Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! – the TV taping

Yesterday I attended the first live taping of Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!, here in Los Angeles. Here’s my take on the night...

I’m not sure if this means anything, but the several-blocks-long line to get into the Wilshire Theater snaked around the Flynt building, headquarters of Hustler magazine. Most of us had obeyed the producers' instructions and dressed up (business casual) and left our cell phones in the car. (Cell phones, we were told, would not be allowed into the theater, a threat they never followed up on.) Nicely dressed in the SoCal sunshine, as I stood out there on the Flynt sidewalk, I was reminded of the weirdness of the Oscars, when the stars parade down the red carpet, dressed in evening wear, at five in the afternoon. They look out of place, and that might just be the theme of this posting.

But let me back up... Many years ago, when I was a devotee of A Prairie Home Companion, Amy got us tickets to a live taping of that show, at Town Hall in New York. While I’m certainly glad I went, the show was a bit of a bust. First of all, we happened to go the night they did the talent show for people from small towns with populations under a thousand. They didn’t do as many skits as they usually do, and I was underwhelmed by the small-town talent. Not that they weren’t good. It’s just that, well, there’s already way too much music in the show, and to double that amount becomes almost unbearable.

But it was still fun to see Tom Keith do his sound effects, and to hear Garrison (who really should be our poet laureate) do the news from you know where. But the most important take-away for me was the realization that radio is often best left to the radio. Sitting there in the theater I felt like a captive, and I realized that the great thing about the radio is that you can do so many other things while listening to it. An entire world enters your home and fills your imagination while you fold your socks or prepare your pasta. I’m reminded of the farmers in third world countries whose lives were changed by the transistor radio, who could now work the fields while listening to the BBC all day.

Sure, it’s fun to see the mechanics of A Prairie Home Companion, but really it’s too impersonal in a large theater. Garrison comes out of my living room speaker and sounds like he’s right there in the box, talking to me. In the large theater he’s tiny, much tinier than my imagination holds him to be. In my radio mind, he’s a giant. And on radio they lower the audio level on some of the clapping so that when Garrison starts his soliloquy you hear him from word one. In the theater you and your fellow audience members are clapping as he’s starting to speak and you never hear him say, “... in Lake Wobegon, my home town...”

Last night Peter Sagal and his buddies took the divorce even one step further. They’ve turned the radio show into TV, and one broken up by commercial interruptions. You sit there in the beautiful Wilshire Theater and think, this isn’t the show I love. In my mind, listening on a weekend, or streaming at work the following week, I would imagine Carl and Peter and all the contestants sitting on stools on an empty, black stage, with nothing but microphones and water in front of them. But, for TV, there’s a set that looks like a cross between a 1950s TV game show studio and one of those slick entertainment “news” shows some people will be watching tonight. There are flashy graphics ever swirling behind Carl Kasell’s head (and on a massive screen dead center at the back of the set), while the same set is simultaneously implanted with red velvet, retro, curtain doorways, like the kind that separate first class from coach, and you think, my god, what the hell were they thinking? If Peter Sagal wants to come on stage, why doesn’t he just come from the side?

But I’m being catty. In reality the set was fine. Carl sits off to the side like Spalding Gray behind his desk. Peter stands off center behind a podium. And the three contestants sit side-by-side behind a sort of anchor news desk. From an audience member’s perspective—mine—the three units do seem too far from one another. Granted, the show the other night was designed for TV, and though there were monitors showing, say, a close up of Carl Kasell, we in the audience did not see the final product, slickly cut together. So who knows? Maybe it’ll be good on the screen.

When we first moved to LA, Amy and I went to a taping of Will & Grace, with VIP tickets provided by a friend who was a writer on the show. I never thought the show was all that great in the first place, but 22 minutes of it on TV was at least moderately bearable. There are 22 minutes, and then it’s over. But the taping of those 22 minutes lasted hours. There were multiple takes, with the writers continually huddling and coming up with new jokes to try. To keep us preoccupied during the tedium of these discussions (which, alas, we in the audience couldn’t hear) there was a fluffer who regaled us with stand-up “comedy,” and even threw candy at us half-way through the taping to get our blood sugar up. But after three or four hours of this, you are brain dead.

