Written Interview: Steve Levitan
Today’s interview is with TV writer Steve Levitan. Just check out this credit list: “The Critic” (2 episodes, 1994), “Wings” (15 episodes, 1991–1995), “The Larry Sanders Show” (2 episodes, 1995), “Frasier” (4 episodes, 1994–1996), “Men Behaving Badly” (1 episode, 1997), “Stark Raving Mad” (21 episodes, 1999–2000), “Greg the Bunny” (2002) TV series (unknown episodes), “Just Shoot Me!” (131 episodes, 1997–2003), “Stacked” (19 episodes, 2005–2006), “Back to You” (17 episodes, 2007–2008), and the recently multiple Emmy Award nominated hit series “Modern Family” (16 episodes, 2009–2010). The lead-in to the interview (on Deadline.com) provides more background on Levitan:
Steve Levitan, 47, is known for creating the TV series Just Shoot Me! Stark Raving Mad, Stacked, Back to You, with varying degrees of success. He’s also known for being highly vocal in his displeasure with the networks (like NBC and Fox) at times. And, in the words of one producer, “for being the only Jew in Hollywood who wears a 44 long”. But the veteran writer/producer — who won an Emmy Award as executive producer of Frasier and has written for the Larry Sanders Show, Men Behaving Badly, The Wonder Years and other comedy shows — is now a happy guy at the helm ABC’s Wednesday night sitcom hit Modern Family, which he co-runs with Chris Lloyd. While he has some strong feelings about the state of the TV industry, he admits in this Showrunner Q&A with Deadline contributor Diane Haithman — done before Modern Family was nominated for Emmys — that these days he’s finding it pretty hard to complain.
Some key excerpts:
SL: Obviously, everything I say in this interview is [about] myself and my writing partner Chris Lloyd, we were doing this together.
DH: OK. How did you come up with the mix of characters for Modern Family and decide: This will be our neighborhood?
We knew we wanted to do something about family, and we started to realize we wanted to do something in the documentary form. We wanted to do multiple families, because we both liked the adult relationships. We didn’t want to be constantly doing kid stories, we wanted to be able to do both. Frasier was based on an adult brother relationship, and an adult father-son relationship. Just Shoot Me was a complicated adult father-daughter relationship. So then it was a matter of populating it with multiple families, and the idea was, how has family changed recently? So let’s start in the middle with a very conventional, right down the middle family — a working husband, a stay-at-home mom, and three kids. And the kids were kind of loosely based on my family in terms of the sexes and ages of the kids. And then we wanted to do a gay couple. And we wanted to do something cross-cultural as well. And what was nice there was the older man/younger woman thing. We could have done three siblings, and one of them was married [to someone from another culture]. But we liked the idea of the father being with the younger woman because you’ve got multiple things going on. There was nice conflict and tension.
— —
DH: You talked about choosing the documentary format. Other shows are doing the same thing. Certainly NBC’s The Office does it.
SL: Because it is a wonderful device. One of the things that we did that was smart, we basically did everything that would help the comedy. Who cares if it had been done before, in terms of the documentary style or the way we shoot it, or having multiple families — if it helped the comedy, we did it. Consequently, we have a show that really runs smoothly and efficiently. And we shoot fast, and that’s enormously helpful. The documentary form itself is such a wonderful device to get to the heart of a story, cut to the chase of what a character is thinking. You don’t have to work in funky, awkward exposition. You cut to it, and you are right there.
— —
DH: I understand that you got into this business by writing spec scripts.
SL: I wasn’t writing them with hopes of selling them to the actual show. It was just as a sample. It was a Cheers and a Wonder Years.
DH: You were trying to get on the staff of the show.
SL: Yes, and you were more likely to get hired on a different show. Because the people writing that show are likely to look at your script and say: “This kind of missed the tone a little bit.” But to the rest of the world it’s, hey, that really sounds like a Cheers. People read more pilots now than they used to. When it’s a pilot, it’s supposed to stand on its own, so in some ways it’s easier to read. I read a really bizarre pilot when we were staffing for Modern Family, and it was a comedy about terrorists, and a really difficult subject to make funny, and so we ended hiring that person.
— —
DH: What are the notes like? Your reputation is that you don’t listen to notes anymore which is why Modern Family is successful.
SL: We get notes from ABC. And 20th TV [the producer] weighs in. Chris Lloyd and I are a very strong presence in that process, and we can be a bit intimidating at times, so we try to discourage people from wasting our time. But we also try to listen when people have good ideas. But both of us feel strongly about this: we simply never, ever, ever do anything we don’t agree with. We’ll never take a note from anybody that we don’t agree with. We won’t do it to make somebody happy. We might say that’s a lateral move and it’s making them happy, fine, but we’ll never do something that we think is wrong. I think everybody should do that. I’ve always done it, even when I didn’t have a history to fall back on. And I think it’s what you need to do in this business.
There are a lot of people chiming in because it is their job to chime in. And while they may be very well meaning, and might have very good things to say at times, certainly everything they say is not going to be right, like everything I say is not going to be right. So you have to learn to listen to everything, and cherry-pick the good notes.
— —
DH: We’re done. Anything you’d like to add?
SL: No, I am just ridiculously grateful right now. It’s sappy, but true. For awhile I thought maybe I should start switching over to features, start living that life, because TV is getting very tiring. But now there’s literally nothing I’d rather be doing than Modern Family.
It wasn’t too long ago that Hollywood pundits had written off broadcast comedies. Now look: “Modern Family,” “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Community,” “Big Bang Theory,” “Parks & Recreation.” And I’ll say this about “MF”: It’s the first time in like forever that my entire family (two parents, a 19 year-old home for the summer, and a 10 year-old) actually sit down together to watch a TV show — in reruns!
Bottom line, “Modern Family” rocks. I love all the characters, but Phil is my absolute hands-down favorite. He thinks he’s so cool, but at time is the single most clueless person on the face of the planet. Then he’ll surprise you with a grand slam (like the wedding ceremony at the end of the season finale). And so, I honor Phil:
Great concept, great characters, great casting, great directing, and most of all — great writing!
For the rest of the Deadline interview with Steve Levitan, go here.