Whats the vibe like? Is the show shot in sequence? Is it fun? What if the shows not funny? Are you forced to laugh? Do the actors react badly to an unresponsive audience?
“Solid Gold” – back in 84 or so. Was in the Marines at Camp Pendleton, and got free tickets. Saw Mickey Gilly lip-sync his hit at the time, whatever it was. Rick Dees was the host. Solid Gold Dancers looked nice. Dees taped a few intros for other acts, etc. So it wasn’t shot in order (but I imagine your OP refers more to Sit-Coms than things like this)
Lousy warm-up comedian.
Was more boring than watching every paintjob in America dry. I never ever accepted free tickets to any other taping.
But my experince may be atypical.
Sir Rhosis
I saw two episodes of “The Wolfman Jack Show” being taped at the CBC facility in Vancouver in 1976. There was a fair amount of waiting around for technical matters to be resolved, and a bunch of retakes. There were musical guests on, including David Cassidy (!), but none of the music was live. I couldn’t tell you if the bits were taped in any cohesive order. All that would have been assembled in post. I never got to see the finished programs, and the series was cancelled, so I guess I never will. Too bad, because both times, at the end where the credits would have rolled, Wolfman came up into the audience and shook hands, including mine, both times!
There’s an NPR show called Says You! that I’ve been to a few tapings of. There’s a little bit of technical setup, and the host asks for a few cheers at the beginning so they can set the recording levels. The only differences are the editing (have to cut each show down to 30 minutes), and they do three shows at a time.
This isn’t entirely on-point, but I’ve never told this story since it happened:
I was at an Aerosmith concert in 1988 at Sandstone Amphitheater in Bonner Springs, KS (outside Kansas City). At some point during the show–my memory is a little hazy, for some reason–Steven Tyler said into the mike, “Hey! You guys want to be in a video?”
“WHOOOO!” we cried.
He said, “OK, when I say, ‘…and what about DAVID GEFFEN!’ you guys start screaming and going crazy.”
We were a little confused, but what the hell, right?
So he yelled, “And what about DAVID GEFFEN?” and we screamed like we were on fire for a while. And then they started the concert again.
I have no idea what that was about; maybe it was a birthday present for David Geffen or something.
OK, so it’s not like I was on Live at Budokan. But it’s all I got.
My girlfriend got tix to see Jenny Jones (before that guy was killed)–this was the early days of tacky, vulgar daytime “talk” shows. I can’t remember the topic exactly, something about women who dress slutty and husbands who encourage it or some such (does it matter?-you’ve seen one show like that, you’ve seen them all).
I remember the whole time trying to shrink in my chair–I SO did not want to be shown on TV on the off chance that anyone would recognize me and wonder why I was in that audience.
The “guests” (I call them working actors) were nas-tay. Blech.
There was a warm up act–a middling comedian.
There were people on the sidelines, waving their arms to signal that we needed to whoop more and applaud more loudly etc.
It’s not something I would want to do again–unless I got tix for a show I loved (TDS, for instance).
I’ve been to two Daily Show tapings. One was in March 2003, the other was a couple of weeks ago. They do try to psyche up the audience first, and there was a warmup comedian at the second taping. But the pre-show chat with Jon Stewart was more fun. If he says something at the beginning of the show that makes the audience laugh but confuses you at home, it’s probably a thing he learned or said during the pre-show Q&A.
In 2001 I went to a taping of a show called Lifegame, which was a TNN thing in which a celebrity guest would be interviewed and have scene from his life acted out by an improv group. The guest was Steve Schirripa. I don’t remember many of the details, it wasn’t great.
I’ve been in the Dress rehearsal audience for Saturday Night Live once. Susan Lucci was the host and I think the Gin Blossoms played. Technically I wasn’t in the live studio audience but I was in a live studio audience. The do the dress rehearsal immediately before the show and cut about 3-5 skits based on audience reaction. The seats right in front of the stage are reserved for friends/family of cast and crew. Plebes sit in the stands, which aren’t very visible when the show broadcasts. There are a few skits you can’t see, because the sound stage is laid out to have multiple skit sets prepared at once. But you can watch those on monitor.
It was a cool and fun experience. Dennis Miller warmed us up with some standup!
I’ve been to Jon Stewart’s SNL performance (which is where I first saw, and fell in love with, India Arie’s music). I adore Jon Stewart, so it was a highlight (we have a friend who works for SNL, so she gave us her comp tickets to the show).
I’ve worked on two soaps, so it wasn’t a conventional audience, but I did watch constant tapings, which I loved.
I’ve also been to cough Donny and Marie’s talk show. It wasn’t intentional, and if you watched the episode, you saw my close friend and I rolling our eyes several times at one another at some of the idiotic things they said. However, one of our friends was on the show, and she had asked us to accompany her elderly mother in the audience, so we complied.
E.
