00:00:52.000I first went, oh, I guess I got to start drinking Southern Comfort because she's making it look pretty good.
00:01:00.000When I worked with Phil Hartman on news radio, one of his favorite stories was he was like a stagehand at the whiskey.
00:01:09.000Hendricks performed, and it was his job to stand with his hand on the speaker because he was worried that Hendricks would knock the speaker into the crowd.
00:04:46.000It's such an American story because it's you trying to figure out how to make it in show business and trying to be a musician and all these different things that happened to you and the whole Scientology thing.
00:04:59.000And then eventually starting to write on big sitcoms and the Roseanne story.0.97
00:05:14.000It's like if you think about television history in America, a big part of it is defined by its sitcoms.
00:05:20.000You know, because sitcoms, like whether it's All in the Family or Seinfeld or Friends, there's something about those sitcoms that like cement us in this place of comfort and happiness and like laughter.
00:05:33.000Like those are our almost like our extra family, these people on TV that we become attached to watching every Thursday.
00:06:30.000I mean, in 94 when I first came to LA, sitcoms were the thing.
00:06:35.000That's why everybody came to LA in the first place.
00:06:37.000If you were a comic, you came to LA hoping you were going to get a deal so that you could be the next Roseanne or Jerry Seinfeld or fill in the blank.
00:07:20.000It's amazing thing about a young Sheldon on Netflix was a whole generation of kids watched that show and had never seen the Big Bang Theory.
00:08:19.000If something stinks, you rewrite it or you cut it, but you don't put it on TV where, as I've always said, if it stinks in front of the audience, if you put it on TV, it's going to stink forever.
00:09:18.000Been for 40 years accused of it, but never used it.
00:09:23.000And I remember one time I had a reporter on the set of The Big Bang Theory who went and sat in the audience and watched this tape of show in front of a live studio audience.
00:11:20.000And if you watch the writer scramble, and every week you have to have some new scenario, and you've got five cast members you have to juggle around at the scenes and network executives, and TV company executives, and the managers of the actors, and everybody's feeling like we live or die, depending on whether the audience laughs or not.
00:11:50.000Once you begin to see yourself, you know, I started to, you know, my testicles dropped at a certain point and I stopped saying, yes, sir, no, sir.0.66
00:12:36.000First of all, boy, did you get out at the right time.
00:12:38.000You know, like with network stuff, like all your gigantic hits, you know, they were all like perfect at the right time when everybody was watching sitcoms.
00:14:41.000It's enjoyable, you know, it's extraordinarily well written and well produced, and casting is great, but it doesn't cause out loud laughter.
00:16:25.000New York is insanely congested and there's too many people and it's just nuts.
00:16:29.000But other than that, it's a great metropolitan city filled with everything all the greatest restaurants and there's comedy clubs and all these.
00:16:51.000They go there because that's where the auditions are and that's where the plays.
00:16:54.000And some of them are fantastic people, don't get me wrong, but there's a larger percentage that aren't fantastic and they are a mess and they're exhausting.
00:17:04.000And those are the people that cross their arms.
00:17:05.000And that's why you think people don't want to laugh because they do everywhere else.
00:17:09.000Well, clearly, the shows that I've been spent my whole life working on do really well all over the world.
00:19:00.000You know, and that's how I spent the last many decades, you know, rushing around trying to fix it.
00:19:07.000This episode is brought to you by The Terminal List Season 2.
00:19:12.000Chris Pratt is back as Navy SEAL Commander James Reese, and this time he's fighting for redemption.
00:19:18.000Nine months after finishing his list, Reese is hiding in Mozambique with a terminal brain tumor when the CIA pulls him back for one final mission hunt the terrorists behind a wave of attacks.
00:21:18.000You know, people respond to the Big Bang characters.
00:21:22.000I tell this story in the book at Comic Con.
00:21:27.000Early on, thousands of people were camping out at night to come in and see the panel at Comic Con for the Big Bang Theory.
00:21:36.000And I was sitting next to Jim Parsons at an autograph line, you know, where people come up with a cast picture and they sign it.
