people are pretty unfiltered, but I try to keep it moving and focused on the task at hand. There’s not a lot of delegation in the story-breaking department. From our perspective, that’s the most important thing Craig and I can be doing at any given time. Everything else—punching jokes, shooting, editing—can be handed off. But story is job one, so one of us is usually leading that room. I think it’s evolved into a thing where, from my perspective, I’m trying to figure out the story and these guys are helping me do it. That’s how I approach it. It makes it easier than saying, “What do we as a hive mind think this story should be?” Craig and I have pretty specific tastes, so it’s maybe not as democratic as it could be. But we have some great writers, so every voice is definitely heard and listened to.

CT: I don’t know how anyone could ever run a show without a writing partner! Carter and I are best friends—in many ways like brothers—and having someone you trust that much to co-run the show seems so crucial. We almost always have two writers’ rooms going, working off an overall plan/season shape that Carter and I come into the season with and keep refining as we go. We can be so much more efficient this way, as long as we can build in time to meet up, just the two of us, to talk about the overall story we’re telling—sadly, that time can be hard to find! We each weigh in on the script or outline that the other one is working on—usually scribbles in red pen in the margins—so we each contribute to every story and script.

NL: So you’re a hybrid sitcom—part multi-camera/part single-camera? Or …?

CT: Yes, we are most certainly a hybrid. We shoot multi-cam, but we take three days to do so. And we often do more stylized, cinematic pieces where we are single-cam (or two camera). It’s a bit odd, actually. A straight up single cam show with many location shoots is much more expensive and hard to produce than HIMYM, but a multi-cam audience show didn’t fit the story we wanted to tell. So we found a weird middle ground that just sort of worked!

NL: You generally do not shoot in front of a live audience, so what’s your barometer to know if something is funny?

CB: We have a pretty merciless crew. If they don’t laugh, you know it’s not funny. Plus we have a table read and a run-through, and there’s network people and studio people and department heads watching those, so you can gauge their reactions as well. But mostly, the barometer for what’s funny has to come from within. And I think that’s a good thing. When you have a live audience, the funniest joke will always be the joke that has the word “poop” or “boobs” or “penis” in it. If you just go by that, you’ll have a great tape night, but then you’ll get into the edit room and it’ll be “The Poop Boobs Penis Show,” and … well actually, it’ll probably go on to be a huge hit and make you very successful. So maybe we should get a live audience.

NL: How much rewriting comes from first draftto first table read and what’s actually shot?

CB: A whole lot. I mean, it depends on how good the first draftis, but no matter what, the writers’ room will change it quite a bit. Actually, that mostly just applies to the comedy. The dramatic moments I try to not mess with or punch up in the room. Drama needs to feel personal, and can’t be written by committee.

CT: We definitely rewrite, but it’s rare that we tear a script apart after the table read. We try to get it as close as we can by the time it table-reads— the goal is to basically just be beating jokes, making it funnier, not asking the question, “What story are we telling?!” That part needs to be figured out sooner, because the process of making a TV show just moves so fast. Cameras are rolling before you know it—so the story needs to be solid.

NL: What’s your basic production schedule from script thru post?

CT: We break a story in the room on dry-erase boards (well, sometimes Carter or I come in with a two-three page beat sheet of a rough story idea and then go to the big boards). Then we send the writer out to do a rough outline, just to get the shape down, and usually have them come back into the room with that outline, which we fill in a bit more, answer questions that have come up from the process of putting it on paper. Once that is as clear as possible, we send the writer out for a week to do a first draftof a script. They turn that in, and Carter or I give them notes on it. Then they take a few more days to write a second draft. Then, we bring that into the writers’ room and do a group rewrite prior to the table read. We table read it on a Monday, rewrite it, then do a run-thru onstage on Tuesday and rewrite it again. Then, Wednesday morning at 9:00 a.m., we start shooting until Friday.

NL: How much fine-tuning to jokes occurs right up ‘til the last minute?