I went to a Kids in the Hall taping once but I don’t remember very much about it except that it was good. I’m pretty sure that the things I saw taped didn’t come out on the same show and a few of the things I saw taped I never saw on any show at all. I watched the show religiously for the first few seasons so I wouldn’t have missed it. Everybody laughed much harder than normal people ever laugh. I think when you are in that situation, partly things seem funnier like when you are at a comedy club, and partly some people try to laugh really hard and loud so their laugh will count. The Kids in the Hall were pretty funny but sometimes they were just weird. One of the sketches they taped that night was so weird I had no idea what was supposed to be funny about it. This lady is sitting at her table and time is going by really slowly. I remember thinking, “oh my god what are these people laughing about?” I never saw it on TV. I am pretty sure the salty ham was taped that night.
This is kind of not related but once I went to see Mike Myers and it was either before he was on SNL or right when he started but he was not that big yet and he was doing this show with a partner and they did all the Mike Myers things like Sprockets and Waynes World that weren’t famous yet and he did a lot of making fun of Buffalo, New York, which he called “talking proud land” and other local humour things that never would have made sense outside Southern Ontario. He did a thing on Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings that did make it to SNL but it was based on a kids show that I don’t think is shown all over. He changed it to a little kid in a bathtub who would say “are you looking at my bum?” He copied the song off this show, “Well you know my name is Simon, and the things I draw come true,” but he would say, “Well you know my name is Simon, and I like to do drawer-ings.”
That’s totally not the same as seeing a taping of a show, but it’s my story.
I think the OP was talking about sitcom tapings, and unfortunately, none of the subsequent posts were about sitcoms, or really answered his questions.
Sadly, neither does this one.
I was at at live broadcast of SNL back in the late 70s. Ray Charles was the guest. I’ve been at several of public radio show broadcasts, including A Prairie Home Companion and Michael Feldman’s Whaddya Know, and a Late Show with David Letterman.
There’s an excitement about all of them, especially the live ones, because you become acutely aware that the show has to keep going, no matter what. No stopping and saying, Can I do that over?
As for the procedures in sitcoms, where there’s a storyline that might not all be shot at the same time, and certainly not in real time, I couldn’t say.
Was that the one where they gave him a painting as a gift?
When I was just out of Biola U, in L.A. County, a floor at the school took a bunch of people to a taping because they would get paid (IIRC) $200 (in 1993) for rounding up 25 people.
It was Chevy Chase’s talk show. It was horrible. There were things that even I could recognize as good straight lines, but Chevy said things like, “Yeah”, when Letterman would jumped on them with both feet.
About that time I also went to a very short lived show on Fox called “Open House”, which was full of the obvious “funny” things typical of shows that get cancelled quickly. OTOH, “Full House” was horrible and lasted years. Maybe the difference was that it was aimed at kids.
I’ve been to three:
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“Late Night with David Letterman” The guests were Sean Young and Jeff Altman. We got standing-room-only tickets, so we missed the opening, but the crowd was manic. Sean Young was creepy. The band plays through the entire commercial break; before that I’d assumed that they only play for 30 seconds or so and then edit it together, but they play an entire song. And Jeff Altman usually isn’t that funny, but that night his routine was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’m sure being in the audience had something to do with that.
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“Geraldo” Some classmates were going as a joke, and I figured what the hell. They taped several episodes in a day and the audience can apparently stay for as many episodes as they like. Only the show producer addressed the audience; Geraldo only came out once the show began, and went off-stage during breaks.
The one we watched was about incest. They had a dad and his daughter/lover on in really really cheesy disguises; he had a fake beard and she had a fake blonde wig. During the break for commercials, they asked audience members to raise their hands if they had a comment or question. They picked three or four, and then when the show starts taping again, had Geraldo go through the audience and act as if he’d just picked those guys out of the crowd.
It was all unbearably awful, but the worst was after the show ended and the guests and the Big G had left the stage, they turned the camera onto the audience to do “reaction shots.” They’d say “act like you just heard something really horrifying” and then pan the camera slowly across the crowd. Then “act like you just saw something really funny,” then “angry,” and so on. Those shots were then edited back into the show as if they’d happened real-time.
- “Kate and Allie” I was walking around Times Square one day and when I passed the CBS theater, they had ushers grabbing people off the street to watch a taping. It was towards the end of that show’s run, so I think they were having trouble getting a full audience. The “vibe” was slow and kind of creepy. It wasn’t filmed in sequence as far as I could tell. I stayed for about 45 minutes, and they only got two scenes finished.
We were sitting up in the balcony, and there was a crazy guy sitting by himself in the front row, mumbling to himself the whole time. When the cameras were rolling, he was dead quiet, but as soon as they said “cut,” he was off again talking up a storm. The funniest bit about this was that the first scene had one of the kids trying to save time by putting all the stuff for breakfast into a blender and turning it into a shake. They kept having to shoot the scene over and over again, because they were having problems with the blender. One of the staff people said, “it’s the bacon, it’s clogging up the blades of the blender. Do we have anything other than bacon?” Crazy guy in the balcony shouted out “Sizzlean!”
