Contemplating the meaning of life over email while watching the men's U.S. Open final.

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Laugh Riot

by Tad Friend  40 mins

What happens when a newcomer tries to bend the rules of the most venerable and conservative of cultural forms—the American sitcom?

In a large white office at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, an office that falls under the bashful gaze of the seven dwarfs who adorn the pediment of corporate headquarters across the way, four men are brooding about art, commerce, and the fate of their television show. It is a late afternoon in mid-July, and the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, sits at his desk smoking a Merit and sneaking glances at the computer screen, where the script of his second episode awaits him. ABC, the network that will air their situation comedy, wants it to be filmed in front of a live audience and have a laugh track. To Sorkin and the others in this room, a laugh track represents all that is truckling and mediocre about television and would destroy their show. “It feels like I’ve put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cuff links,” Sorkin told me, “and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.”

The show, Sports Night, which debuts on ABC this Tuesday night, September 22, at 9:30 P.M., is about six smart producers and anchors of a late-night sports-highlight show that resembles ESPN’s Sports Center. Some of the best sitcoms have been about the world of television—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Larry Sanders Show—but Sorkin intends an unusual mixture of comedy and drama, with runs of banter that are funny but not jokey intercut with serious, and even solemn, moments. In the first episode, Casey, one of the anchors, is getting a divorce and contemplating quitting the broadcast because sports has become a greedy and violent business; in a later episode, a female character named Dana, the producer ofSports Night, reveals finely nuanced crises of conscience about how to broker, publicize, and conduct an interview with a star football player who just exposed himself in the locker room to the show’s young female reporter. It’s because of this mixture that the network has been so insistent on the reassuring overlay of “audience response” sound.

“The show starts off confusing viewers,” Jamie Tarses, the president of ABC Entertainment, explained to me. Though she acquired the show and has championed it at the network, she’s worried about it. “People will wonder, ‘Am I supposed to think this is funny, or serious?’ So we’re nervous about it. People need the comforting aural cue of laughter. It’s conditioning.”

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Sorkin, writer of the screenplays for A Few Good Men and The American President, had not planned his first foray into television to be a traditional sitcom, but something moodier and more realistic. “In film,” Sorkin had told me, “my critics will tell you that nobody hugs the middle of the road tighter than I do, and I do feel comfortable there—you don’t watch A Few Good Men and go, ‘Wow, this is different!’ But while in any other art form mixing comedy and drama is three thousand years old, in the half-hour TV show it’s unheard of.” Though Sorkin merely wants to create a well-crafted amalgam of comedy and menschy melodrama—The American President on the small screen—the half-hour form is so hidebound that what he proposes is akin to adding contraception to Catholic dogma.

The men gathered in Sorkin’s office are by turns defiant and fretful. “The problem with the laugh track is that it makes all television the same,” Thomas Schlamme, the show’s director, says. Schlamme developed the unorthodox camera style of Larry Sanders and directed last year’s live episode of E.R. With his baseball cap, and his glasses dangling on a lanyard, the director is the picture of L.A. cool, but he’s also the group’s bomb thrower. “Suddenly Susan and Seinfeld have the same laugh track, though there’s not a fucking laugh in Suddenly Susan and there’s a thousand in Seinfeld.”

“I’d like to see Jamie and say we don’t want the audience,” says Tony Krantz, the co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing Sports Night.

“With all respect,” says Rob Scheidlinger, an executive producer on the show, “it’s too easy for them to say no to you.” Krantz needs to maintain smooth relations with ABC’s executives if he wants to sell them other shows in the future, and he is by nature a mediator. “There’s only one man who has the leverage with ABC,” Scheidlinger continues, “and that’s Aaron.”

Sorkin looks uneasy, and lights up another cigarette. A handsome, high-cheekboned thirty-seven-year-old with a mop of dirty-blond hair and rimless glasses, Sorkin is wearing one of his fourteen white Gap Oxford shirts, paired with a narrow tie. This is a look meant to evoke the old-photo insouciance of his idol, the playwright and Algonquin wit George S. Kaufman. “I’d like to say, ‘Jamie, you have two choices,’” Sorkin says finally. “ ‘Put the show on or don’t. But if you do, do it our way.’”

“How far are we willing to go on this?” Schlamme asks.

“We’re not willing to cancel the show,” Krantz says quickly.

“Aren’t we?” Scheidlinger asks.

“Well, I think we are,” Sorkin says. “I think we have to do this show for thirteen episodes, and then be canceled, if that’s what’s necessary.” There is a silence, and then Sorkin launches into one of his articulate tirades.

“ABC says they want the audience because it opens up the actors’ performances, makes them brighter, but they actually just want the two hundred people there on Thursday night so they can tell if it’s good—otherwise they have no idea. If I’m a creative person, I’m going to write or direct or act, I’m not going to go work as an ABC exec. They do not understand that it’s about taking risks, and about taste.” Sorkin doesn’t necessarily believe this, but it sounds impressive and he’s rolling. “And furthermore, the idea that two hundred people from Canoga Park who’ve just passed through a metal detector are determining what’s funny in television is truly scary.”

“I just don’t get it!” Scheidlinger bursts out. A short, balding man who was formerly Sorkin’s agent, he often sits through these meetings in a brown study, and then startles everyone by finishing someone else’s half-articulated idea with an apt, gnomic phrase such as “causeless anthropomorphism.”

“It’s fear,” Krantz says coolly—the chief resident diagnosing a puzzling fever for the interns. “Fear is the reason TV is the way it is. It’s about the bottom falling out in the ratings, about worrying about looking stupid—it’s about playing it safe, about not getting fired for not taking a risk. Do you give in to the fear, and give the audience the past, or a repurposed past, which they’re familiar with?”

“What will happen with this audience is that ABC will have control,” Schlamme says, his face growing red, “because they can see the effect of what we do on the audience. And they get to keep saying, ‘More Jeremy falling’”—a reference to the show’s brainy but sometimes bumbling associate producer character—“And ‘Make Jeremy bigger, more laughs. More, more, more!’ That’s not the show I signed on to do.” He looks intently at Sorkin.

