We constantly run lines together before every show too, and then there's a long, traditionally long, story to tell the audience every show. Today, we're doing it twice.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
To do eight shows a week saying exactly the same lines, you have to be obsessively perfecting it or utterly mindless.
I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through.
On 'Whose Line,' we had six, seven, eight scenes per show, so everything was pretty quick. And there's a lot of games that we just got tired of, like 'Hats' and 'World's Worst' and 'Hoedown' and stuff.
I find that on serialized television it's wiser to hit the ground and look forward, and take the cues from the writers and the events happening, otherwise you just tie yourself in knots.
Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.
Doing the long lines - it looks easy when actresses do it: they just say it straight up, looks like they do nothing wrong, they just keep going, but it's not like that.
I've been on shows where they're just setting it up, and they're trying to find the tone of the writing and performance. That's always a really chaotic period on shows.
When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.
When you're starting out, every line in a show or a commercial is like a huge success.
We don't hold anything back. We go for broke, and if we have a good idea for a story line, we just use it because you never know and because the dynamics of the show are going to change.