(1) I saw an episode of NewsRadio (it was the episode with guest star Janeane Garofalo). I remember sitting over an hour in the audience and worrying I might have to pee (which wasn’t an option–once you left, you were gone). The pre-show comedian was pretty funny and interacted a lot with the crowd, so the time went quickly. They also showed a previous episode on the TVs (there were banks of them above the audience), since it was a relatively new show and not everybody was familiar with the set-up and characters (though I was).
The taping was extremely smooth. They shot entirely in sequence, and everything took place on that one set. I don’t remember them shooting any sequence more than two takes. Peter Bonerz was the director (he played Jerry the dentist on The Bob Newhart Show. The cast didn’t interact with the crowd (other than some basic Thank Yous at the end and a few joking asides), and I remember that even though the action took place in front of us, it was natural to actually watch everything on the banks of TVs above us. The vibe of the audience was good, and laughter was infectious–I lauged at things I wouldn’t have alone in my living room. It was also strange laughing at things on Take 2 for a joke we’d already heard, but the actors seemed to enjoy the audience feedback (and the episode was pretty funny).
(2) I was in the audience for The Larry Sanders Show. Even though it’s mostly a one-camera show, the bits that actually take place on Larry’s show were taped in front of a live audience. I didn’t get HBO so I hadn’t seen the show before, though I knew about it and liked Garry Shandling’s previous TV show. This episode was with Norm McDonald, and these sequences were completely out of context (since we didn’t know the story or action outside of the On-Air sequences we were watching in front of us).
I also remember there was a bit they wanted to film between Norm, Garry & Jeffrey Tambor on the couch during the “commercial break”, so they didn’t want to clear us from the set for this one bit, so we got to watch them film some one-camera action with the proviso that we had to be completely silent. We were.
To this day, I’ve never seen this episode.
(3) I was in a taping of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, but back when it was on cable (pre-ABC). Because of this, things weren’t as topical as the News of the Day; topics were more general. We sat through 3 half-hour shows with new rounds of guests, and HBO would re-run these shows repeatedly over the subsequent weeks (needless to say, this meant the shooting schedule back then was not particularly tasking).
I remember very little about those episodes–one guest was Jack Valenti and had to do with media censorship (the V-chip, etc.). It was OK, and there were some good moments I suppose, but not much to report.
I was by myself in Hollywood on all 3 tapings–the first show I got the ticket while visiting Universal Studios, the last two I got by simply being walked up to in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.
Pray tell?
I have been to many tapings of shows, and quite a few sitcoms. Happens when you live in LA.
Two come to mind:
Life With Lucy - the last, and worst, sitcom from Lucille Ball. It was the episode where Lucy and Gale Gordon are stuck up in a tree-house because the ladder fell down. It was truly horrible and during the run through, Lucy stopped the taping and yelled, “the line isn’t funny. Where is the scriptwriter?!”
Out comes some hapless 20-somethng woman, obviously terrified of the great Lucille Ball. The woman just stood there and Lucy made a few suggestions, and without waiting for a response, decided one of her suggestions was good. The scriptwriter nodded and fled. When that scene took place, the audience laughed a lot louder than the line deserved, but most likely out of respect and having seen Lucy create the line.
However, the worst example of sitcom laughter was during the pilot of Perfect Strangers. How I got roped into going to see that, I have no idea.
The show was pretty lame but directly behind where I was sitting were the writers and every friend they had, plus family, plus neighbors and people who owed them money. They laughed so loudly and insanely at every stupid line…they were guffawing in the aisles when one of the actors said, “hello”. It got so bad, the people in front of me all turned around to see the lunatics who were peeing their pants in laughter…and trust me, it was the fake laughter you hear when Uncle Bob tell the same damn joke for the 40th time at Thanksgiving dinner, just 1000 times louder. Yes, I know they were only trying to be supportive for their friends and the actors, but it was embarrassingly hideous. I always hated the show Perfect Strangers after that.
My dad was the guy they paid to say “ow!” every time Fonzie walked in the scene on Happy Days. Don’t laugh, it put me through college.
I attended several performances of A Prarie Home Companion -probably in the region of fifteen to twenty years ago. (There is a part of me which doesn’t want to admit to being old enough for it to have been that many years- but the truth of when I left MN is inescapable). Watching it live wasn’t that much different from listening to it on the radio- except you couldn’t wander around and eat dinner during it and you had to dress up (more as the show became more famous and harder to get tickets to). On the other hand, it was fun to watch the persons walk around and the sound effects guy make sound effects and all the other things that one doesn’t get to see when one listens to the radio.