Sorkin says, “So this, right here, is the struggle for the soul ofSports Night.” He picks up the phone and calls Tarses’s office to make an appointment for the next day. But he’s feeling queasy. He fears that Tarses—who regularly pokes fun at the formality of his manners, and who has suffered through a number of his tantrums—doesn’t like him. “I’m not good at confrontation,” he tells me afterward. “I either blow up or I cave. And threatening to quit seems like an awfully big bat to use on people you’re supposed to be collaborating with.”

***

There are three rules for creating a hit network television show. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC, West Coast, likes to tell the story of how he watched twenty minutes of the pilot for E.R., then turned to the network’s entertainment president, Warren Littlefield, and said, “Either the audience is never leaving, or they’re never coming back.”

“I didn’t know,” Ohlmeyer told me blithely when I visited him in his office not long ago. With his yellow cashmere sweaters and loafers worn without socks, his cigarettes two-fingered from an elegant box, the silver-haired Ohlmeyer embodies the Bel Air style, a kind of weary sapience. After thirty-one years in the industry, he concludes, “Hey, if you bat a hundred in television, you’re in the Hall of Fame. For a show to be a breakout hit, there has to be some magic that happens with the audience. Nobody knows what that is. Nobody fucking knows. But everybody’s chasing that magic.”

The chase has become exceptionally desperate of late. Twenty years ago, NBC’s head programmer, Paul Klein, believed that the only way viewers would not watch a network show was if you startled them somehow. His “least objectionable programming theory” was predicated on the belief that on any given Thursday viewers tuned in at eight P.M. for CHiPS and kept watching whatever NBC happened to show until bedtime. The trick was not to disturb their reverie: “Thought, that’s tune-out, education, tune-out,” Klein wrote. “Melodrama’s good, you know, a little tear here and there, a little morality tale. That’s good. Positive. That’s least objectionable.”

At that time, though, NBC, ABC, and CBS attracted 91 percent of the prime-time viewers. Today, with the roaring growth of cable and of the newer networks—Fox, Warner Bros. (the WB), and United Paramount Networks (UPN)—the big three are drawing only 47 percent.

“Historically the business was about ‘flow,’” Don Ohlmeyer says, referring to the belief that viewers would seamlessly flow from one show to a similar one in the next time period. It doesn’t work that way anymore: he cites network research showing that less than 50 percent of the people who watch Friends Thursdays on NBC at eight P.M. are still watching NBC when E.R. appears at ten P.M. “Today it’s about appointments,” Ohlmeyer goes on, meaning that remote-clicking viewers will only schedule time to watch their favorite shows. All twenty-two prime-time hours have to be appointments, and each half hour has to be an appointment. There is no ‘the audience’ anymore.”

Steven Bochco, who created Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, says, “I liken the networks to a guy who, as he loses more and more hair, invents a more and more elaborate comb-over in denial. ‘We’re stemming the tide.’ ‘No one else can do what we can do.’ ‘We still reach more people than anyone else.’ Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. In fact, as any idiot can tell, we’re getting our brains beaten out.”

The traditional broadcasters worry that if they don’t figure out some way of recapturing the audience from such edgier pleasures as South Park, they’ll become known as the county fair of the information age—as the antiquated place you visit twice a year to catch the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl. Recently, the networks have begun to ask themselves a novel question: What if we take a stab at the fresh, the daring, the alternative? Not long ago, NBC’s Entertainment president Warren Littlefield gave all his executives granite stones engraved with a single word: Risk.

Two years ago, the imperative to take risks led ABC to hire Jamie Tarses, then thirty-two, away from NBC, making her the first woman to head a network entertainment division. The largely male Hollywood establishment still sifts compulsively through the minutiae of her behavior (which is by turns playful and brusque) looking for signs of hauteur or simmering sexual tension—motivations it would never impute to a male executive.

Tarses, for her part, upheld the network’s new credo last fall when Sorkin was pitching Sports Night to her. “The greatest thing about you is that you don’t know the rules—we don’t want you to follow the TV handbook,” she told him. “TV is about the writer, and we’re executives. Our job is to let you succeed or fail wildly.”

Traditionally, ABC had done neither. For most of the past decade, it has been the family network, known for shows like Growing Pains and Full House. But last year it fell to third place in ratings among eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old viewers—for the first time, it lagged behind even the upstart Fox—so throwing away the TV handbook started to sound smart. ABC Entertainment chairman Stu Bloomberg, a shy man with a soul spot and a dot of a beard, told me that the ABC of the future will be defined by distinctive shows like Sports Night, and by the network’s ubiquitous, bright-yellow we-love-TV ad campaign. “Hopefully, this fall our programming has caught up to the campaign,” Bloomberg said. It’s a curious idea—trying to program to match the standard of your ads, rather than vice-versa. It’s an even more curious one, given that the thrust of TBWA Chiat/Day’s campaign is to provoke a blanket nostalgia for the pre-cable world of indiscriminate viewing (“TV, so good, they named a frozen meal after it”).

Sports Night, as it happens, came straight out of cable’s sensibility. Five years ago, Sorkin was living at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, rewriting The American President through the night. “I kept the television on for company,” Sorkin says, “and it was tuned to ESPN’s Sports Center. There was this rotating group of anchors that I liked: they knew a lot and didn’t suffer foolishness. And I thought, If I worked there, I’d meet my girlfriend and my best friend. I wanted to be part of that family.” The subject of sports isn’t particularly suited to a TV series, but likable characters who like sports are. “Creating a friendly environment that people want to be part of is TV,” Sorkin says. Specifically, it is a TV sitcom: hour-long television shows usually take you on some sort of journey (The Love Boat), while half-hour ones encourage you to be happy where you are, with your family (Roseanne) or your workplace family (Cheers).

Television encourages brief, fierce loyalties. This is why, as the medium has matured, the sitcom has become its most popular form: there are now more than sixty sitcoms in production.

Indeed, in the half century since the first sitcom, The Goldbergs, aired in 1949, even middling situation comedy—Family Ties orMarried … with Children—has become a mainstay of the entertainment economy, earning hundreds of millions of dollars for the network and similar amounts for its creators when sold into syndication. These shows are mass culture at its most potent and pervasive, and, often, at its schlockiest. But once in a while a show arrives that actually deserves its gigantic audience and helps imprint a cultural moment, be it the seventies political rants of All in the Family or the nineties narcissism of Seinfeld. Those few we call classics.