The Wait Wait taping had its own fluffer, who threw not candy but public radio swag. And we were coached when to clap. We clapped as we went into a commercial break. We clapped as we came out of the break. Frankly, I was clapped out by the end. I was no longer an independent-minded public radio listener, but a trained sea lion.

The beauty of radio is its low cost. When the radio panel tells us their fake news stories each week, we see each episode in our mind’s eye. But on TV, Wait Wait has to now not just tell, but show. So we saw re-enactments of the fake news. I could hear the cash flowing. Each little segment now actually has to be produced, with actors and locations, and budgets. But what’s weird is that the real item has to seem as fake as the fake items, otherwise you’ll know which is real, because, well, reality just doesn’t look produced. So we had the Escherian experience of watching a faked production of a real news item.

Carl no longer does the message on anyone’s answering machine. Now they’re giving out Carl Kasell calendars, with Carl’s face Photoshopped onto the bodies of hunky firefighters and athletes. Each time the calendar was mentioned, they showed photos from a couple of months. But how long will this joke last? And which would you rather have? The calendar, or his voice on your answering machine?

I’ll take the voice on my answering machine. For the in-joke, in the world of radio, is Carl Kasell. Here’s the staid news announcer doing silly limericks. (Actually, they’ve cut the limericks from the TV show.) But you have to know who Carl Kasell is for the joke to work. Most of the TV viewing world won’t have a clue who the guy is. (Apparently this pilot was funded by CBS.) Also, the fun of the radio show is that Carl is the celebrity. But now, on TV, he and the panel members are largely unknown. I mean, Roy Blount, Jr. the famous TV personality?

So there on the panel last night was Tracy Ullman, sitting between Mo Rocca and Tom Boddet. And I suspect she’d never listened to the show before; during the taping she expressed genuine surprise to hear that she and her fellow panelists were being scored—“There are points?!” And while she acted larger than life and was at times actually funny, she was rarely witty. It was like she thought she was doing the Hollywood Squares, instead of a quick-witted, topical, news quiz show. She seemed to inhabit an alternate comedic world. I could imagine Peter Sagal’s initial conversation with the CBS executives. He wanted Paula Poundstone (“Paula who?”) while they insisted on a celebrity: “Ya gotta have a name!”

With Ullman as a panelist, the well-oiled machine, already tripping in its new TV suit, was completely thrown off rhythm. (Peter Sagal in fact did look out of place in what he admitted was a borrowed (network approved?) suit.) Granted, once Ullman learns what the show is about, she might actually become a great guest. And last night was their first ever TV taping. These things take time. So who knows? It might turn into an excellent show in the end.

That said, this audience member was mildly uncomfortable during much of the taping. Okay, this was weird: Many of the questions had come from the already-broadcast radio show from that weekend, and I imagine the TV panelists were told: “Don’t listen to the radio show this week; we’re going to be asking some of the same questions.” I couldn’t remember if Tom and Mo had been on the show that weekend, and wondered if they were faking their answers. My guess is they hadn’t been and weren’t. To make things even weirder, after our taping they had another taping immediately planned, with a completely new audience. Were they going to be asking the same questions? Were they going to cut the two versions together, with the best of?

It was especially weird seeing the questions on the large teleprompter facing the stage. (I could see it clearly, and I’m pretty sure the panelists could see the answers to the questions as they were scrolled.) Certainly Peter Sagal writes comic bits for the radio show too, but there was a strange sense of everything now being overscripted. I felt like the curtain had been lifted, and there was the frail wizard of Oz at the levers.

The best part of the show actually occurred when a mistake was made and everyone knew that what was being said wouldn’t go into the final cut. The show was suddenly “off-the-record.” Ullman, after complaining that she hadn’t known about the points scoring, now complained that she was down two points. Peter Sagal replied with a brilliant, off-the-cuff remark (and this isn’t quite verbatim): “If you’re behind, then maybe you should start attacking their character.” He was clearly referring to the McCain campaign’s recent tactic of smearing Obama, using the pit bull Palin. Anyway, the audience roared with laughter and the clapping was genuine. That was the show we loved, those moments of pure, brilliant, spontaneous wit, worthy of the Algonquin Round Table. Of course, it was a shame that it was effectively off-the-record, and I couldn’t imagine how CBS would even allow the effectively anti-Palin comment to be broadcast even if it were on the record. But then the stage manager gave his cue, Peter picked up where he’d left off, and we were back in TV land.