00:21:43.000And this girl comes up to Jim, and her hands are shaking, and she hands him the picture to sign, and she's crying out of joy to see Jim Parsons, to be this far away from Jim Parsons, Sheldon.
00:22:10.000Nobody ever cried when they saw Roseanne, you know, or anybody like that.
00:22:14.000But she was crying out of sheer joy to see these guys.
00:22:19.000And that's when I went, Something's happening here that we didn't plan, that we couldn't have planned, that these characters have hit a nerve, you know.0.97
00:22:29.000Well, I think it is the misfits thing.0.95
00:22:31.000You know, I think that's a giant part of it.
00:23:29.000And an older brother who's kind of a knucklehead, you know, means well, but, you know, it's how they have to accommodate this remarkable human being.
00:23:40.000It really became watching them how much love and protectiveness went towards this little boy who was oblivious at how caustic he was.1.00
00:24:02.000And it was one of the magic tricks of young Sheldon an eight year old being a dick is not acceptable.0.99
00:24:10.000Right, you know, 25 30 year old Jim Parsons, you can be why you can be caustic, but when it's coming out of a child's mouth, not so pleasant.0.93
00:24:21.000So it really shifted to becoming how his parents and his brother and sister, and eventually, and his grandmother took care of him.
00:24:30.000They just they excused him for being the way he was and allowed him to be that way.
00:24:36.000That's a love story, it is, and it's completely unique to the original show, the Big Bang Theory.
00:24:43.000You know, obviously Sheldon's older, but it's just a different thing.
00:24:56.000When you talk about the Roseanne days, those are some of my favorite days because, you know, I'm friends with Roseanne and I know how crazy she is.
00:25:04.000And, you know, and she talks about, well, I bet you know better than I do, but she talks about how crazy she was during those days.
00:25:19.000Yeah, that's a good, that's the nicest word I can think of.
00:25:22.000Well, you know her whole story, how she got hit by a car when she was young.
00:25:26.000Yeah, that's what a lot of people don't know.
00:25:28.000And I thought it was really important to have her on after she got in trouble and got fired from her new show to have her on and explain her history.
00:25:37.000She had legitimate mental illness, like not like I need attention, mental illness, hit by a car when she was 15 years old, was in the hospital for a long time, was in a mental health situation.
00:26:21.000That initial act that she and her sister, I don't know if she talked about her sister much, but they wrote that act and it was like nothing that we'd ever seen before.
00:27:51.000And all your stories about just dealing with crazy actors and the Sybil Shepard thing, she made you change the joke, and then it didn't work, and then she got mad at you for that.
00:28:43.000More often than not, though, in those situations, for whatever reason, when someone is the head, the big star of those shows, you hear nightmare stories.
00:28:52.000When someone is like the lead actor, the show is written about them, it's all about them.
00:28:58.000It's like there's something about the intoxicating power of being the top person on the show.0.98
00:29:04.000Pictures six feet high on a fucking billboard outside the place, your name's painted on the wall.0.99
00:29:36.000Larry Darrell and Darrell and Tom Post and those, the crazy characters would come in in the show when he was a psychiatrist, even that one.
00:29:45.000Crazy people would come in, and the comedy was in Bob reacting.
00:29:49.000A raised eyebrow would get an enormous laugh because he becomes the audience reacting to the crazy people.
00:29:57.000And I was begging him for years to come and do any show I'd worked on as I was such a fan.
00:31:31.000It was so not that he didn't win the Emmy, just that he had just recently been murdered.
00:31:36.000It was just, it still was so hard to believe and so painful that Dave just came in with the banger.
00:31:44.000Dave Foley was like one of the secret producers of news radio.
00:31:47.000The news radio, Paul Sims was so brilliant that when he created the show, he allowed all these creative people to come up with alternative lines.
00:35:16.000You know, we made a lot of mistakes, but Two and a Men was so successful, CBS granted me unbelievable leeway to make decisions, do shit over again.0.87
00:35:28.000Like the pilot, nobody gets a do over.0.50
00:35:31.000We got a do over on the Big Bang pilot.
