TV and film legend James L. Brooks never planned on making sitcoms
In a Q interview, Brooks looks back on his career and also discusses the feminism of The Mary Tyler Moore Show
As unbelievable as it sounds, James L. Brooks — the legendary television and film producer who co-created comedies like Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons — never planned on making sitcoms. Back in the 1960s, when Brooks was in his 20s, he was working as a news writer in New York City. In 1965, he moved across the country to Los Angeles to work for a documentary filmmaking company.
Within a few weeks of his move, however, the company laid him off, leaving him broke and far from home.
"There was a very bleak New Year's Eve where some of my old documentary friends got together for a party," he says in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "And into that party of sort of grubby guys walks this golden [man] in a tuxedo, who was the friend of the host. And it turned out to be Allan Burns."
Despite being only a few years older than Brooks at the time, Burns was already one of the biggest names in television with five shows on the air. After a brief conversation at the party, Burns offered Brooks a job on NBC's My Mother the Car.
Brooks started working in sitcoms at a time when the genre was changing. Shows with wacky, over-the-top premises like My Mother the Car and Bewitched were on their way out and being replaced by a new wave of shows that found humour in people's real lives. One of those shows was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is still beloved by many to this day. But Brooks says that when he pitched the show to CBS alongside Moore — who already had a development deal with the network — the pitch wasn't initially very well received.
"Years later we found out that [Grant Tinker] was ordered to fire us in the room and he just didn't do it," he says.
Brooks adds that a senior executive said the three things you couldn't put on television were "divorced women, Jews, and men with mustaches."
"He said this in a meeting with, like, 20 executives in a semi-circle, looking at us. Looking at my face, he said 'Jews,'" says Brooks, who is Jewish.
Eventually, they decided to have Moore's character be on the rebound from a broken engagement. The show, which featured a single career woman as the protagonist, represented a revolutionary shift in how women were portrayed on television, but Brooks says the thought never occurred to anyone in the writers' room.
"Anybody who's self-conscious about doing something revolutionary will never [do something revolutionary]," he tells Power. "We were very lucky in our timing, in feminism coming to a crucial point just at the time we did the show. It's just one of those breaks, that the timing was perfect."
The full interview with James L. Brooks is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with James L. Brooks produced by Vanessa Greco.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
