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Lear, who spends most of his time at CBS as executive producer of Family and Maude, is a dapper, droopy-mustached man of 50 with the comedy writer's congenital air of melancholy, like a sensitive spaniel; he tends to be the spokesman for the team. Yorkin, 46, who concentrates on being executive producer of Sanford at NBC, is a beefy, genial soul with a flushed face and a habit of punctuating his speech with a stabbing thumb that one senses could easily become a fist. Both men, in their divergent styles, bear down hard on their staffs to achieve the gloss and precision that have become characteristic of Yorkin and Lear productions.
Ruthless Rehash. Each of their shows is taped before a live audience. Yorkin or Lear then leads the cast and staff through a ruthless rehash session, and another performance is taped before a second audience. The show that eventually goes on the air combines the best of the two performances. This system provides a TV equivalent of the Broadway theater's "tryout experience," says Family Producer John Rich. "We're doing a play a week and we're trying to be entertaining every minute. We don't have a Hartford or a Boston for tryouts."
No shows on TV are more heavily rewritten than Yorkin and Lear's. Whether a script originates with their staff or is one of the 60% that come from freelancers, Yorkin and Lear usually see that it gets torn to pieces. The story line acquires new twists, the dialogue is recast, sometimes new characters are added.
"When a writer says, 'I'd like to see Edith Bunker in menopause,' I know we can peel back layers of Edith and Archie," says Lear. "When I hear an idea like that, I'm like a dog hanging on to a bone. I'll hang on forever until the show is right." One of this season's early Family episodes, about Archie's infatuation with the brassy wife of an old Air Force buddy, was conceived in June 1971. After eight major rewrites, it was scheduled for taping last February. Lear withdrew it at the last minute for more work when it was already in rehearsal. By the time it was finally taped this summer, everybody had had a crack at it, including the actors.
This is where Yorkin and Lear's flair for casting shows up—in picking seemingly unlikely performers who will grow into their roles and shape them with their own temperaments. Veteran Comic Foxx won his Sanford role partly on the strength of his only other dramatic appearance—as a junkman in the 1970 movie Cotton Comes to Harlem. He and Co-Star Demond Wilson now work with Sanford's Producer and Chief Writer Aaron Ruben, who is white, to "translate the scripts into spook," as Foxx puts it. "The writers are beginning to learn that black is another language." (Meantime, Ruben is training black writers for the show.)