Has anyone been in the studio audience for a sitcom?

I'm just wondering if any of you have been in a studio audience for a sitcom?

What was the experience like?

Was it a show that you liked or did you just go to it because you were able to get tickets?

 

CPO Sharkey

jerol

 

The Morton Downey Show...if there ever was an unofficial sitcom!

 

Please share details please.

 

"Alice"...I was surprised at the other stuff going on in the take that would never be seen on the tube. The actor in the back kitchen was still doing his thing as if he was actually working in a counter joint restaurant.

 

We saw the pilot of a late-'70s sitcom called "Angie", although I think it was done in '74. We were excited because it was taped at the historic old Sam Goldwyn Studios. Pat Morita did warmup. Later I found out it was a Garry Marshall show, but we did not find it funny. At the end they brought the writers out to take a bow and I wondered why they deserved it. Boy, did they have to sweeten THAT live audience with a laugh track!

It lasted less than two seasons.

 

I was in the audience for Mary Tyler Moore's CBS variety show "Mary". I dont recall a whole lot about it other than Johnny Mathis was a guest.

 

I haven't been to hundreds like Steve, but I bet I've been to 50 -- sometimes standing off to the side with the DP. But I've worked on at least a three or four hundred sitcom episodes going back to the 1980s. One thing I think a lot of audience members don't get: the shows can get pretty tedious to watch, since they typically require about 3-4 hours to shoot (and sometimes much longer), and there are long stretches of waiting while the cameras move over to different sets. The longest one I saw being filmed was an episode of Mork & Mindy around 1978 or 1979 that I think went from 6PM to 1AM. They let the audience go home around 10PM and then spent the next 3 hours shooting tons of pickups in front of empty seats. That was a rare 5-camera sitcom, where they had to put a special camera only on Robin Williams 100% of the time because he ad-libbed so much.

There's a real art to shooting sitcoms well. Hands down, my favorite director to watch and to work for was James Burrows, who rehearses the hell out of the cast, moves through the episodes quickly, and rarely does more than 2 takes of any scenes. Shows like Will & Grace, Two and a Half Men, Big Bang Theory, and Friends rarely ran long because the casts and scripts were so good.

I have a lot of sitcom stories, but I'll share one: I can recall a pilot show where the executive producer/showrunner was fretting because the audience wasn't laughing enough. He called for a brief break so that he could yell at the sound man, convinced the audience couldn't hear the jokes well enough. Unfortunately for both of them, the audience could hear just fine. It just wasn't funny.

When the show is funny, and you're on the stage, it's a pretty magical place with electricity in the air. But man, when things are going bad, everybody's glum and kind of looking down at the floor and it's very awkward and uncomfortable. As one example of that: I remember the warm-up guy asking for questions during a taping (shot on tape, not film) of The Betty White Show in the late 1970s. An audience member stood up and said, "hey, I heard this show is cancelled. Is that true?" Everybody on the set -- actors and technicians and producers, they all stopped and stared. You could hear a pin drop. The warm-up guy's face reddened and he said, "uh, well... it's true the ratings aren't as high as the network hoped, but we're confident things will do better, and our cast is great, and you're going to love tonight's show!" Of course, by Monday the word was confirmed that CBS was going to cancel the show.

 

The warm-up guy should have not given a serious answer and cracked a joke instead (duh!). Don't give the guy the satisfaction of a real answer and move on as quickly as possible!

 

Was Small Wonder filmed before a live studio audience?

 

Yup!

http://mentalfloss.com/article/64652/how-small-wonder-programmed-itself-hit

I'm actually a bit surprised that they didn't just use a laugh track considering how cheaply the show was done and all the special effects shots.

 

Small Wonder is very similar to the kid sitcoms on Nickelodeon (Henry Danger)

 

The Nick sitcoms are a lot less silly from what I've seen of them.

 

I've been watching re-runs of Mork and Mindy on Antenna TV and I was surprised at how many times Robin made me laugh out loud!

 

I saw Blossom and a pilot that never got sold with the guy from Cheers that was Kristie Alley's BF in the show. It took place in a circus enviroment.

 

Man, that Circus sounds like a weird show!

http://antennafree.tv/2013/07/12/pilot-error-kevin-currans-circus-comes-to-an-abrupt-conclusion/

 

I never have myself but as a kid I used to notice on the laugh track of Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch that the same guy was laughing every episode. I remember thinking "Man, that guy gets to go to every show!"

 

Thanks for that. I never knew about this story.

 

I learned something interesting recently about how they taped one of my favorite shows, WKRP in Cincinnati.

When they started, they used to do two tapings of each episode on a Friday night in front of a live audience. The second one would go real late because they often had to do retakes again and again to make sure they had everything.

Then they switched to a much more efficient method. They started taping the whole show without an audience during the day on Friday, making sure they had a decent take of every scene. Then in the evening they would perform it once in front of an audience, and if they messed anything up, they would insert that part from the daytime take.


I've never seen a sitcom taping, but I was in the audience for an early 1991 Tonight Show with Jerry Seinfeld and Corbin Bernsen that made me a fan of the Seinfeld show, and I think inspired a later episode (although the third guest of my show was Jeffrey Osborne, not George Wendt).

 

I have an old memory of something about Cheers post Diane where something was so down and out crazy funny that they had to reshoot it because everyone on set lost it. And it was said at the time that it was very rare for stuff like that to happen on Cheers.

 

I went to a taping of "Kate and Allie" in NYC around 1985 I think (I still have the tickets somewhere). I did like the show but I also went just because I was so curious how it was done.

I don't remember TOO much about it...I recall them bringing out a video screen to show a scene taped earlier in the day, and that the stairway to the upstairs just ended at the top with a little platform for the actors to stand on once they got to the top.

 

I got to see a taping of Nurses in the early 1990s, which starred Loni Anderson. The tickets were free as me and a friend of mine were visiting Universal Studios theme park in California. I didn't watch the show but thought it would be fun to go and see the process (it was, btw).

Before I went: I thought Loni Anderson was pretty, but nothing really special. After I went: OMG, that woman is breathtaking. Seriously, watching her on TV doesn't do her justice.

 

Yeah, for some reason it never occurred to me that on sitcom sets the downstairs and upstairs sets were both on the ground level and that the stairs never actually went to an upstairs. Isn't the magic of editing amazing?

The "bedroom" sets are each of course separate sets too and are not actually in the doorways that you see on upstairs hallway sets.