Saturday, July 03, 2010

“We write every episode together from page one. There are seven of us on staff, and generally we are all sitting around while our assistant sits at a computer and typies it all up.

“To keep our momentum, we tend to skip over the science and put it in later: “Science to come.” The science itself isn’t crucial to understanding the show. It’s like Ricky shouting at Lucy in Spanish. You don’t have to understand it, but if you do, there’s another level available to you.

“We have a science advisor. A friend of a friend of mine was an astrophysicist at UCLA. What we did with the pilot was find stuff and then he corrected it. So for the show we asked him for recommendations for a science advisor. But he said, “can I do it?”

“Then later he told me he was on a plane reading a script, women came over and started talking to him. Welcome to LA where scripts are magic.

“The science has to be right. There was a show that shall remain nameless, but one of the characters was a paleontologist. And the paleontology was never anything that sounded right.

“We always have ‘the nerd beat.’ This is usually whatever we were talking about ten minutes before. Like Green Lantern is vulnerable to wood. But classic Green Lantern is vulnerable to the color yellow. Which means you can take both green lanterns out with a #2 pencil.

“Here’s our test for humor. If you can say a line to a friend, and your friend gets the joke without any context, then it’s a bad joke. You should have to spend ten minutes explaining who the characters are. If your friend doesn’t get the joke unless he knows the whole setup, then it’s a good joke.”

Labels: Banff, interviews

3:54 PM

1 Comments:

Thanks for this. I'm both a writer and fan of the show, so this info on the process is fascinating. DVD special features never go into the kind of depth I want.

By  Anonymous, at 8:28 PM  

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