Unintended Consequences

Yet another from the archives, with the dust blown off and links refreshed.

Be careful what you wish — or write — for.

This photo presents an object lesson for sitcom writers to be a little more careful about the ideas they propose and fight for in the Writer's Room. The window is directly above the head writer's desk on my current show — the equivalent, I suppose, of the corner office in a corporate cube farm. The script he and the staff writers came up with called for the young heroine of our show to discover that pitching a baseball isn't quite the same as throwing a football — a lesson learned the hard way when she’s humiliated by surrendering a monster home run.

Remember, the target audience for this show is young children, so the writers had to keep it simple. Trouble is, their idea worked a bit too well when the stunt woman who portrayed our actress at the plate hit the ball a lot farther than anybody in the Writer's Room or production staff thought possible. After sailing in a majestic arc through the blue skies above Sunset and Vine, the ball crashed through the window like a little white comet flung from the Oort Cloud in the far distant reaches of our solar system, spraying shattered glass all over the head writer's desk.

I’d like to believe he’ll think twice before pounding out another script involving a batted ball … but he’ll probably just move his desk.