Families say the darndest things

THE instruction from the television director to the 5-year-old was simple: “Tell us what you think love is, Lexi.”

Action!

“It’s like when you really like a person. That’s called love. It’s like ‘Splash,’ ” says Marni Walker, the youngest child on ABC’s new comedy “Sons & Daughters,” played by Lexi Jourden, whose script doesn’t have the slightest bit of dialogue to help her out.

“What do you mean?” asks big brother Ezra, played by 9-year-old Noah Matthews.

“The mermaid. The boy.”

“It’s not as simple as just liking somebody. I mean, you have to want to spend the rest of your life with them.”

“Well, that’s what I was trying to say. But you can love them too.”

Cut!

Same scene. Different take. New dialogue.

Marni: “I’m going to marry Clark because he’s my best friend.”

Ezra: “Well, you know, if you marry him, he can’t be your best friend anymore.”

Marni: “Well, I guess you’re right. Maybe I won’t get married.”

Ezra: “You can get married. I’m just saying.”

Marni: “No, I think I’ll stay with friends because that lasts longer.”

Cut!

Moving on.

With “Sons & Daughters,” ABC also is moving on, past its traditional family sitcoms and into a new realm of comedy that is finding commercial success on other networks: shows like “The Office,” “My Name Is Earl” and “Scrubs,” on NBC, “How I Met Your Mother” on CBS, and “Everybody Hates Chris” on UPN.

HBO’s “Sex and the City” paved the way for single-camera comedies, half-hour shows shot like dramas without soundstages, live audiences or laugh tracks. But when critical darling “Arrested Development” failed to develop a mainstream following on Fox, the industry began to wonder whether viewers were more comfortable with the traditional format after all.

“Sons & Daughters,” though, pushes past single-camera sensibility toward the partly unscripted world of “The Office” and other new shows, such as Oxygen’s “Campus Ladies” and Fox’s “Free Ride.”

Shot without an audience and using three cameras to invoke the feeling of a documentary, “Sons & Daughters” has dramatic elements that make its nuanced comedy feel more authentic than the traditional format in which jokes are set up and dialogue follows a line-line-punch-line rhythm. Unlike Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” for which actors receive outlines, this show has completely developed scripts, with story arcs carefully plotted. The only thing missing is the dialogue. The conversations are meant to be “written on the fly” by actors, writers on the set or the director, so that the words evolve from the natural thought process.

“Most people think when they hear improv that that means the show isn’t written,” said co-creator Nick Holly. “But this show is actually written three times. It’s written in the writers’ room. Then it’s written on set when the dialogue is filled in, and then it’s written again in the editing, because when we piece together all of the different takes, we’re essentially rewriting it all again.”

“Sons & Daughters” is at once an improvisational comedy that also is scripted, a show about family that isn’t a family show.

“We’re just asking people to kind of look at how they’re getting their comedy a little bit differently,” said co-creator Fred Goss, who also stars in the show and directed five episodes. “Since it’s not joke-driven in a traditional sense, the jokes are coming out of how we ratchet up the size of the elephant in the room. If you’re invested in the characters and you’re onboard with them on an emotional level, that laugh will come out of a relatable place.”

The elephant is family. Lots of it. This is not your typical four-person sitcom household. This family has 16 members, with who knows how many marriages and divorces between them, and countless steps and halves in the family tree.

And, of course, issues. But not the kinds of issues facing the wacky, upper-crust Orange County Bluths in “Arrested Development,” the show “Sons & Daughters” gets compared to the most because of its faux documentary feel and atypical humor.

This family, made up mostly of Walkers, Fentons and Halberts, is more down-to-earth and lives in a small town in the Midwest. So the angst is more about 15-year-old son Henry Walker’s constipation and “wishful flushing” syndrome than about a father sent to prison for his shady accounting practices.

“For me, this show feels like the best in comedy and drama,” said JoAnn Alfano, television president of Broadway Video, comedian Lorne Michaels’ production company, which is co-producing the show. “What I responded to is it felt real, for lack of a better word. It felt like if you peeked over a fence in the backyard and watched your neighbors, this is what you would see.”

For Gillian Vigman, who studied improvisation at Second City in Chicago and performed on “Mad TV” for one season, the show is an opportunity to ad-lib while acting, instead of winging it purely as part of a comedic routine. Vigman’s straight-faced “wishful flushing” theory about her constipated stepson’s penchant for repeatedly flushing the toilet isn’t delivered as a joke. But it certainly makes you laugh.

