George Lopez returns, once-estranged daughter in tow, with a textbook family sitcom in the making.
One of the show’s producers, a former writer of the CBS show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is also a member of the original cast of My Name is Earl.
That relationship, and the show’s connection to that of a man who was the heart of a comedy-drama and the “voice” of an audio-drama is the source of some interesting comparisons and differences, and also to some degree, the show.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the show, in my opinion, is that it’s a family sitcom — with the primary family dynamic being between the matriarch and her two children. And it’s about a man trying to make ends meet, as husband and father, and what he learns along the way about family and love and family life is not unlike what I learned about and fell in love with the concept of family during the eight years I spent working at the CBS Studio Center.
Like many other writers, I started working in television as a script consultant, working on The Cosby Show and The Wonder Years. One thing I learned during those years is that you can take a script you know from a very simple sitcom like Sesame Street, and you can do something wonderful with it.
When I first worked on the CBS show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, in which a young woman finds herself in the middle of a bitter custody battle with a man she believes had sexually abused her, I wrote a scene for the main character, Kimmy, in which she discovers that the man in question had in fact been her mother’s ex-husband. In order for the episode to be able to work on that level, you needed to know something about the character. She didn’t actually have an ex-husband. So I wrote a scene that was much more complex and complicated than the character was. And what happens there is that it’s very complicated, and it requires you to go away and learn a little bit about the character. And so I went away and had to write another hour of script. There’s a scene that I wrote just for the character and had to go back in and add more detail to it so that the character was able to feel like an actual person as opposed to just a very complicated concept.
Then I wrote a scene with the
