STUDIO CITY, Calif. -- When the writers of the ABC sitcom Last Man Standing break for lunch one recent Friday, five of them take their food to Ed Yeager's office on the lot here.
Yeager's office is unusual, in that half of it is dressed as a tiki bar (for post-taping drinks). Elvis and Rat Pack memorabilia further bring out the retro theme, while the couch, where Sid Youngers is seated, is adorned with a homey, Roseanne-theme afghan.
Former standup comedians, Youngers, 57, and Yeager, 58, got their start on that ABC sitcom, which ran from 1988 to 1997 and is now chiefly remembered as one of the last socially aware sitcoms built around a genuine standup star, Roseanne Barr. Inside the TV business, Roseanne is equally recalled as an exemplar of the sitcom's Versailles period, a time when writing staffs were large and the jobs flowed. Roseanne didn't have a writers room; it had joke rooms and story rooms, the better to accommodate Barr's habit of bringing writers on as quixotically as she fired them.
In a way, that profligacy still reverberates. Five of the writers on Last Man Standing once wrote on Roseanne. One of them, Miriam Trogdon, is now part of a writing team with her own daughter, Gracie Charters, 26.
Last Man Standing, which stars Tim Allen, is in its fourth year. It is the sort of multicamera, middle-of-the-road sitcom that the broadcast networks now schedule almost without telling anyone, lest they appear fusty-branded compared with the trendsetting shows on streaming services.
For the Roseanne 5, however, it is a plum gig.
Last Man Standing isn't typically on the Emmy radar, but it is likely headed to profitability in syndication and could run for years to come -- no small feat in today's climate for network comedy. The show features a more cantankerous spin on Allen's persona. This sitcom dad, Mike Baxter, is the marketing chief of a sporting goods company whose traditional attitudes are held in check by the women who rule his household as well as a liberal son-in-law. As part of his duties at the company, Outdoor Man, Mike has a video blog on which he not only mocks climate change fears but also extemporizes on a patriarchal America that has lost its way.
While dismissed as ho-hum by critics, Last Man Standing has earned praise from conservative blogs as refreshing, and its ratings, which creep up to 8 million viewers when DVR numbers are factored in, are considered solid. But perhaps the most unusual aspect of Last Man Standing is the composition of its writing staff of 15, a number of whom are closing in on 60. Given various revolutions in the TV business, these writers feel fortunate -- if not surprised -- to have landed jobs actually writing for a multicamera sitcom on a broadcast network.
Take away the multicamera kingpin Chuck Lorre's four CBS sitcoms, led by The Big Bang Theory, and network schedules are noticeably bereft of a form that has kept the Last Man Standing writers employed -- and well-paid -- for decades.
"I would say as a young writer, there's definitely sort of this fin de siecle feel about everything," Charters says. "People have this attitude that TV is going to be over. And it's kind of depressing."
Joey Gutierrez, 51, whose credits include The Drew Carey Show, says he felt "lucky that I'm still doing it after all this time." He did note that there seemed to be more older writers now than when he started, which he attributed to the need for multicamera veterans on family sitcoms produced for cable channels like Disney, TV Land and Nick.
"But it also gets harder and harder to get jobs, too, in that not only has TV comedy been shrinking, but you get more expensive," adds Mike Shipley, 50, who has written for My Name Is Earl. "People have to really want you in particular."
The person who wanted these writers in particular was the Last Man Standing executive producer Tim Doyle, 55, one of the Roseanne alumni. He has earned the reputation of a sitcom long reliever, assuming control on shows after the creator has left, and perhaps the creator's replacement has been axed, as well; it is then that Doyle enters, to keep a show functional enough to reach syndication.
"I get the jobs that I get because of prior relationships and experience and, generally, somebody has a problem somewhere," he says.
In the '90s, Doyle took over Grace Under Fire when series star Brett Butler had "writers hiding underneath desks," he says. He then ran Ellen for that show's fifth season.
After serving as an executive producer on the CBS sitcom Rules of Engagement, he took over Last Man Standing in 2012. As usual, there were problems. Jack Burditt, the creator of the series, had left after a death in the family. By the end of Season 1, Last Man Standing had gone through several show runners and was about to be moved to a less desirable time slot, on Friday nights.
Enter Doyle, a casual man with white hair, a mischievous streak and liberal views. During his first meeting with Allen, the subject of politics came up. The star had looked the writer up on the movie database IMDB.com, Doyle says, "and there's a picture of me on IMDB standing in front of the White House holding up a sign that says, 'Liar.' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Obama's a big liar.' And I said, 'No no, that's an old picture.'"
From that conversation, Doyle thought Allen's character should indulge his Republican views more, something the show had only touched on. The second season was starting the Friday before the 2012 presidential election, and Doyle centered the first episode around Mike's fervent support of Mitt Romney.
"It may have been heavy-handed, it may have been clumsy, it may have been shallow, but we startled people a little bit," Doyle says. "Because sitcoms at this point don't do that stuff. They don't mention politics, ever."
By then, Doyle had also fired most of the writers from the first season and handpicked his new staff. The sky wasn't the limit: As Deadline.com reported, ABC, in agreeing to renew the series, had gotten 20th Century Fox Television, the studio that makes Last Man Standing, to reduce what it charged for broadcast rights.
Doyle likens his strategy to the Moneyball approach: He thought of writers he admired but were no longer in high demand. "It's also one of the things that buys me good will with Mr. Allen," Doyle says of the veteran joke writers he hired. "He likes to score. Even if he's kind of iffy about a story or has some concerns about something, he will be more into a scene if he knows he's got that great gag that he gets to say."
Yeager, after seasons with Dharma & Greg among other shows, had filled a recent gap with a six-month stint adapting Married ... With Children for Russian TV. Youngers was starting to work regularly again, having left the business six years earlier to raise his children when his wife died. Trogdon, whose credits include Sabrina the Teenage Witch, decided to team up with Charters, who had started to write her first spec scripts. Matt Berry, a fifth Roseanne alumnus, had risen to executive producer of Desperate Housewives.
Yeager, Berry and Doyle were all fired from Roseanne for various reasons, but Doyle misses Roseanne -- or anyway, the kind of network comedy it represented and is no longer made.
"It all seems to coincide to me with the financing and syndication rules, and the networks becoming owned by studios, and the studios being owned by networks," he says. "Everything felt a little corporate. So you're getting to this point of, 'We don't want to do a Roseanne-type show; we want to do How I Met Your Mother. Beautifully executed, and Friends, beautifully executed, but never about anything other than sex."
Perhaps that era is coming to an end. After lunch, in the writers room, the Last Man Standing staff goes back to punching up an episode. Written by Doyle, it largely revolves around two of the Baxter girls' adventures in pheasant hunting. Meanwhile, word comes that ABC has canceled its new sitcom about millennial dating in the age of social media, Selfie.
Weekend on 01/15/2015