Hoping to create such a classic, Aaron Sorkin took his idea to Tony Krantz’s Imagine Television, which is half owned by the Walt Disney Company and which serves as a bridge between the “talent” and the networks. Brian Grazer, who is best known for producing such films as Apollo 13 and Liar, Liar, and who is Krantz’s co-chairman, often seems restless with his role as intermediary, and with television, of which he says “most everything fails and at best it’s mediocre.” When I had breakfast with Grazer and Krantz last June at the Polo Lounge, Grazer was jittery, his hair sticking up like Alfalfa’s. “You’re meeting with Jamie?” he asked distractedly. “She’ll probably show up topless.” Minutes later he blurted out, “Aaron’s very intense. He has a brittle quality—at the table read, he scared me! He’s like an assault weapon!” He glanced at Krantz, who was radiating his usual brown-eyed, Yogi Bear calm. “Maybe I should backtrack on that,” Grazer said.

Krantz said smoothly, “I think what Brian is referencing is that Aaron was totally focused, totally on his game.”

When I spoke to Krantz later, he was candid about why he took the show to ABC: Disney owns not only the network (whose license fee of $800,000 per episode of Sports Night is much higher than the industry average of $500,000) and Touchstone Television, which is co-producing the show, but also ESPN. So opportunities for cross-promotion abound.

“I’m dreaming aloud here,” Krantz said, “but if we prove ourselves, there may be opportunities to promote the show with ESPN magazine, at the theme parks, on Monday Night Football.”

When I brought up the idea of synergy to Brian Grazer, he mumbled non sequiturs and then laughed uneasily. “I’m just camouflaging what seems so crass—obviously, when it comes to time slots or staying on the air, Disney is going to choose their children over other children,” he said.

Krantz’s first order of business, though, was to introduce Sorkin to the rarefied ways of sitcom development. “Tony would get out a pen and a legal pad,” Sorkin recalls, “and say, ‘Okay, tell me about the characters. There’d be a producer, right, a girl? And a boss who’s a Lou Grant type? And some interns?’ He doesn’t do that anymore.” Sorkin hates to be prodded, and he inveighs against television’s schematizing tendency, in which “characters are defined by career goals and libidos—this is the one who works too hard, this is the horny one, this is the gay guy.” Yet he also wanted the show to click. By the time he’d finished conceiving his characters, they included a producer who was a girl, a boss who was a Lou Grant type, and an internlike assistant producer, Jeremy.

More ambitiously, Sorkin planned to challenge many of the rules of sitcom scene writing, rules that even the best sitcoms often follow. The rules run more or less as follows: Shows have an “A” and a subsidiary “B” story (and sometimes a “C” story as well), which are “broken” across three acts or a “teaser” and two acts; scenes should have three laughs to a page; no character can leave a room without saying something funny; and a scene should end with a zinger that sends everyone into the commercial laughing. (For example, two characters ask the boss for a raise, the boss instead yells and storms out, one character says brightly, “Well, that went well.”) This is the “button,” or “blow,” to the scene. Sitcom characters also behave in predictably eccentric ways: they move to new towns and only then decide if they’re going to stay; sit around three sides of a dinner table (leaving one side for the camera); are always best friends with the people across the hall; spend every night with their friends in strangely uncrowded bars having strangely audible conversations; refer to sex with bizarre euphemisms (“She really rotated my tires!”); speak expositorily on the phone (“I know you’re my mother, and you just want to remind me that my brother, Jonathan, is allergic to cats . . .”); run amok with new responsibilities until they’re “drunk with power”; get embroiled in weird misunderstandings and rather than just explaining the confusion, instead break into someone’s apartment to replace the message they’d left on the answering machine; never do any actual work; often learn lessons that require a group hug; and never watch TV themselves. (In its first few episodes, Sports Night presents characters who continually question their own right to assert power, spend much of the time passionately and intelligently pursuing their jobs, and also watch a fair amount of TV.)

Last Christmas, when Sorkin delivered his rule-bending pilot script about Casey’s divorce and gloom, ABC professed delight. Tarses said at the outset, “I’m as excited about Sports Night as I’ve ever been about a show.”

***

The network authorized the making of a twenty-one-minute-and-forty-five-second pilot; production expenses—including the building of the elaborate set—eventually mounted up to more than $1.9 million. With real money now at stake, the network’s summons to break the rules and go for “wild success or wild failure” was superseded: a wild failure could cost ABC more than $10 million. So it began to nudge Sorkin toward the rhythms and protocols of television—and toward the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old demographic that is the advertisers’ favored target.

The importance of the eighteen-to-thirty-four market explains why last year Fox could charge advertisers $200,000 for a thirty-second spot on King of the Hill, while CBS, the number one network for people aged fifty and older, could charge only $110,000 for the same ad on its show in the same time slot, Touched by an Angel—even though Touched had five million more viewers each week. “As the years go by,” King of the Hill co-creator Greg Daniels says cheerfully, “their audience is dying and ours is getting jobs and spending money.”

It also explains the repetitiousness of what we see. “Because everyone is sharing that demo,” says Dean Valentine, the president and CEO of UPN, “way too many shows are Friends clones about affluent twenty-seven-year-old yuppies who wear black knit shirts, work in a magazine office, and just want to get laid.”

Tarses felt that Sorkin’s story needed a few tweaks. One of her trademark “notes” on stories is “Could we make the woman’s role stronger?” and she suggested that he beef up the part of Dana, the show’s producer; he says her “very, very good notes” inspired him to write a crucial scene in which Dana asserts herself. Tarses and her ABC colleagues also wanted Sorkin to take up the hints of a romantic interest between Dana and Casey, the just divorced anchor: like most network executives, she likes story lines about smoldering lust.

ABC wanted James Burrows, a veteran of Cheers, to direct the pilot, but Sorkin decided on Tommy Schlamme, in part because of his association with The Larry Sanders Show. Schlamme told Sorkin that the time had come to take the half hour, visually, where Steven Bochco had taken the hour with Hill Street Blues. In the traditional “four camera” sitcom, filmed before an audience, the cameras are out in front of the stage and the actors face forward from the living room, as if they were in a play. Schlamme wanted to film without an audience, using a “single camera” style in which the cameras can go deep into the set, getting better “angles” and also better “eyes,” or close-ups. The single-camera style feels more like a movie. And it usually doesn’t have a laugh track.