00:36:05.000You know, when his manager calls me and says, Charlie can't come to the run through today at rehearsal, his Bic lighter blew up and he has no eyebrows.
00:36:15.000I'm somewhat naive to some of this stuff, but I know Bicklighters.
00:37:52.000There was a couple of years there where, you know, you had to get through Cliff going home to his mother.
00:37:58.000I wanted to be in the bar with Woody and Sam, and he would tolerate some of the dips, but then they'd come roaring back with great writing and stuff.
00:38:09.000But more often than not, if a show fails on a few occasions, even a show you love, there's a likelihood you may move on.
00:38:18.000And it's usually something that happens behind the scenes, like a head writer leaves or someone new gets hired and they have new ideas about stuff.
00:41:33.000I mean, Bochco understood that as well, that it wasn't the crime of the week, which is solving the crime, is more the Dick Wolf approach to dramas.
00:41:47.000Bochco was about the characters, about the cops, about their heartaches and the The torments of being a cop in Los Angeles.
00:41:57.000Also, if you're going to write a show about drama, who experiences more drama than cops?
00:42:01.000It's the perfect genre because you're always going to have chaos.
00:42:06.000You could write in any kind of chaos, whereas if it's one person who's a plumber who's experiencing that much chaos in his life, you'd be like, what the fuck are you doing with your life, man?0.99
00:42:14.000How are you involved in so many murders?0.98
00:42:15.000How are there so many armed robberies when you're around?
00:42:19.000But if you're a cop, it makes sense to write it in like that.
00:42:23.000I can't remember the name of the guy who.
00:42:26.000He was a New York City cop who wrote a whole bunch of books that I think were a big factor in the Bochco lore.
00:45:14.000Quite rightly, I saw that they were just trying to, you know, rip off Roseanne and do it again, have another hit show with an unhappy housewife.
00:45:23.000And he very wisely or whatever said, No, I don't think so.
00:49:05.000I wanted Franny's turn, the character, the thing that just feels, I wanted her to leave her husband and try and be, you know, single and live with her daughter.
00:49:14.000And you said, No, she has to be married because Cosby's married.
00:49:28.000And I said, where do I come in to, what sensibility can I bring to a single mom show?
00:49:36.000And to their credit, they sent me to Elgin, Illinois to spend a few days.
00:49:42.000The Chamber of Commerce took me to a women's shelter, a YWCA.0.75
00:49:50.000hospitals where women were either on welfare, working two jobs, you know, killing themselves to support themselves while raising children.0.90
00:50:03.000And I got this walk through what I went, oh, this is Greek tragedy.
00:51:18.000Well, that's a similar situation to what we were talking about before where people would just become tyrants when they have their own show.
00:52:16.000I think if you're damaged in this certain kind of way that actors in comics can be damaged, and you succeed, and you learn that horrible, horrible, two o'clock in the morning, horrible truth.
00:53:39.000You're trying to find a solution that, the best I understand it, nothing on the outside is going to heal the inside.1.00
00:53:49.000This episode is brought to you by Call of Duty.
00:53:52.000Modern Warfare 4 is coming, and they're going all in on this one.
00:53:57.000The kind of missions that make you go, dude, did they really just do that?
00:54:03.000Set during a full scale North Korean invasion of South Korea, expect a real boots on the ground experience.
00:54:09.000As young South Korean recruits fighting to protect their homeland and North Korean forces, hunting traitors, interrogating civilians, and more.
00:54:18.000Modern Warfare 4 launches October 23rd.
00:54:22.000Pre order digitally for early access to the campaign or pick up your physical disc on day one.
00:55:00.000So if you're a damaged person and then all of a sudden you're one of the most recognizable people in the world, who Brett Butler was when that show was number two, I mean, it was a huge show.
