Sitcoms with limited sets

It was always surprising how small the Tonight Show set and stage looked when you got a glimpse of it in relation to the studio audience. During Carson's era, they tried really hard never to let you see that, so it would only happen if Robin Williams started running around or something unusual happened. On Leno's show, I think they constantly showed you wide shots that had the audience and the set visible in them.

 

I think that later in the series they started to go to the upstairs rooms in the house.

 

One angle they very rarely showed was behind the performer looking out. I think Letterman's show was the first to do that, and they actually had 6 or 7 cameras covering everything in the Ed Sullivan Theater.

Famously, Rosie O'Donnell was furious at her director for ever shooting behind her during her monologues, looking out at the audience. I think she had some physical attributes that she did not want to emphasize on camera. Several of her talk-show directors were fired because of these and other problems

 

Too bad St Elsewhere was not a sitcom. The entire show took place inside a snow globe.

 

Don't forget that these other shows - some sitcoms were contained within St Elsewhere St. Elsewhere :

Cheers : March 27, 1985 - Crossover episode
The Bob Newhart Show: November 20, 1985 Mr. Carlin appears
M*A*S*H: December 18, 1985 BJ is mentioned

 

Then you have to include Newhart since that was Bob Hartley's dream.

 

If Newhart is in then so is Coach (which had a crossover episode) and George and Leo.

And the episode where Bob appears on Murphy Brown is in too - which brings in The Nanny.

 

That's a big ass snow globe.

 

There's a podcast called "TV GUIDE-ance Counsler" where the host mapped a lot of this out.

The Nany brings in not only Everybody Loves Raymond but Spinal Tap too. And if you go the other way The White Shadow comes in since Coolidge is in both.

It's crazy how much the St Elsewhere ending screwed with the NBC universe.

 

On an podcast about the Multiverse, they mentioned that over 400 television shows exist within the Tommy Westfall Universe, including the program the Podcast was taken from.

 

So then, 6 degrees to St. Elsewhere can be done from all directions?

 

This reminded me of some studio dramas I've seen from the early 50s that were aired live. Since there were no audiences, the sets weren't just the two dimensional stages we expect. They had built hallways with multiple stages and the camera would follow the actors, making right angled turns to new stages or pulling the camera backwards to a previous set. The entire shows were shot with a single camera (!) so there was no way to fade from one set to another. Moving the camera between sets was the only workable solution.

 

It has been postulated that a majority of the entire TV universe is contained in Tommy Westphall's snow globe, because of the various character crossovers forming a continuity going all the way back to I Love Lucy.

The Westphall Theory of a Unified TV Universe, Explained

The Tommy Westphall Universe

 

The Honeymooners had varied quality of sets over the many years of that show.

I believe it was in the early years, the doors were not real frame and panel doors. They almost looked like cardboard with shadow lines painted on them to make it look like frame and panel. In later seasons they installed real doors.

But the area I'm still wondering about is when they show supposed sun light shining in through the window, and hitting the wall over the kitchen sink.

I've alway expected that it was just a hot light behind the set. But the last few times I noticed that situation, I thought that it looked like they had painted the wall, as a faux finish effect to look like sun light coming through the divided light window!

If so, that would be really creative, but then switching between day and night scenes they'd have to repaint every time.



I found the set I meant here for the pilot; but I'm sure there were many episodes like this — perhaps the entire first season or so.

 

On big movies and TV shows, there are scenic technicians called "standby painters" who will go in and deliberately lighten a wall or paint on the "effect" of sunlight or remove glare just to help a set look better on camera. Stuff like this goes back many years. I strongly disliked a lot of the early TV shows of the 1950s like Your Show of Shows and the first wave of Honeymooners because the sets looked so cheap. It was de rigueur to have painted chairs and tables on the backdrop behind the actors, kind of like vaudeville theaters. By the mid-to-late 1950s, they started having real props, real doors, real windows and so on, and it just escalated from there.

They did have "light schemes" where they could flip a switch and simulate a night look, or show what the room looked like before the lights turned on. Again, that's an old theater trick going back to the 1920s (maybe even before electric light).

 

Yes, the recent "NBC Live Musical" events for Grease and Sound of Music did the same thing, shooting on multiple stages all over a big lot, but it was done with multiple cameras do give them some flexibility in shooting. There were live audiences watching monitors and in some of the studios to give them a live effect, laughs and applause and stuff.

The old 1950s live shows like Playhouse 90 and so on did not have audiences, but they did still use multiple live cameras on large sets with hallways, bedrooms, offices, courtrooms, whatever they needed to tell the story. Just as with Saturday Night Live today, they'd go to commercial and then use that time to remove the sets and pull in new ones to continue a scene set in a new place. As far as I know, multiple-camera live shows go back to the early history of TV: this shot below is I think from about 1940-1941...



Just two cameras is at least enough to give them a close-up and a wide shot, and you can do a lot with just that. I think 3 cameras was pretty standard, even for local TV.

 

Sanford and Son.

 

During my career as a print art director, 80s, 90s and 00s, in the studio we used duratrans (huge rear lit positive transparencies, 20' x 60') of out door scenes, to simulate reality through windows.

While today, a lot of that can be accomplished with Photoshop, CGI and green screen, in my experience, there was a level of detail lost on the windows themselves in the lack of accurate lighting on the window frame and reflections on the glass when stripping in a scene the old analogue rubylith method or in fact even with Photoshop.

Does anybody still use duratrans in film, or is it all done with CGI and green screen?

 

Yeah, I used to dislike the crude nature of those early sets as well, but now I find them historically compelling.

That was actually good enough back then.

 

I always heard them called "Translux" in production, just a giant rear-illuminated photograph of a city background or something like that outside a set window. From a distance, it looks surprisingly real, even standing there on the set looking with your eyes.

The recent ILM "Stagecraft" system where they're using giant LED screens with moving backgrounds has changed production quite a bit, starting with Mandalorian and extending to the Marvel shows like WandaVision and so on. When they have time to plan it, you can shoot with a big screen background and actually move the camera around and have the background move in perspective with the camera. It's not cheap, but it works very well with productions of a certain budget (and up).

 

Sounds like massive improvements. Not surprising though. Thanks for the info.

 

They had a few sets though:

The shop floor
Canteen
Two manager offices
Maybe the warehouse?

 

The Office.
The Royle Family.
Early Doors.

All absolute classics as well.

 

All I remember on Three's Company is the apartment/kitchen and the Regal Beagle. Any else?

 

It also often featured the following (what I remember off the top of my heard:

• The Roper's Apartment
• The Apartment Bedrooms and Bathroom (that's where Janet and Chrissy met Jack when he woke up in the Bathtub)
  
• Jack's Bistro
• Janet's Flower Shop