By television standards, the sitcom laugh track has deep roots. In 1949, the West Coast producers of The Hank McCune Show, a series about an inept TV show host, added the first laugh track because they wanted to replicate the feel of shows produced with live audiences in New York City—they wanted Hank McCune to feel like television. But laugh tracks quickly became a bass line underneath jokes, and they reached their peculiar apogee in the 1960s, when shows such as The Munsters featured metronomic guffaws every six seconds. (After the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, CBS, in a strange attempt to regain the audience’s trust, put a disclaimer on its sitcoms declaring that the laughter we were about to hear wasn’t real.) In the 1970s, shows such as All in the Family tried to distinguish themselves as more “real” by being “taped before a live studio audience.” Then, in the 1980s, a number of shows—The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,Hooperman, and United States, among others—tried to distinguish themselves as completely real by dispensing with the laughter and the audience altogether. Most were bombs; not one was a hit. Shows without laughs can sound dry and feel weirdly unsettling, though the audience often isn’t sure why.

Today, when even game shows are “sweetened” with sounds ranging from the “low, warm chuckle” to the “innuendo laugh,” the necessity of the laugh track has become an article of faith among network programmers. Sorkin recalls Stu Bloomberg telling him that The Wonder Years was the only one-camera show that ever worked. “I said, ‘Stu, you have to allow for the fact that those shows didn’t fail because they were single-camera, they failed because they were lousy.’”

The pilot for Sports Night was made in April, with a laugh track: the producers buckled simply to get the pilot on the air, and they planned to raise the issue with ABC again. In an unusual compromise, the show was filmed with an audience on one night, but there were also several days of shooting without an audience. Though the episode was unevenly paced and contained some uncertain acting moments, it was a promising piece of work, and in May, ABC announced that Sports Night would be on its fall schedule—in a favored time slot, between the network stalwarts Spin City and NYPD Blue.

By now a pattern had emerged, one familiar to countless previous television writers: The more promising Sorkin’s work was, the more the network had at stake; and the more it had at stake, the more inclined it was to favor time-tested formulas over the innovations of a television neophyte like Sorkin. ABC wanted the show to be funnier and the characters to be more clearly sitcom types. To that end, they prevailed upon Sorkin to hire Tim Doyle, previously the head writer for the ABC shows Ellen and Grace Under Fire, and his two writing partners, all of whom were under contract to Disney. (Two other Disney writers were also pushed Sorkin’s way.) “There’s a lot of money involved here, and a lot of ambivalence about what Aaron has done, so Disney is looking to cover its ass in every conceivable way,” Doyle explains. “They wanted me to be there in case everything turned to shit.”

The day before a big laugh-track meeting in June, ABC, as if to ensure Sorkin’s compliance, presented him with its audience-research findings. A survey of 288 viewers who had watched theSports Night pilot found that it tested strongly, at a rating of 160 (100 is average), and skewed toward eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds and, heavily, toward males. But follow-ups with four focus groups in Chicago and Atlanta revealed that viewers would not seek out the show because of the depressing story line, and that Casey was perceived as “whiny and weak.” (Touchstone Television’s own testing, Rob Scheidlinger says, showed that women found Casey “mopey and morose.”) The research department concluded that “viewers need more depth and frequency to the comedy (one-liners were effective to a point) and only want drama used every so often as a tool to give the characters more dimension.”

Many classic sitcoms—including The Dick Van Dyke Show, MASH,Taxi, and Seinfeld—tested poorly or had a chilly initial response from viewers. Testing rewards the nice, the familiar, not the fresh or ironical. Nonetheless, after staring at ABC’s data, Sorkin had a difficult few days. “Everything untraditional was seen as fatally bad,” he told me, with his usual passionate hyperbole, “and the gist of the research seemed to be that I should consider myself extremely lucky that ABC had ordered thirteen episodes, and that any further departures from the norm would end my participation on the show.”

The other networks were following Sorkin’s laugh-track battle with a more than sporting interest. However much the other networks like to see risky ideas succeed (enabling them to follow suit), they prefer to see them fail, because that vindicates the status quo. Don Ohlmeyer, at NBC, told me with a big grin, “I’d love for the show’s creators to prevail on the laugh track—it would improve the chances for our show in that slot. Nobody’s coming home from work saying, ‘Gee, I can’t wait to see that new show without the laugh track’—that’s just creative caca. So what makes Aaron think he’s so right?”

Sorkin and the other producers had naively thought that they’d win because they believed the show was clearly better without laughs. Then came the big June laugh-track summit in Stu Bloomberg’s corner office, where it became apparent that the network’s position was unyielding. Both Lloyd Braun, the chairman of Disney’s Buena Vista Television, and Tony Krantz delivered impassioned speeches suggesting that the network would remain in third place unless it took chances like not having this laugh track, unless—in that fitting phrase—ABC “got out of the box.”

“You delivered a pilot with a laugh track, and we bought it,” Bloomberg observed. “Now you’re trying to pull the rug out.”

Tarses brought up MASH, a show whose sensibility Sorkin had said he’d like to emulate, and pointed out that it had a laugh track. Sorkin groused, “Yeah, but Larry Gelbart”—the show’s co-creator—“didn’t like it very much.”

“The show ran for eleven years,” Tarses said reasonably. “Who gives a fuck whether he liked it or not?”

An hour after the meeting ended, Sorkin called Bloomberg and Tarses, and apologized: “Is there anything I can do to disabuse you of the notion that I think you’re jerks?” They laughed. But the mutual unease remained. Tarses told me, “Everything we say to Aaron has the unspoken sentence in front of it: ‘You’re extraordinarily good at what you do—we’re in awe of your ability.’ And then we say, ‘But here’s what you must do, or here’s why what you did sucks.’ Our criticism is really just suggestions, and a desire to collaborate. I feel bad because Aaron does view it very personally as criticism, and so he causes himself far more pain.”

It was a morning in mid-July, and a group of the Sports Nightproducers were sitting in Aaron Sorkin’s office scarfing Doritos and peanut M&M’s and talking about the prospects for their show. Slouched on chairs and couches were Sorkin, Schlamme, Scheidlinger, and Tim Doyle. Doyle, a hulking man with a salt-and-pepper beard, was dressed in the TV writer’s uniform: jeans and an unbuttoned flannel shirt over a T-shirt. This was also the classic male adolescent uniform in 1978, when many current TV writers were watching a lot of TV, which may not be a coincidence.