CT: We are always trying to beat the jokes, find the extra twist or surprise or a way to call something back that we never thought of until Tuesday night before shooting on Wednesday morning. And Carter and I also always have the writer onstage paired with either one of us or another writer watching every take so that they can tweak jokes and try out alts.

CB: Often, we’ll fine tune jokes in the edit room, too. If a joke is too wordy, for instance, and could be funnier if it was faster, there’s ways to shorten it through editing. And likewise, if a joke isn’t landing because there isn’t enough setup, you can use the narrator, or even record some off-camera dialogue, to make it clearer.

NL: Will your characters ever change, or will they continue to follow the golden rule of sitcoms that characters don’t change, their situations do? Or am I wrong about that?

CB: I think there’s an even bigger philosophical question there: do people change? Obviously the goal in creating any character is to make them feel real. Now, is the reality that after eight years of hooking up with random babes, Barney can become a new man who wants to settle down? Or is the real reality that a zebra can’t change its stripes? I truly don’t know the answer to that. I guess it depends on the person. So I don’t know if I can even answer that question on a conscious level. Maybe the characters have changed over the course of the series, and maybe they haven’t. If they have, it’s probably because the people writing them have changed, and the actors playing them have changed, and to some degree even the people watching have changed.

Ultimately, I guess the answer is: If you’re writing something that tries to draw from real life, you can’t worry about how much or how little the characters change. You just write it and see what happens.

NL: Now that your show is a certifiable hit, how hands-on is the network with notes? Or do they leave you alone and let you and Carter do your thing?

CB: They’re great. Really, really great. It took making a show for another network to really grasp that. The truth is, they don’t leave us alone—they give us notes, and they’re usually good notes at that—but they also trust us, and trust the process, and know how not to make a good show. If you try to micromanage the writing from outside the writers’ room, you might as well just leave show business. That never, never, never works.

NL: Do you have a favorite episode of HIMYM?

CB: “Ten Sessions,” aka the Britney Spears episode. I think thematically the episode encapsulates everything we try to do with the whole series. It’s just about a guy trying to get a girl to fall in love with him. Trying over and over, failing over and over, but not giving up. And then when he does give up, his friends pick him up and give him the strength to keep going.

I love the last scene of the episode, in which Ted takes Stella on a two-minute date. It’s a cab ride, a dinner, a movie, a cup of coffee and some cheesecake, and a walk home, all in one shot, on a sidewalk, in two minutes. What you don’t see is everything going on off-camera—an entire crew working like a clock in perfect synchronicity making the shot work. It was one of those moments that makes TV writing feel like NASA in the 1960s. You come up with an idea that seems like it can’t be done, then figure out how to do it, and have some really talented people work together to pull it off. Fifty years from now, that’ll be the two minutes of How I Met Your Mother that make me smile the most.

CT: I always love the episodes that are surprisingly dramatic. I love that finale to season 1, with Ted comforting Marshall out in the rain on the stoop. That image gives me such a chill. I love the two episodes around the death of Marshall’s dad. And purely comedically, I love all the Robin Sparkles episodes—Carter and I first started working together by writing music, so any episode where we can write a crazy song is extra joy.

NL: What’s the worst/best thing about being a showrunner?

CB: The best thing by far is getting to write things that go out to a huge audience in very short order. It’s not like any other medium in that respect, except perhaps journalism or blogging. In the movie business you spend years working on a movie that, if it does get made, lives or dies in a weekend. In TV, you have millions of people sitting around an enormous campfire waiting for you to start spinning a yarn, every single week. That’s a beautiful thing.

The worst thing is the stress. It’s stressful to the point of physical danger, and that’s why I’m not sure I want to keep doing it after How I Met Your Mother ends. And that’s also why, again, having a studio and network that doesn’t support what you’re doing makes it absolutely not worth doing. Because the blank page is stressful enough.

CT: The worst thing about being a showrunner is the pressure of the clock—come Wednesday morning, they’re gonna shoot whatever we write. The best thing about being a showrunner is that come Wednesday morning, they’re gonna shoot whatever we write.

See interview with Don Roos and Dan Bucatinsky on the companion website: http://www.focalpress.com/cw/landau