People are out of their home on a Saturday night or they're at the movies or they're at dinner and a lot of the people who flip on the television are doing just that. They may have never seen your show before and you can't count on to your audience to be there week in and week out.
I learned that a television show is not a collaboration. You give your 180 percent, but you do not question the show-runners. I remember doing a reading, and my part was kind of small that week, and I commented on it, and the next week, they cut me out of the show. So I learned that you never ask questions. In TV, you always assume you're going to be fired.
We played a show the other week at this festival and it was an audience that I'd never normally play in front of. That's one the greatest things about festivals: you don't always get your audience, you get people who just pop in out of curiosity. The reaction was amazing; there were people dancing, which we've never had, I guess because the message is pretty powerful and the performance is a lot more visceral than it has been previously. The audiences seem to be reacting to that really well and it's a wonderful thing, because at a performance you really bounce off your audience.
For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.
One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.
People forget that in the early '70s, Saturday was the most-watched night of television of the week. It was where you found 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and 'All in the Family.'
I'm not a type of grandmother sitting in a rocking chair. I'm a lot in the theater. I'm a lot at concerts. I'm a lot at friends.' I like to go out for dinner. I don't have to be home one night a week if I don't want to.
I think people overplay the 'Saturday Night Live' schedule. I mean, yeah, it can be some late hours. But the late hours are usually only one or two nights out of the week. You might have a crazy six-day week, but you'll work three weeks, and then you get a week off work. I'd take most jobs if it was hard work and then I got a week off.
I like the idea of being out there regularly with an audience and with a funny gang of people. That's what I grew up with - doing television, doing shows every week.
When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week.
There's certainly pressure to find your audience early. You need to paint the picture, but it's tough trying to find the balance between a show that people can tune in on any given week while still grabbing the people who are there every week.
Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up. Just the concept of "I had this idea" and within a week it was in the world, that was a part of why it felt weirdly empowering as a performer.
A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.
In television, there's this weird sense of isolation from your audience; you kind of get this feeling that you write the show for you and your wife and your friends and the other people who work on the show. It's our little show, and then it goes out into the world, and somebody watches it.
My favorite is doing the television show, as a variety show, every week. If the show wasn't that great one week, we could always come back and apologize, you know?
You put this face on television, week in, week out, they'd stop me and they'd say, 'Hey, Roy, how are you doing?' They'd know who I was, what I was, what I looked like, and what I did - all from seeing and hearing it at the same time on television.
I've never seen a schedule where you just go in two hours almost every day of the week and then all day on one day. Then you shoot it at night with an audience and you're out of there.