The topic of the moment was what kind of language you could get away with on television. Everyone was wondering if a piece of innuendo from another writer’s script, in which Jeremy refers to someone’s takeout Peking duck by saying, “I never eat anything with a face on it,” would slip by the network’s Standards and Practices department. (Sorkin would say later: “It doesn’t matter—it’s a bad joke and not the kind of thing we’re going to do.”) The networks are trying to appeal to the young and hip with controversial words and scenarios while trying not to alienate Middle America or their affiliate owners, many of whom are conservative and religious. Sorkin gets weekly memos from the network’s Standards and Practices department telling him, for instance, that the “use of ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ is excessive and must be reduced by 1/2.”

“You can now say ‘penis,’” Doyle informed the intensely curious men. “You can say, ‘Put your penis in your pants.’ You can’t say, ‘Suck my penis.’”

“What about ‘playing with his penis’?” Schlamme asked.

“Maybe.”

“What did you get away with on Ellen that surprised you?” Sorkin asked.

“ ‘Asshole.’”

Sorkin was outraged. “You got ‘asshole,’ and we didn’t get ‘son of a bitch’?”

“I got a couple of ‘dyke’s, too,” Doyle says. “But I still have the Standards and Practices memo saying that Ellen couldn’t kiss her girlfriend—that gays should ‘express their affection in other ways.’”

Sorkin was even more upset about ABC’s proposed ad campaign for the show. The network memo had suggested “testimonial tease spots (male/female POV)”—men declaring that they like the show’s sports angle, and women saying they like its relationships. This struck everyone as formulaic. “Doing these ads is hard,” Sorkin said, at his usual rat-a-tat-tat pace. “It’s the Sunday crossword.” He makes a characteristic “um ah ah” sound as his tongue catches up to his spinning brain, like a car double-clutching on a curve. “But you get a feeling from ABC that ‘every executive producer says his show is different, and eighty-five percent of our shows fail, so why should we devote all this energy to you when you probably won’t be around?’”

Sorkin had proposed a spot in which actors playing ABC admen sit around trying to come up with a campaign for the show. Tarses quickly rejected his idea, but Sorkin and Doyle now traded cheesy lines that the actors might say: “Could we have a sassy black neighbor?” “We have a campaign for a show we’re not going to air that you could use.” “We’ve had a lot of success with funny aliens.” “We have a relationship with Fran Drescher—you could use her.”

“What you’ll be appalled by,” Doyle said, “is that they’ll do a twin shot of Michael J. Fox falling off the bed and getting his head stuck in the toilet”—on Spin City—“and Jeremy falling off the chair, and they’ll say, ‘Two, two, two times the fun, Tuesdays on ABC.’ They’ll sell the least desirable aspect of the show.”

“Because it’s easiest to sell,” Sorkin said. “What kind of veto power do I have over these ads?”

“You have as much power as you assume,” Doyle said serenely, “but it’s ABC’s show, and they can do what they want.”

“You mean it’s their air,” Sorkin said. “It’s not their show.”

Doyle cocked his head and smiled slowly. “You don’t have any real power, but you have leverage—they can’t do the show without you.”

This sort of griping is endemic to television writers, yet Sorkin seems to require an enemy even more than most. His friend Warren Beatty, who has high praise for his abilities, says, “I’d like to see Aaron become the head of a network”—he laughs—“so that his vestigial patricidal instincts are quelled. It’s nice to put the problem off on someone, but he needs to learn that the creator is his own enemy, that the enemy is fatigue and stupor and cliché.” Today Sorkin felt that the enemy was the rule book: “I’m trying to discourage the writers from their sitcom instincts,” he told me, after the others had left, “from having all the characters hang out at the local bar. Every writer’s script has a ‘My God, you’re the greatest’ tear-welling-up moment about another character and we’ve got to pull them all out.”

Later that morning, the group returned. One of the writers, Paul Redford, came into Sorkin’s office to ask for help with the C story in his script. “You don’t have to talk about A story and B story and C story,” Sorkin says, blowing cigarette smoke and starting to speechify. “That’s a language imposed on us by network people, like ‘back story’ instead of ‘exposition.’ It’s bullshit. We need to be a bit more magical.”

Doyle sang out, “Maybe we can call them 1 story, 2 story, and 3 story.”

Afterward, Redford said quietly, “Everyone always says they’re going to blow away the rules, but it’s a pretty rigid format.” Indeed, Sorkin’s own Sports Night scripts have classic A and B stories. What makes them distinctive is that he doesn’t bait for laughs by doing setup lines and jokes as much as by stringing garlands of dialogue in which a phrase wends sinuously throughout. One character in these scenes is typically passionate about his or her agenda, the other is inattentive or just barely hanging in there. In the second episode, entitled “The Apology,” the show’s senior associate producer, Natalie, huddles with Casey:

Natalie: I may have certain feelings for Jeremy.

Casey: Ah.

Natalie: I think it’s possible that I have feelings.

Casey: Okay.

Natalie: I think these feelings could interfere with my judgment as far as his work is concerned.

Casey: I admire your professionalism.

Natalie: These feelings have been growing inside me, like a rush or a surge of—

Casey: That’s probably a little more than I need to know about the—

Natalie: Fine.

Often Sorkin’s scripts pivot on a scrap of dialogue in a way that suddenly introduces a confrontation, a cri de coeur. In this same episode, the other anchor, Dan, is in trouble with the network because Esquire has written about his membership in an organization that supports legalizing marijuana. Forced to render some sort of apology on the air, Dan unexpectedly apologizes to his younger brother, Sam. He explains to the viewers that Sam died eleven years ago in a car crash, high on the marijuana he’d seen his brother so often smoke. Haltingly, Dan says, “I’m sorry, Sam. You deserved better in my hands.”

ABC had just told Sorkin that it loved the script, and he was now, briefly, jaunty. “It’s unusual for half-hour television,” he said. “Ordinarily a show about drugs is a ‘very special’ Home Improvement, in which the parents find a roach clip in Timmy’s bedroom and give him a talking-to. Still, ABC’s response was so amazed. I feel like a guy who goes to a desert island full of natives and pulls out a cigarette lighter and flicks it, and they think I’m a god!”

