“It’s good to be able to come to work and laugh every day.”
This was one of the first things camera operator Jamie Hitchcock said to me during my visit to the set of Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, where they were pre-shooting several scenes for the episode “A Snotty Attitude and a Party on a School Night.” Georgie & Mandyis one of vanishingly few multi-camera sitcoms that still shoots with a live studio audience, so my visit to set on a Monday saw them working on the scenes for that week’s episode that would be too logistically tricky to capture in front of a live audience. For instance, one of the sequences shot that day was a montage involving the two child actors portraying Georgie and Mandy’s daughter, CeeCee, where the two parents struggle to adjust to sleeping with CeeCee in their bed. These scenes are then cut together in rough form to be played back on screens for the audience to react to the following night.
Since the earliest days of television, sitcoms have been a staple of the medium, with I Love Lucy in particular cementing the shape and structure of a multi-camera comedy, shot in front of a live studio audience. These days, the multi-cam sitcom is a much rarer breed—especially those shot with a live audience. By my count, there are only five currently shooting in L.A. Though these shows rarely enjoy the critical accolades given to supposedly more “serious” television, they have long been a core component of the industry structure, helping to keep the whole machine humming along. With all that in mind, I was eager to get a firsthand look into the process of making one of these series.
Read the story here on SOC.org
