Quote: ContainsNuts @ June 12, 2007, 5:15 PM
Just read the subject of this email! The guy who wrote it is having a laugh that is for sure!
Clearly mistaking volume for quality! Teamwriting v individuals. They should be producing a lot better stuff than they are considering the population and teams of writers they go through.
Our humour is cutting edge and much less censored than the US. I think we have more diversity too, not bad for a small country.
However, I do think Family Guy is one of the funniest things on TV at the mo, although their funniest character is played as a british baby.
It depends on teh team though. Some sitcoms have twelve or thirteen writers, yet they still struggle. I was watching some show the other week which had twenty eight writers and it was awful, mainly because it was unfocussed and jumped around too much.
If you write alone you have to discipline yourself to writing alone. And to do it well and be hard on yourself to turn in a good product. If you are in a team it has to be a team which works; just having a team of writers doesn't create anything. Having a team of good writers who work well together is the key.
If you look at SNL, in it's heyday the script meetings had thirty writers, and they would work around one table. And mostly, it worked, because although there was competition, all of them brought something to the team and the team and tehrefore the prodcut benefitted as a result.
Cheers I think had about twelve writers, and in it's zenith there was no one to touch it, simply because each line was written for each character as a punchline, and they went with the best one.
This is all pretty obvious stuff, but the trend here at least is to have a team of writers who meet up once and then go away and work alone and then come back and what you get is twelve voices. It's a misunderstanding of the system.