The night before Sorkin was supposed to have his final laugh-track showdown with Jamie Tarses, the producers and stars of ABC’s shows had the promotional duty of mingling with ABC executives and television critics from around the country at a cocktail party in the Horseshoe Garden of the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. It was a Thursday in mid-July, and a swing band played “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” as half-sozzled critics sought out the Olsen twins beneath clusters of yellow “ABC” balloons. Meanwhile, the producers of Sports Night began a series of skirmishes with the network’s executives.

Sorkin and Schlamme cornered Carolyn Ginsburg Carlson, ABC’s senior vice president of comedy programming, near a bed of ice stacked with glistening shrimp to ask again why she favors a laugh track. Carlson, a petite woman in an elegant white suit, glanced nervously up at the two men standing before her with their arms folded. “For me, the real issue isn’t the laugh track but the audience—that’s what we want,” she said. “The night when we were shooting the pilot with an audience was the first time I saw the actors smile. It makes the actors more generous.”

Sorkin muttered, “If they argue for an audience, they get a laugh track, too, without having to argue for it, which sounds so silly.”

“I’d rather give up the eye candy,” Carlson went on, referring to Schlamme’s panning and Steadicam shots, “and focus on the relationships.”

“I’m not arguing because I want my visual stamp on the show,” Schlamme said with a forced smile, “but because this guy”—he tossed a thumb toward Sorkin, who had gone off to brace Stu Bloomberg on the same topic—“wants this show to feel real.”

“I believe you can have proscenium shows that feel real,” Carlson said, using shorthand for the way four-camera shows resemble a stage play.

“Really?” Schlamme said. “Which ones?”

“Well, you’re probably going to laugh at me,” she said, uncertainly, “but Friends—I believe in those characters. And Spin City—that’s a world I believe in.” Schlamme looked at her, politely incredulous. “Maybe we can try it your way,” Carlson finally said. “But we’d only be doing it because we respect you and want you to be happy.”

As the party was winding down at ten-thirty P.M., Sorkin took Jamie Tarses aside for an intense conversation in a corner of the hotel’s huge green lawn. Afterward, he didn’t speak until he and his wife, Julia, were in their black Range Rover driving home. “I got hosed, I got hosed,” he said at last as the car crept down the 110 freeway. “You married a half-man, a fraction of a man. We’ll film the show without an audience on Wednesdays and Fridays, and also tape it in front of an audience Thursday nights. There will be a laugh track.”

“What happened?” Julia asked.

He sighed. “We talked about our relationship, and why it wasn’t better, given that we have a similar sensibility and we’re working toward the same end. She confided—maybe she says this to all the executive producers—that of all the new shows, Sports Nightwas the one she cared about. But she said that because our show is difficult, it needs a laugh track and an audience, so people will watch it and like it.” Julia rubbed his arm gently. “And, in truth,” he said after a wrenching pause, “there was part of me that agrees with her. So I told Jamie she’d won, for two reasons. Number one, she’s the boss, and number two, I have to believe, based on her success at NBC, that she’s got stuff in her head about how to make this work that’s more credible than what I’ve got in my head.”

“So it’s not your show anymore,” Julia said sadly.

“No . . . it’s still my show,” Sorkin said, slowly, as if he were trying to persuade himself that there was honor in retreat. “I decided to give in so we could win the next battles—about promotion, and about keeping us on the air when we’re in ninety-eighth place.”

Next morning the Sports Night office was downcast. “Aaron’s inexperience in television hurt him,” Tim Doyle told me. “He had all the leverage, because they couldn’t do the show without him. You have to spend that capital, because no one gives you credit down the line. If the show fails, they still blame you.”

Scheidlinger and Schlamme sat with Sorkin in his office and did a bleak postmortem. “I couldn’t sleep, because I was thinking, What a waste!” Scheidlinger said. “The half hour is sick, they’re trying to invite in new talent, to revitalize it, and then they hobble you.”

“Jamie’s idea is that talent, if allowed to run with abandon, will self-destruct and not be successful,” Schlamme said. “But it’s two different definitions of success. Ours is, ‘We did the show we wanted, artistically.’ Hers is, ‘We put one hundred episodes on the air and made a lot of money.’”

Sorkin said, in a low voice, almost to himself, “I hope Jamie will respect that I’ve given in and feel she owes us one.”

“Never happen,” Schlamme said, looking flushed and wounded. “Last night three people said to me, ‘You know, Jamie thinks ofSports Night as her baby.’ And I was thinking, Oh, no—don’t say that. She’s a bad mommy.”

It was five P.M. on a Thursday in August: time for the show’s weekly audience taping on Disney’s Stage Six. Two hundred people were in the stands, and they were watching the pilot episode on the monitors overhead. This is meant to introduce them to the show; it is also meant to rev them up for hilarity. The audience composition roughly mirrors the show’s target audience: it is all white, mostly male, and fairly young.

Josh Malina, who plays Jeremy, the klutzy assistant producer, stands offstage near the crafts table, which is heaped with fruit and pastries. “Laugh, monkeys, laugh,” he murmured, touching the pancake makeup on his nose; he could tell from the crowd’s gleeful chortles that this was the point in the pilot tape at which Jeremy falls off a chair. Like all the actors, he’d prefer not to have to project his lines to the stands in the middle of two days of pitching them more intimately toward the camera. “I don’t know why they come,” he said. “All they’ll see is an inscrutable play.”

After the pilot concluded, the warm-up comic introduced the cast members, and then Tommy Schlamme ordered the actors to their places. The set is huge, complex, and unusually authentic feeling. It has numerous corridors and six different three-sided rooms, including a studio packed with fifty television monitors, which run video feed of sports footage. “And . . . action!” Schlamme said, facing the newsroom, where the first of the episode’s fifteen scenes is set: Casey and Isaac, the Lou Grant–like boss played by former Benson star Robert Guillaume, are watching a football game, trying to predict what play the Seminoles coach Bobby Bowden will call. Schlamme kept his eyes on a quartet of monitors that showed the feed from cameras A, B, C, and X—and below, the feed when the fifth, handheld Steadicam was used for tracking shots. Schlamme asked for a second take. The audience laughed harder than it had before. On the third take, though, the laughs were desultory. This pattern is predictable: according to John Amodeo, the show’s line producer, “the second take always has a bigger laugh—everyone gets it, even the stupid ones. By the third, they’re bored with it, the fourth has no laugh at all. So the laugh-track guy’s job isn’t to make the show funny, it’s to do a smooth fade of the audience level, reproducing the natural attack and decay of laughter and applause.”

