It was like an older but better version of Young Talent Time because we had more time to spend on it. There were three guys and three girls and we made thirteen episodes that were sold in the United States and Canada.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think that the wonderful advantage we have in the film of being able to cast a girl as young as Emmy and which we couldn't do in the theatre of course because no girl of 16 or 17 could sing 8 shows a week, couldn't sing two.
It was far more fun than work doing those shows for all those years, we all loved each other and loved going to work, we all understood how fortunate we were to be in that place, to have achieved that success worldwide.
It evolved out of the idea to make a kids TV show. And it actually turned out to be a bit dull and a bit regulated and too many people looking over your shoulder and it wasn't really.
You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.
Not that there weren't great shows, and not that there wasn't plenty of fine music played. It's just that the consistency and the height of where we could take it, with the help of the audience, was less, I felt, in the '90s.
Well, we had more money and more time the first season than we did at TV 23.
I guess at the age of 15 was the first time I made a goal of wanting to be on television, and I didn't get a series until I was 23, which was 'The West Wing.'
The first twenty shows at TV 23 were really a workshop.
There were 84 original episodes. It was rated No. 1 and No. 2 on the Fox Children's Network. We figured it was time to make it available to people who have never watched it.
I still run into people in the business who skip over any other credits I have and say, 'I loved 'Hey, Dude!' This was back in '88, '89, '90. It was a goofy show about kids working at a dude ranch in Arizona. We did 65 episodes; I wrote 13 of them. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was writers' boot camp. It was great.