Episode Report Card 4 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT "Everybody knows about Television Without Pity."
By M. Giant | Season 5 | Episode 13 | Aired on 08.29.2005
Then I worked on sitcoms for, like, four or five or six years and worked my way up and still was like, really frustrated with sitcom writing 'cause it was just so writers' room-ish, and long, long hours, and everything I was working on I thought I was too good. And, like, the last sitcom I worked on was a sitcom called Nikki. I remember that show [again, I remember when it was on]. Yeah, horrible show. [laughs] I basically went from Nikki to Six Feet Under by writing a short story called "Courteney Cox's Asshole." Okay. It's on my website. People read it online, that I wrote this short story. It sort of got a lot of attention and was actually kind of considered a piece of literature and got published in, like, journals, and my agent sent it to Alan Ball and he loved it. Very cool. So what's your favorite episode of Six Feet Under that you've written? That I've written? Yeah. [pause] I don't know. "Back to the Garden" and "Rainbow of Her Reasons" are related, to me, because they're my first and my last episodes. They sort of go together. It's like beginning and ending to me. And I loved writing "Back to the Garden" because it was my first episode and it was so exciting to see it become real. To go out to the location at Aunt Sarah's house, cover that whole world, and have people dancing at the bonfire and the treehouse they built for Claire and her boyfriend. Cool. And then "The Rainbow of Her Reasons" was really fun for me because it was my last episode and I got to put everything in there that was mine to share. Yeah, I liked the bit with Claire singing. Yeah, like, that was awesome. That was great. Had you heard her sing before? Yeah, I knew she was a great singer. She's, like, a classically trained singer, you know, so she could sing. Yeah, she did a great job. So you got to be there for the shooting of that part? Exactly. Of course. And the recording. We went to a recording studio first and recorded it. Yeah. The guy who produced it, he's produced big -- you know, Whitney Houston, Barbra Streisand, you know, really huge singers -- so it was in his recording studio because we had to record it first and then bring it to the set to play back. That was really fun. Can you give me an example of how an episode or script might change from when it's written to when it actually gets shot and ends up on the screen?