Very much agreed. If you listen to any of the Adam Carolla podcasts with Joel, you quickly find out how deep his range is. And basically, he is just an overall good guy.

dude is completely wacko, but i cant not like him

The cats are funnier than the bunnies. Great picture selection.

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. "

I was laughing so hard it hurt at that glory hole stuff. The producers of the show have to be just dying when they put that together. No way they're oblivious, even though the miners probably are.

Do you think CBS or Lorre's production co really has a slogan: "Don't be special. Be one of us"?

It's even better that the old dude on that show is named Jack Hoffman.

He should send them all a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Yeah Sheen owes all of them nothing, because he and he alone created a show and the conditions for himself to make $1.3+ mil per episode.

Yeah, this. I don't see how anyone on that crew can complain about being on a hit show for 7 years. It's pretty much the best case scenario in that line of work.

If the show dies without him, then clearly he is a bit more important than any of the replaceable cogs in there.

In the not-so-distant past I'd resented the fact that the top current sitcom earner was basically mailing it in every friggin episode on an absolutely horrible show.


Now that I realize he was actually spite-mailing it in this whole time I've done a complete 180!

I've heard from friends who've written on Lorre shows that he's a huge ******* and an absolute nightmare to work for.

Curious how you would feel if one of the four or eight episodes they were going to shoot this season was written by you.

While the "Well, it was a good run while it lasted" viewpoint might be a very healthy and zen take on life, I think people who had jobs before this and don't have jobs after this have every right to be peeved at least. Maybe they don't deserve your sympathy, but I have a really hard time believing that many people in their shoes would be like "c'est la vie!"

Standard.

As best you can guesstimate LFS, say you wrote episode 6 and this wasn't your first time doing so. How much money did you just lose?

Fsoyars needs to answer that, I actually know next-to-nothing about how writers' contracts work. But I do know that while they work together, having a script you're primarily responsible for writing get shot and aired is a big deal, at least when you haven't already done it 100 times. That's more what I was talking about.

Well, I wouldn't post that without first putting myself in there shoes. So, yeah "well it was a good run" is exactly how I would feel. If you work on a sitcom in any capacity and you reach 7 seasons, pretty much anything after that is gravy. 7 is a pretty standard full run for the highly successful sitcoms.

edit: basically my point is that it's so incredibly rare to get that many seasons out of a show that anyone who would really complain about working for that long consecutively on one show would have to lack a considerable amount of perspective.

You get paid in full for the episodes you write regardless of whether or not they are produced and/or aired. The only thing you'd be missing out on is potential residuals from reruns.

It's a big deal as far as getting to see it on TV and have it say "written by [you]" in the credits and get some small amount of recognition for that. That's about it though. It makes no difference financially (except if it reruns). And you're right if you've done it a 100 times you probably don't care all that much.

Isn't there a fair amount of turnover on sitcom writing staffs? I've been operating on the assumption that a fair percentage of each show's writing staff is relatively new, and that being in the same writing position for 7 years would be very rare (and that it would therefore be more likely that somebody wrote an ep that isn't going to get shot and that's going to royally suck for them). Is that wrong?

I was joking about the Atlas Shrugged part, but certainly Charlie Sheen owes the crew nothing and the crew owes nothing to charlie sheen.

Any writer responsible for the dreck that was Two and Half Men deserves nothing but scorn

There's a small amount but I don't think as much as you're implying. The only writers who would voluntarily leave a show like that are the writers at the top who've made enough money to walk away for either personal reasons or bc they sold a pilot or something. The business is just too uncertain to leave a dream job like that unless you can afford it. A guy I know walked away from a high level position on Big Bang bc he couldn't stand being there, but then again he's been a showrunner multiple times and has plenty in the bank.

As far as people being fired or just culled out, it happens but it's definitely not like a regular, expected thing. I'd say on a show with 15 writers in any given season you might lose one or two and have one or two new ones. But it wouldn't be weird at all for an entire staff to come back in tact from one season to another.

Also on a show like Men, the staff tends to grow as opposed to being turned over. As the show becomes more and more successful, the budget goes up and they are able to afford bringing on new writers while retaining the old ones.

well if you spent 7 years being around Charlie Sheen and weren't prepared for something like this, who's fault is that? the cokehead gravy train is over, too bad you didn't have a contingency plan in place, brah!

odds this Lorre dude pulls some spite move and just replaces Sheen on the show with someone else? it probably wouldn't last more than 1-2 seasons that way, but it would be a pretty funny FU to try it.

Two and a Half Men: NOW WITH CHRISTIAN SLATER*!!!

* - or some such replacement level leading man

lol, and this!

I very, very much doubt they're nicking slogans from Alcoholics Anonymous

I think the odds are pretty good.