On a recent episode of the "Dinner's on Me" podcast, Chuck Lorre described working as a writer on two seasons of Roseanne as "malice. It was absolute," per Variety. Roseanne Barr "hated that there were writers. Fundamentally hated that other people wrote words that she would say," he said, and he put up with 60- to 70-hour weeks because after 15 years of poverty and health issues he was "not going to go back to scrambling to pay the rent."
The word is doing a lot of work. "Malice" is a legal term, the kind of word that lives in a cease and desist, and now it lives in a podcast clip. One of the biggest sitcoms in television history is being described by the writer-creator who built the machine that followed it as an act of malice, and the delivery vehicle is a dinner-and-drinks podcast hosted by an actor from the show. The industry's standard for a hostile workplace is now a soundbite.
The explanation is the part worth a pause. A stand-up comedian who built a career on her own words enters a machine that requires a room of other people to write the words for her, and according to Lorre that transition "was not going to happen." That is the entire business model of network television in one clause. The star writes herself, other people write the star, and the tension between those two facts is what the writers room was for, and now it is what the writers room is remembered for.
The machine's response to all of this is a photo of Lorre at an awards dinner and a timestamped quote. The malice is dated, the room is gone, and nothing in this story is actionable, which is exactly what the industry means when it says the record is complete.
YOUR TURN: If the writers room was "malice," what is the room called now that it has been replaced by a podcast, and who hosts it?
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