Curiously, none of the people in the stands were looking at the stage in front of them: they’re all watching the monitors overhead—watching television. After scene A is finished, Tony Krantz said to the actors, “Smokin’.”

Sorkin and Scheidlinger sat in black director’s chairs at the front of the stage, their backs to the action, listening on headphones and watching another quintet of monitors. ABC’s Carolyn Ginsburg Carlson and her deputy hovered nearby, and they occasionally whispered to Sorkin: Carlson often wanted the actors to smile more. Peter Krause, the lithe actor who plays Casey, came over to Sorkin to ask for guidance after having given a smirky spin to a line about how his wife used to do up his tuxedo studs. Sorkin doesn’t mention smiling: indeed, he’d earlier told Krause, “You were mind-fucked and bitch-slapped with all those notes from the network during the pilot. We’ll shield you from notes like ‘Smile more.’ This is not a high school play.” Instead, Sorkin, a former actor, did the line for Krause—“I used to have a wife for that”—giving it a small, bewildered shrug. “Make it real, a little hurt,” Sorkin says. As Krause walked back, Sorkin raised his voice and added, “Don’t make a meal of it”: he hates any wallowing in emotion, mugging. In the next take Krause repeated his sitcom smirk and Sorkin grimaced.

Laugh-track battles and their equivalent are fought every day in television studios across Hollywood, and the compromises reached explain why we see what we see. “Programmed dissent” is the network jargon for its contradictory desire: enough edge for the young (the producers winning a point); enough hugs for the rest of us (the network winning a point). “Take a risk” often means “update by 10 percent or so.” This January Fox will air another Imagine Television show, The PJs, as a midseason replacement. It’s a very funny stop-motion foam-puppet show set in a housing project, with Eddie Murphy providing the voice of the project superintendent. In the original four-minute demo tape gunshots fly around, there’s a realistic backdrop of filth and gloom, even a character named Crackhead. In the pilot episode of The PJs, Crackhead has become Smokey and is ostensibly in recovery. The sets are brighter, and the feel of the show is much cheerier. “Who wants to be in a world of squalor?” asks Peter Roth, the president of Fox TV. “Now the emphasis of the show is on family, relationships, friends. Nobody can afford to disinvite any audience on network television today.”

Television is a singular medium because its visionaries routinely look backward. Susanne Daniels, the executive vice president of entertainment at the WB, told me, “We spend a lot of time talking about what’s next, and very often it’s about what used to be on, isn’t now, and should be. One of the reasons we bought Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that we had been talking about Kolchak: The Night Stalker and how it was scary and funny at the same time, and we wanted to recapture that.”

Peter Roth says he regularly pages through television books and circles shows that could be updated. “I circled Kolchak,” Roth says proudly, “and then had lunch with Chris Carter, and out of that conversation came The X-Files. Television is a derivative medium, and every top ten show has been seen before—the trick is to repackage it and contemporize it to make a modern hit. E.R.derived from Marcus Welby; Ally McBeal is The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Seinfeld is The Honeymooners; Mad About You is I Love Lucy.” And Fantasy Island and The Love Boat have returned to the networks twenty years later with even their titles comfortingly intact. As the comedian and television host Fred Allen used to say, “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”

Felicity is a beautifully written college drama that arrives on the WB this fall with enormous positive buzz. But J. J. Abrams,Felicity’s co-creator, recently discovered television’s conservative impulse when he planned a story line about an interracial relationship between a black student and a white proctor. Television content has broadened significantly since the early 1970s, when a CBS researcher told Alan Burns, The Mary Tyler Moore Show co-creator, that there were four types of people viewers wouldn’t accept as a lead: divorced people, Jews, New Yorkers, and men with mustaches. But interracial relationships are still anathema; the networks believe them even more controversial than gay relationships. So the WB’s Susanne Daniels told Abrams, “Hold off. Do it in the second season—if it’s a hit, you can get away with it then.” You can get away with a lot on a hit; the network executives’ congenital anxiety then plays to the show’s advantage, because they become afraid to tamper with a winning formula. Abrams had always enjoyed his dealings with the WB, but now he exploded, suggesting that by not fighting stereotypes, the network was condoning racism. Daniels felt equally outraged and remembers thinking, How dare you; this isn’t about civil rights! This is just a television show—it’s a business.

By the third week of August, with only a month remaining before the show aired, everyone’s baseline nervousness had risen: ABC had done “awareness” and “intent to view” tracking all summer to determine how many people noticed its ad campaigns and how many planned to watch its shows. Sports Night fared poorly on the “awareness” and extremely well on “intent to view”—meaning that few knew about the show, but those who did planned to check it out.

“I would hope that we’re going to be patient, if it doesn’t come out of the box,” Stu Bloomberg told me later that week. When I pointed out that as the network’s entertainment chairman the decision was pretty much his, he scowled. “I want to be patient,” he said. “But you don’t want to give NYPD Blue a terrible lead-in. You can never look at a show in a vacuum, or else your affiliates will be on you.”

I spoke with Jamie Tarses that same day. “So much of what happens to Sports Night has to do with Spin City and how well it does against NBC’s Just Shoot Me, which had a hell of a summer,” she told me. “That’s what September twenty-first brings—an inability to control anything in your life. And the stakes are so high! Half a share point means a difference of millions of dollars. It’s so easy to fail, and if you fail one too many times, your reputation is at stake. So decisions get made from fear. Fear from agents, fear from producers, fear from us. It’s hard to fight it. There are too many shows that I developed this year that I’m quite enamored of—and the odds are that many of them will fail.” Curled up on her office couch, she smiled gamely. “You have to say to yourself, All the kids are a little bit sick, so you can’t be surprised when some of them die.”

The sick-ward anxiety was apparent at a Tuesday afternoon “network run-through”—a dress rehearsal of sorts. The show’s writers and producers and the top ABC executives have come to the set in Burbank to shuffle around the stage in a herd, following the actors as they play each scene; it was the last chance for the network to weigh in before filming began on Wednesday. In this, the third episode, Casey expresses growing interest in Dana, and Jeremy gets ill after he sees a mother deer shot while he’s producing a hunting show. In the last act, Jeremy delivers an impassioned three-page speech against hunting, which ends with his comparing hunting in Indian culture to what they had just done: “It wasn’t food and it wasn’t shelter and it sure wasn’t sports. It was just mean.”

