New Demand for the Half Hour?

BY Jaime Weinman

"Over the past couple of years I would say there has been more of an interest in half-hour shows," says Dani Romain. She should know: she's the co-creator of Living In Your Car, one of several recent half-hours developed by The Movie Network. Writers are increasingly finding that they're likelier to get on the air by selling a half-hour show than an hour: TMN is shifting a lot of its focus from hours to half-hours, basic cable channels like Comedy and Family thrive on half-hours, and over-the-air networks are keener on the form than they've ever been: “I do think that format is enjoying a renaissance,” says Jenny Hacker, head of comedy development at the CBC, a network that has itself commissioned several new half-hour series.

So it seems screenwriters with half-hour ideas and scripts have more places to pitch than ever – but the catch is that many of those outlets aren't looking for the kind of pure comedy that traditionally filled that slot. Some of them are looking for more shows like the WGC Screenwriting Award-winning Less Than Kind, whose executive producers, Marvin Kaye, Chris Sheasgreen and Mark McKinney, don't call it a sitcom.

Wanting to avoid the hackneyed term "dramedy," they call Less than Kind a “comerama.” McKinney says this describes a show with an "inclination towards being a comedy with dramatic underpinnings rather than the reverse."

Not since the golden age of half-hour dramas like The Twilight Zone (or The Littlest Hobo?) has the term "half-hour" meant so many different things at once.

Many creators of new half-hours say that their shows are nothing like the joke-dominated sitcom or sketch formats that we usually associate with that length. Romain says that the executives at The Movie Network “aren't there looking for a set number of jokes per episode.” While Sheri Elwood, whose half-hour Call Me Fitz is about a character she describes as a "degenerate," says that the show "was never a sitcom. The comedy is something that just happened. The characters are outrageous, and following them down the rabbit hole of their lives is an amusing process."

And Less Than Kind too, which moved to TMN after running for a season in CityTV, deals with some dark material - no sugarcoating; the recent death of co-star Maury Chaykin will be incorporated unflinchingly into the upcoming third season.

The explosion of different types of half-hour TV is one of the things that’s got writers excited about the half-hour format. Joseph Kay, who worked with Romain and George F. Walker on the one-hour This is Wonderland and now on the half-hour Living In Your Car, says that with hour-long shows, “you still need a certain kind of accepted structure to frame episodes,” but the half-hour is “a format that feels like it's still being gestated,” and that leaves more room to experiment. (As an example, he points to Louis C.K.’s recent show Louie, which introduced new storytelling techniques by splitting the half-hour into completely separate stories.)

Different Animals

Marvin Kaye thinks that cable shows like Less Than Kind and Fitz in Canada, or most of HBO and Showtime's half-hours in the States, constitute a whole new genre for writers: "They are a different animal altogether, and there are certainly enough of them to start a new file heading.”

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