00:56:29.000It just sucks that so many talented people have that, whatever the fuck it is, that self sabotage gene, you know, that makes them not be able to ever change course and enjoy this fortune that they've been given.0.98
00:56:46.000Making an audience laugh temporarily fills the hole.0.99
00:57:17.000I mean, they were all drugged out of their fucking mind.1.00
00:57:20.000And they're all, like we were talking earlier, had you seen at one point in time, you saw Morrison, you saw the doors play for like 20 minutes before you tried to pull his dick out.1.00
00:57:30.000That was the shortest concert I've ever been to.0.96
00:57:32.000It was an outdoor, it was a singer bowl, it was an outdoor concert.
00:57:36.000Kind of arena and cops came in on horses hitting people over the head with sticks, right?0.99
00:57:43.000Because he pulled his dick out and they just stopped the show.0.99
00:57:46.000I think it was after he did it in Miami and he got arrested in Miami.1.00
01:00:40.000Yeah, but that story is just the story of his death is like, oh, it's really, it's a weird one.
01:00:46.000Whereas some of them do seem like normal drug overdoses, but the Hendrix one, there's a lot of weird stuff to that one where it does seem like it's possible that he was murdered, unfortunately.
01:00:56.000But there's just a huge number of those guys died so young.
01:01:00.000And it's because of what you're talking about.0.97
01:01:03.000That, whatever fucked up thing that makes them so brilliant at performing.0.97
01:02:20.000And I do know that in my own life, seeking a spiritual illusion, not finding it, but the act of seeking it, there's some salvation in that.
01:03:16.000And spirituality has a bad name because it's attached to a lot of people that, you know, Through no fault of their own, they're trying to find their own way and they're using that kind of lingo.0.98
01:03:28.000And maybe some of them are just still really fucked up.
01:03:31.000And that word now gets attached to people that are claiming to be on a path to try to fix themselves.0.98
01:03:38.000But you just associate it with people who are unsuccessful in the act and they're just like, it's like performative.
01:03:45.000They're like performatively being spiritual.
01:03:48.000Whereas I know some people that are like legitimately spiritual.
01:03:51.000Some of the nicest people that I know that are like, I.
01:03:55.000I know this guy who's a Christian, and all he does is build houses like small homes for homeless people and help them and get them jobs and teach them skills and help them get clean.
01:06:03.000Laugh horse, so I wanted to make it as funny as I could because otherwise it's just boring.0.99
01:06:07.000Who gives a shit about your life, Chuck?0.97
01:06:09.000But if I can make you laugh, then maybe it's worth reading.0.98
01:06:13.000But beginning with my childhood, you know, when I was a kid working for my dad, you know, those things that's me, but if I were to be held to what I said in 1969, It wouldn't go well for me.
01:07:31.000It's hard for people of 2026 to wrap their head around the environment of California, Los Angeles, 1994, and the impact that Scientology had because you had Tom Cruise, you had Jenna Elfman, was that around that time, Darman Gregg?
01:12:37.000It was just learning to be still, which is meditation.0.99
01:12:40.000Just learning to be still and not being tossed around by every fucking thought that comes screaming through your head like a tree full of rabid monkeys.0.99
01:12:49.000And that first time I did it, opposite a pretty girl.0.99
01:12:57.000It was a woman who was running the classroom, the communications course.0.87
01:13:05.000I said, I have this feeling like I'm up in the corner of the ceiling looking down at me.
01:13:12.000And she yelled out, Chuck has gone exterior.
01:13:35.000I had, I popped out of my head and I had an out-of-body experience.
01:13:39.000I didn't know what was happening, I didn't understand what exterior, I know what the word meant, but I didn't understand this as as but it felt good.
01:13:48.000The only other time that happened to me having that experience was when I flipped my car over at 70 miles an hour in Iowa and I remember seeing the accident from up in the sky looking down at it.
01:14:01.000That was more like a near death experience.
01:14:33.000And this heightened moment where they really believe there's some real significance to them sitting there and doing this exercise and that something big is going to happen.
01:14:42.000Your brain can trigger endogenous states that actually are real.
01:14:48.000So it's like what they're saying is kind of true, even though it's kooky.
01:16:46.000You know, an actual professional hypnotist.
01:16:48.000And when he would put his hands on them, whatever it was inside their brain that would just release.