William H. Macy, the actor, who is the husband of Felicity Huffman—Dana on the show—marveled to his wife, “That’s a great speech Josh has. I’m a hunter, and I think it’s all liberal horseshit, but it’s a great speech.”

Huffman, a delightful comic actress, said, “Hey, Stu Bloomberg was laughing earlier.” She caught herself: “Isn’t it terrible how we rate the scripts on whether the network guys laughed?”

After the run-through, the producers met with ABC’s executives in the greenroom on the second floor. ABC’s executives sat on one side of the oblong wooden table, with Disney and Imagine executives and Sports Night producers ranged around them. Tarses gave the networks’ notes: The Jeremy story didn’t land with them emotionally, and perhaps the script’s three bits of bantery business should be cut to two. Both of these were useful observations, whose gist was that Sorkin left the Jeremy story alone too long in the middle of the show. Sorkin agreed and later he wrote a new scene to fill the gap. The network also wanted the performances to be brighter—a standard Tuesday note. Then Tarses referred to how Jeremy’s oration was followed by another from Isaac, the boss. “You’re asking a lot of your audience to sit through two long speeches,” she said.

Sorkin, who had been monosyllabic, now snapped, “I often ask a lot of my audience.”

“That’s all we have,” Tarses said quietly.

In the silence, Sorkin took a deep breath. “I hate to bring up an unpleasant subject again,” he said, “but the laughs aren’t working for us.” Surprisingly, Sorkin had come to believe that the performances in front of the audience were brighter; he also told me that he found that “there are moments in the show where I now get nervous that there aren’t laughs.” But he and his colleagues still found the laughter on the rough cut of “The Apology” infuriating, and they had decided to plead one last time to shoot the show their way. Sorkin said the episode sounded like an I Love Lucy parody, and added, challengingly, “You may not even want to air it, because it’s so bad.”

The long-suffering Stu Bloomberg looked upset and said that his team couldn’t respond to what they hadn’t seen. “Why don’t you watch it now?” Sorkin said. So ABC’s four executives trooped into a production room while the producers and Tony Krantz huddled in Sorkin’s office, and a fraught air settled over the entire suite. “We’re holding their feet to the fire,” Sorkin said grimly.

Upstairs, Jamie Tarses was in a gloomy daze. “I’d pretty much stopped speaking since they’d said we were going to hate the show,” she told me later. “I was traumatized, because this show means so much to me. And we were watching, and midway through the second scene somebody stopped the tape because we were all laughing, and we looked at each other: ‘Am I crazy? Isn’t this wonderful?’ And by the end”—when Dan apologizes to his dead brother, Sam—“I was crying, which is phenomenal. We laughed, we cried, we got everything out of that half hour we could have ever wanted to.”

The ABC team walked into Sorkin’s office with expressionless faces. “Then,” Tarses says, “we had to say, ‘I’m really sorry, but weloved the show.’” They hadn’t found the laugh track jarring, because they laughed exactly when the audience did.

“In my mind,” Stu Bloomberg told me, “that strange moment laid the laugh-track question to rest forever.”

The episode even had Sorkin’s version of the sitcom hug: before upbraiding Dan for his initial posturing about marijuana, Isaac says, “You know that I love you, don’t you, Danny?”

Tim Doyle, not unkindly, maintained that the show had joined the sitcom fold. “Sports Night has become a surrogate family—Isaac the dad, Dan and Casey the brothers, Dana the sister—and now it sends the same message as Caroline in the City andSuddenly Susan. Single people living in the city can find all the emotional support they want at work. Because of that sentimental message, Sports Night has a chance as popular entertainment.”

And so ABC finally became convinced that Sorkin knows what he’s doing in television. Three weeks later Thomas Schlamme would say: “The marriage has begun to work—since that day they’ve never once said, ‘Could you make it funnier?’” At the end of August, with ABC’s blessing, Sorkin released the five Disney sitcom writers, including Tim Doyle.

Later that Tuesday night, over martinis and crab cakes at the Ivy restaurant, Sorkin and Schlamme talked about the long day. They were sitting outside, at the best table in Los Angeles’s renowned power spot—and earlier Garry Shandling had stopped by, with the NBC sports reporter Jim Gray, to wish Sorkin well. But now the restaurant had emptied, and only the waiters and valet parkers still stood at their posts. Sorkin said to Schlamme, “You showed me today how the button on a scene works and the complete difference in sensibility when you’re writing for a laugh track.” The scene in question was a trademark Sorkin run in which the staff debates who wrote the poem that begins “I must go down to the seas again.” The names Wordsworth, Byron, and Thoreau are tossed out; Casey insists it’s Whitman. Isaac says, “It’s not Walt Whitman,” and Casey replies, “I’m sayin’ I think it’s Slim Whitman.” Dan then tells Dana, with becoming sweetness, “We don’t really know who wrote the poem.”

Now Sorkin said, “I love Garry Trudeau because Doonesbury always has another panel after the joke, and that’s the way I like to write. That is my writing. But you showed me how we have to cut Dan’s line, because people are laughing over it. That single cut makes it a different show.”

“They’re laughing at the rhythm,” Schlamme said. “Half of them don’t even know who Slim Whitman is.” He picked at a crab cake. “One kind of show honors the joke, one honors the reality. Once you start asking why all these people still live in the same apartment in Friends, then TV falls apart.”

Sorkin couldn’t help revisiting his struggle with the network—the irony of the executives telling him that he’s succeeded in spite of himself—one last time, like the dog returning hopefully to his breakfast bowl. “I can’t believe ABC loved what they saw—your direction was too good,” he said in friendly accusation.

Schlamme shrugged: “Or your writing.”

“Boy, they were really enjoying the fact that it was a checkmate,” Sorkin said. He lifted his martini glass and drank, then set it down and subsided into an uncharacteristic silence, looking both pleased and somehow bemused. Today ABC had welcomed Aaron Sorkin into the sodality of television, a club whose sole membership criterion is that you must no longer trust your instincts about what the audience wants.