#2564 - Chuck Lorre

I was a kid at the Singer Bowl in 1969, sneaking in with friends after we slipped a guard a couple bucks. Hendrix headlined, Janis and Big Brother opened, and suddenly I’m at the stage thinking, Jesus, don’t burn that guitar—hand it to me. It was rebellion and a hell of a time to be young.

That late-sixties jump from the buttoned-up fifties was nuts: war, psychedelics, the pill, all of it at once. Hendrix’s explosive rock-and-roll thing made smashing gear feel like part of the ritual. Expensive as hell, but it fit the moment.

Your book is great, man. Watching Big Bang with my family reminded me how much I miss multi-camera comedy. People called it clean family TV, but it’s beautifully constructed and genuinely funny. Weird that a form making people this happy became uncool.

We worked our asses off. I came into Big Bang through the outsiders, not physics—I’m a college dropout—but I understood people who can’t operate in the ordinary world. Sitcom plots matter less than whether you’d want to have a drink with those characters.

A multi-cam show is a play with cameras. If a joke dies before two hundred people, you fix it or cut it; putting it on television preserves the stink forever. And no, we never used a laugh track, despite reporters sitting through tapings and claiming we did.

That’s what I love: you know the room is full, you know the characters, and you’re in on the performance. It’s comforting. There used to be dozens of these shows; now there are barely any, though people still enjoy the form.

I don’t buy the obituary. I’ve heard it for forty years, and one terrific show can change the equation. But it’s brutal: writers, actors, executives, and the audience all get a vote, and there’s no grace period when the laugh doesn’t come.

People want to laugh; Los Angeles may be a lousy place to measure it. It’s absurdly status-conscious, full of people waiting to dismiss something. Elsewhere, people aren’t trying to prove they’re above having fun.

These shows travel like crazy. Big Bang was huge in Germany, Mexico, Brazil. A live audience teaches humility fast: when a joke gets crickets, your brilliant line was not brilliant, and you scramble to repair it.

On Roseanne, John Goodman could enter and say something ordinary, and the place erupted because people loved Dan Conner. That tells you the characters are part of people’s lives. At Comic-Con, a young woman shook and cried meeting Jim Parsons. We didn’t plan that connection.

It’s the misfit family. Big Bang and Young Sheldon make room for weirdos—awkward people keeping each other afloat—so you feel less alone.

Young Sheldon became its own story because we centered the family dealing with this extraordinary, difficult little boy. An adult Sheldon can be caustic and funny; an eight-year-old acting like a dick is harder. His parents, siblings, and grandmother making room for him—that’s love.

Success can bring out terrible behavior. Bob Newhart showed me another model: he reacted to madness like the audience would. On Big Bang, he wanted a live crowd, a real arc, and an Emmy. We got him that Emmy, one of my great joys.

With Charlie, we had six or seven good years before things deteriorated. I didn’t know about heavy use. By season eight, missed work and erratic behavior were impossible to ignore. My sad part was choosing denial because the show was successful and I wanted it okay.

A show’s chemistry is fragile. You can’t pull one beloved character from a world and expect the magic to follow; relationships are the engine. Young Sheldon was a gamble because we built a new family and world, with only Jim’s narration connecting it back.

My first show after Roseanne got buried on Saturday night, aired five of six episodes, and I thought my career was over. Tom Werner called it a noble failure and gave me another shot. Researching single mothers made Grace Under Fire feel like a hero story, even if making it got difficult.

Fame doesn’t mend the hole in you. Drugs, drinking, sex, gambling may numb it briefly, then stop working. For me, the answer has been a spiritual search and learning to give instead of just saying, “Gimme.”

I joined Scientology scared, broke, and hoping for an edge. Early exercises felt powerful, but after ten years I saw advanced people still living ordinary messy lives. My wife and I admitted it was bullshit, lost our community, and I had to take responsibility for my life.

Getting sober led me toward a higher power of my own understanding, not somebody else’s rules: recognizing something bigger than me, being of service, and stopping the hunt for more.

Writing my memoir let me forgive that frightened young man instead of hiding him. Saying “I don’t know” isn’t weakness; it invites collaboration. I never did this alone, and I’m still guessing, even after all the hits.

I’m pulling back into consulting because my presence can suck oxygen from a room. I want people to argue, pitch, and risk being wrong. Comedy is a guess. Go for great; if you miss, at least you took the shot.

That’s a hell of a place to leave it. Your book is terrific, this was a lot of fun, and I’m glad you stayed longer than twenty minutes. Incredible career—and, as the comic-book people would say, use the powers for good.