Situation: Comedy, Episode 2 – A Single Track Mind for a Single

The winners will get $25,000 from Discover (not the $250,000 I said last week. Darn typos!), a contract to be represented by a major talent agency and, hopefully, fame for having written the next great sitcom.

This week, we get to follow those two teams as they begin their six-week adventure. The first team is Mark Treitel and Jason “Shoe” Schuster. Their script is called “The Sperm Donor” and follows the adventures of a young woman and her uptight mother who try to find the woman’s biological father.

The other script is “Stephen’s Life,” written by Andrew Leeds and David Lampson. This script describes a completely average boy who has hopes and dreams way beyond his reach.

We first see footage of Mark at home with his wife, Mindy. He tells us that they just got married, and his plans were to become a lawyer. But, all that may have changed now that he and Shoe have gotten a shot at fame and fortune in Hollywood. Shoe arrives at the front door and greets the family. He tells us that he quit his regular job to become a writer six years ago and this could be his big break.

Similarly, we see Andrew at home, going through his daily routine. His writing partner David was shocked when he heard that Andrew had sent in the TV script that the two of them had written three years ago and it was accepted as a finalist.

All four team members arrive at the NBC studios and are met by Stan Zimmerman and Maxine “Max” Lapiduss. Stan and Max will be leading the teams through the whole process of casting, rewriting, and filming their pilot.

They lead their charges onto the Will & Grace set. The team members are suitably impressed by the fake living room set. None of the actual cast members of Will & Grace seem to be around, however.

Stan tells them that they will be filming their pilots right on this very stage. But, due to the limited budget, each of them can only have two stage sets to work with, so all the action has to take place in one or two rooms. She concedes that it might be possible to add a third set. Maybe.

Andrew tells us that his script calls for twenty different sets for his characters to be in for the pilot. He immediately recognizes that his team (I’ll call them “Stephen’s Team” from now on) will have to do a lot of rewriting.

Max sits the two teams down and explains that they will be doing a 15-minute “presentation,” not a full 30-minute pilot. This has the unfortunate problem of not normally being enough time to fully develop a plot and characters. So, the teams will need to pick and choose their best material and present it quickly.

Stan gives the teams their first assignment. Overnight, they will have to determine how they can whittle down their 30-minute script into a 15-minute presentation.

But, there is another problem. Stephen’s Team wrote nineteen characters into the script and designed it to be filmed with a single camera, like Arrested Development or Sex in the City was filmed. He says that they can’t have all those characters and they have to film it in a multi-camera style, like Will & Grace does. Max explains to the viewers that a single-camera style is much more expensive than a multi-camera style.

You know, I am starting to get a little annoyed by this show already. Here it is that Sean Hayes and his team are looking to find something new and creative, but, at every step of the way so far, they are making the teams conform to standard methods of creating a show (this is how many characters you can have, this is how it must be filmed, this is how long it can be, etc.). I just hope they don’t make them use a laugh track. You’ll see me turn violent if they do.

As they return to the office to start rethinking and rewriting, Stephen’s Team gets themselves all worked up over the multi-camera format. They wrote the script for single- camera shooting and that’s the way they want it done. They decide that they are going to make a stand.

At their office, Mark and Shoe (I’ll now call them “Team Sperm”) meet Javier, who is a line producer and has worked on shows like Hanging With Mr. Cooper. He will be in charge of the logistics and the budget for both teams. He has each team pick out an office.

Okay, now let me take a moment to point out the shoddy craftsmanship of this show, Situation: Comedy. Team Sperm’s script is called “The Sperm Donor.” In the first episode, we saw Shoe explain how Mark added the word “The” to the title to make it better. Most of the subtitles on the show use the correct title. But, in one close-up, the script that was handed to the NBC executive said “Sperm Donor,” with the “The.” Now, in this episode, when the team is shown to their office, the sign on the door says, “Sperm Donors,” with an “s” at the end and no “The.”