01:16:54.000And even after they talked about him being a fraud, if they all left the cult and they said all these terrible things that he did, they still said that moment was the most powerful moment of their life.
01:17:30.000And so many people are looking for something to take them out of their state, the state they're in now.0.97
01:17:37.000And if it's Scientology, if it's being a Mormon, if it's Catholicism, whatever it is, like people are trying to find something that gets them.
01:18:34.000And I couldn't help notice my life was shit.0.99
01:18:40.000And these other people who I admired and I looked up to, they were getting in car accidents, getting divorced, catching colds, basically being just human beings, dealing with whatever shit was coming down the road, not the evolved, you know, spiritual titans that Scientology was promising.0.99
01:19:03.000You know, the exalted, you know, spiritual, enlightened beings.
01:19:08.000People, you know, you know, you haven't, you know, got a, I got a, you weren't supposed to get a cold.
01:19:15.000You were supposed to be, you know, you, you, the promise was you were going to rise up above all these human minutiae, you know, dilemmas and problems and whatnot.
01:19:27.000And, and you were going to have this remarkable insight into the world and you'd have power, power being a very powerful, power being powerful, being a real hook.
01:19:39.000Because if you're a young, scared guy like I was, power was missing.
01:20:47.000And it really began the turn into my life that we're talking about here, which was I decided that I'm not going to look for some outside element to help me go where I want to go.
01:26:43.000It was a rules based religion, it honored some wonderful things like education, you know, and there was a great deal of goodness to it societal goodness, you know.
01:26:58.000I think I mentioned in my book that my father was one of 11 Republicans in the country.
01:27:29.000Well, we were just talking about having some sort of a connection with God and a spiritual connection, and that this is what helped you become sober and get out of the darkness.
01:28:09.000You know, the most extraordinary thing, it's hard to do this and retain anything like anonymity, but there is the encouragement to pursue a God of your understanding, not someone else's.
01:34:28.000It's also connected to a lot of the ancient depictions of it, unfortunately.
01:34:33.000You have to think about like ancient depictions of God and Moses and all these biblical figures who are painted in the garb of the day in which that painting was made.0.98
01:34:44.000These people were looking up at the night sky going, What the fuck?1.00
01:36:29.000And listen, you know, you can see where when civilizations or cultures that took God out of the picture, they replaced it with a communist party.
01:37:04.000That tent pole moves, the tent comes down.0.94
01:37:07.000And everything, you know, if you believe that this is the truth and someone says, no, it's not, it's bullshit, everything else you believe is in fair play.0.91
01:39:53.000We were just talking in front of the house, and there was a piece of land next to his house that he was going to buy, but he had to put it off because his wife was going clear.
01:40:53.000If you give it away, It doesn't have as much value as if you say it's worth fifty thousand dollars.
01:40:59.000I think Paul Haggis was the one in the documentary who was discussing when he first got a hold of like one of the ancient stories that is like super secret and he read it.
01:43:04.000What a relief to not act as if I have a handle on this.
01:43:11.000And what's great is when you're sitting in a room full of people making a TV comedy, a sitcom, and they all look at you, you know, because the second act doesn't work, and everybody looks at you, and it's a great feeling to go, I don't know.
01:46:06.000I learned so much by being in a room for 25 years with great writers.
01:46:13.000And one of the things I talk about in the book, which is really meaningful to me, was when I got the chance to do the Kaminsky Method with Michael Douglas, I decided I want to write it alone.
01:51:39.000That's not a bad way to spend the day.
01:51:41.000No, it's an awesome way to spend the day.
01:51:44.000But some people, the stress of continuing to create and continuing to produce things, it eventually gets to them where they just like, I want off the ride.
01:51:57.000What I've done, and you really hit on something there, is the stress of it at a certain point is intolerable.
01:52:57.000I have this extraordinary writing staff, wonderful cast and crew, and sometimes my presence can be, I don't want to say destructive, but it doesn't encourage people to step up and go, what about?
01:54:30.000But I asked him, I remember this really vivid moment when I said, are you going to write the pilot for this new sitcom you're going to make?0.94