“I’ve got to hand it to the writer on that one,” Vigman said. “It didn’t come from me. Sometimes I get those lines and I think about how am I going to get through this scene? Oh, my gosh, this is so embarrassing and so good. Even though I am trained to do this, there is a side of me that wonders: Can I make this funny enough, strong enough and smart enough? Because it’s an actual scene and an actual story that you’re telling.”

Not having lines on a page was intimidating for Trevor Einhorn, 17, who plays Henry, the estranged son of Cameron Walker (Goss). Trevor had never ad-libbed a performance, but after his first take, he learned that improvising came easier to him than identifying with Henry, who wears KISS makeup, boxers and a faux Mohawk, he said.

“I realized it was a lot easier than I thought and it was actually a lot more fun to do,” he said. “I didn’t want to think too hard about it. I tried to go into like how I would have a conversation with my dad or my mom. We found our own flow and our own way of reading each other. It never got boring. As long as you have a general idea of where the episode is going, you’re free to do whatever you like.”

So when Eden Sher, 14, who plays Cameron’s niece, Carrie, tells her mother in the pilot that she would rather kill herself than be in a sexless marriage and her stunned mother (Alison Quinn) responds simply, “Huh,” it’s a producer’s improvisational dream. That dialogue was all Eden.

“When you don’t literally put words in their mouth, that’s when a lot of these magical, off-the-wall things come up that I think are really hard to come up with in a writers’ room,” Goss said. “Because it’s not a joke. It’s not constructed like a joke. Yet it’s funny.”

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Balancing heart with humor

WHAT is thoroughly developed are the story arcs that build from episode to episode until it all peaks in the finale, much like a serialized drama. This too is a departure from traditional closed-ended sitcom episodes but is becoming more and more commonplace. The central characters of “My Name Is Earl,” “Everybody Hates Chris,” “How I Met Your Mother” and “Scrubs” are all on important life journeys, which viewers track from week to week. And Michael Scott, the always inappropriate office manager of “The Office,” played by Golden Globe winner Steve Carell, has managed to let viewers see ever-so-slightly into his heart this season, a development that Goss feels is essential in the untraditional comedy format.

“With a show like [‘Sons’] that has as much heart as humor in it, our feeling is that the audience gets more onboard with the comedy as they attach themselves to what’s going on with the characters,” Goss said. “In order to do that, we think it’s helpful to have story arcs. If everything is resolved and tied up in a neat little bow, then I think it becomes more difficult to get invested. We never want you to be sure about whether you should be laughing or crying.”

To be sure, Goss and Holly, his partner of two years, are smiling. An actor and editor on the short-lived but critically acclaimed improvisational Bravo comedy “Significant Others,” Goss set out to execute the art of ad-libbing in a different way than the creator, Robert Roy Thomas, of that show did.

“Rob would not tell us until we were in wardrobe and the set was lit the minimal outline of what the scene was about,” Goss said. “He always wanted the first take, whatever the magic is of absolutely not knowing a thing. I saw in editing that there was value to that but there were also problems. So I went in a different direction with it. His pace was more frenetic. I like to slow things down and allow people to attach themselves to the characters.”

Fans of Robert Altman and Mike Leigh, Goss and Holly wrote a script, and produced and financed a 12-minute presentation, “The Weekend,” a similarly shot and scripted concept for a show following the intersection of the lives of three families from 5 p.m. Friday through 9 a.m. Monday. NBC purchased and ordered to a full pilot last year. It helped that Michaels was attached.

“It’s a perfect match because he is a legend and he’s into doing all sorts of comedy, and the only reason we came about is because we were trying to do something alternative,” said Holly, who was a TV agent before joining forces with Goss. “Lorne’s not a big fan of raw, improv shows, but that’s why he liked this show.”

While Goss and Holly waited for NBC to decide whether “The Weekend” would make it to the fall schedule, ABC’s president of prime-time entertainment, Steve McPherson, who had seen the original presentation, offered them a chance to develop another show for ABC, using the same format but centering on one extended family. When NBC did not pick up “The Weekend,” Goss, who was its star, was freed to be the lead on “Sons & Daughters,” a show that definitely abides by the writerly edict: Write what you know.

“There’s a lot of parallels with the show and my life,” Goss said. “My wife is Jewish and we’re raising our kids Jewish, even though I’m not. My father has been married five times, and my mom has been married five times. So I’ve got all these stepbrothers and stepmothers and half sisters. My mother kept burying husbands. That’s why she went through so many.”

Shades of Holly’s family too will be seen. “He sets the records for divorces, but in my family one of the things you do is get pregnant when you’re a teenager,” Holly said. “So you’ll see a lot of that.”