Posts with tag KenLevine
Posted Jul 8th 2008 1:04PM by Keith McDuffee
Filed under: Retro Squad, Reality-Free, Cheers
One of our writers,
Bob Sassone, introduced me to
Ken Levine's blog a couple of years ago. Within a couple of weeks I had his RSS feed in my "Must Always Read" category, and there it remains.
If you don't know who Ken Levine is, if you're any sort of fan of television, it's likely you've seen something he's written: His credits include 36 episodes of
Cheers, 16 episodes of
M*A*S*H, seven episodes of
Frasier, seven episodes of
Becker, four episodes of
Wings, two episodes of
The Simpsons ... and a partridge in a pear tree. In short, the man knows how to write; he's won an Emmy for his writing and even sometimes offers a highly-regarded course on comedy writing, called
The Sitcom Room.
Levine's blog is filled with stories from his days with the aforementioned shows, and they're sometimes hilarious, always fascinating. As a friend of TV Squad, and to celebrate the all-things
Cheers week of
Retro Squad, he's taken the time out to share a new story below. Enjoy!
Continue reading The Cheers episode Ken Levine's still writing in his head
Posted Apr 7th 2008 1:02PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, OpEd, TV Squad Lists, Reality-Free
I was looking over a "Where are they now?" feature our friends at AOL put together on
the cast of Cheers, and a few of the mysteries of the long-running sitcom classic came to mind. These were head-scratchers big and small that made me wonder if the writers are the most clever geniuses ever to man a word processor (it
was the '80s, after all) or, like in most sitcoms, consistency of story was the first thing to go if a good joke came up in the writers' room.
I guess I should just go over to
Ken Levine's blog and ask him, since he wrote for the show for many years. But if I did that, I wouldn't get paid for it. So, after the jump are the biggest
Cheers mysteries, starting with the biggest and most obvious one:
Continue reading Five biggest Cheers mysteries
Posted Jul 26th 2007 11:21AM by Liz Finn-Arnold
Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, Industry, OpEd
How many times have you watched a sitcom on TV and thought, "Hey, I could do that?" Last weekend, twenty aspiring writers came together at the LAX Hilton to test that theory.
The Sitcom Room, an exhausting, yet exhilarating two-day event, was the brainchild of veteran TV sitcom writer
Ken Levine. To me, the event was the ultimate summer camp for aspiring writers and/or TV geeks.
Continue reading The Sitcom Room: So you think you can write?
Posted Jun 13th 2007 11:03AM by Liz Finn-Arnold
Filed under: OpEd, The Sopranos
I'll admit I was first "miffled" by most ambiguous ending ever in the history of series endings. But I'm beginning to come around to the the side that sees
The Sopranos finale as "brilliant" rather than "lame." David Chase left us wanting more, and that's pretty awesome. Besides,
according to Ken Levine, it could have been a lot worse.
On his blog, Ken, a veteran sitcom writer, hilariously reminds us just how annoying
The Sopranos finale would have been on network television. For starters, a countdown clock would have run across the bottom of our television screens for at least a month leading up to the finale. The two-hour finale would have been preceded by a one-hour clip show hosted by Bob Costas. Janice would have gotten her own spin-off called
Widow With Children.
Continue reading If the Sopranos were on network TV
Posted Mar 17th 2007 1:43PM by Bob Sassone
Filed under: Industry, Programming, Web, Celebrities
Posted Jan 31st 2007 2:02PM by Bob Sassone
Filed under: Industry, Programming, Web, Celebrities
Posted Dec 29th 2006 12:06PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Other Drama Shows, Other Comedy Shows, NBC, Industry, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 30 Rock
I came across an interesting article while perusing
Ken Levine's blog last night. He was quoted in
an LA Times article that came out on Christmas day; the article discusses the fact that most comedy writers intensely dislike
Studio 60 and think that the show is completely unrealistic.
But here's the interesting part: like the rest of us who have mixed feelings about the show, they're so fascinated by it that not only do they keep watching, it's also all they can talk about the next day. The comedy troupe
Employee of the Month even does a weekly sketch show imagining what the sketches conceived for the show would be like. Because the sketches themselves weren't funny, they inserted jokes about the program as part of a "backstage" portion of the show. Other writers have cited the fact that the
S60 writers are way too smart for their own good and never laugh at anything, which many writers think is the best part of the job. Ironically, many writers like
30 Rock, because the sketches are goofier and the depiction of a sketch show's writers' room is much closer to reality than it is on
S60.
Posted Oct 28th 2006 12:25PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, Industry, OpEd, Web, Celebrities, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
That's what veteran sitcom writer Ken Levine (right) wonders
on his blog; in fact, he wondered about that so much, he decided to write a little scene that would be typical of a Sorkin-written baseball program. Let's just say that involves a meeting on the mound between the manager and a pitcher named Danny (there's always a Danny in a Sorkin show, according to Levine) that lasts a lot longer than it should and involves lots of topics that are much more esoteric than whether to throw the next hitter a curveball or a fastball.
Levine knows where he's coming from with both comedy and baseball. As Bob Sassone has pointed out many times, Levine has worked on many classic sitcoms in his career (
M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier, etc.), but he was also a play-by-play broadcaster for the Orioles, Mariners, and Padres (comedy writer
and a baseball broadcaster... my two dream careers). One day, he should combine those careers and make a series about the lives of a major league team's broadcasters. I'm sure he'd make it less inside and self-important than Sorkin made
Studio 60, know what I mean?
Posted Aug 13th 2006 1:30PM by Bob Sassone
Filed under: Talent, Industry, Programming, Web, Celebrities
There's always something great to read at Ken Levine's blog, and this past week was no exception. He has a really funny (and really useful) list of situations and scenes that aspiring writers should never include in their TV scripts. My favorite:
Don't hinge your show on stunt casting. I read a "Becker" where former President Jimmy Carter came in for a check-up and offered dating advice. Yeah, President Carter gets his physicals in the Bronx. And yeah, President Carter is always available to guest on a sitcom and advise a character to say whatever is necessary to get laid.
Of course, we've all seen even worse things actually make it on the air, but this is a great list.
Posted Apr 29th 2006 11:04AM by Bob Sassone
Filed under: TV Royalty, Talent, Industry, Programming, Web, Celebrities
- Ken
Levine has two more terrific posts at his blog. In the first, he talks about the best spec script to submit to a TV show,
and in the second, he gives us a behind the scenes look at the writing room at a TV show. If you're not
reading Ken's blog on a regular basis, you're missing out.
Continue reading Out of the Blogosphere
Ken Levine has some thoughts on 
How can you tell if an actor is funny? Ken Levine 
Five other TV shows where Sarah Palin should appear
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