Even the most celebrated, experienced television writers remember their first time: The first time they saw their credit — their name — on the small screen. It’s like graduation day, the moment when their dreams and hard work finally come to fruition, the time when the script they wrote is beamed into millions of households.
For “Modern Family” executive producer Dan O’Shannon, that moment was a little overwhelming. It was 1986, and he was just 23, hired to be part of a writer’s apprenticeship program at Witt/Thomas Productions, which made such classics as “The Golden Girls,” and was turning another of its series, “It’s a Living,” about five hotel waitresses, into new episodes made for syndication.
O’Shannon was thrilled to get the $300-a-week apprenticeship. He sat in a writers’ room and pitched jokes. When he was finally given the opportunity to write a real episode, he watched with friends huddled around his TV in a modest apartment in Van Nuys, Calif.
“I remember taking a walk around the neighborhood, thinking, ‘Wow, I wrote something that’s a little part of TV history,’ ” says O’Shannon, a five-time Emmy winner who just signed a deal with CBS. “But that was the first and last time that I made a big deal out of it.”
That is, until three years later, when another on-screen credit made O’Shannon stop in his tracks: He had written his first episode of “Cheers.” “When I saw my name in the ‘Cheers’ [typeface], that was a big deal,” he says.
For Carol Mendelsohn, who’s been at the helm of the “CSI” franchise for more than a decade, the one person she most wanted to share the big moment with was her father. It was 1985, and Mendelsohn, a former lawyer, had been hired to write an episode of NBC’s “Fame.”
“I’m originally from Chicago,” says Mendelsohn. “So I invited my father to fly out from Chicago and I said, ‘Come to my house. I’m gonna have a few friends over and we’re gonna have a party and watch my episode.’ ” His reaction was completely unexpected. “He flies out. We turn on ‘Fame.’ The episode starts, it gets to my credit, and my father gets up and leaves the room,” she says. “And I said, ‘Where are you going?’ And he said, ‘That’s all I needed to see.’”
A parent also looms large in the memory of Showtime’s “Episodes” co-creator and executive producer Jeffrey Klarik, who started out writing comedy for HBO’s “Dream On,” starring Brian Benben, about a divorcé whose thoughts are illustrated by clips of old TV shows. It was 1992, and he was working with his real-life partner, Emmy-winner David Crane, who went on to co-create “Friends.”
So what happened when he saw “Written by Jeffrey Klarik” on the screen? “David and I looked at each other and went, ‘Yay!’ ” says Klarik, laughing. “And then you wait for your mother to call and tell you how good it was.” Did that happen? “No! And then I called her and said, ‘What did you think?’ And she said, ‘It was fine. Couldn’t your name be bigger?’”
There was no party at Crane’s house when he saw the very first show he ever wrote, a short-lived NBC sitcom called “Everything’s Relative” starring Jason Alexander. “Jason was a theater friend,” Crane says. “He was the one who got us the job.” The “Us” refers to Marta Kauffman, his “Friends” co-creator.
But this was 1987, and “this was our first TV anything,” says Crane. “We were invited to [the] taping and discovered that not one single word that we had written was still in the script except the word ‘decaf.’ We didn’t know enough about television not to expect that the staff would rewrite the script, so we sat there in the audience, going, ‘Oh, so that’s how this works.’”
Was he upset? “When every single word you’ve written is gone, you don’t throw a party,” Crane says.
But Neal Baer, executive producer of “Under the Dome,” was partying — very quietly — for weeks before his first credit. Trained as a physician, he also wanted to become a writer and director. “Back then [the late 1980s], the way to become a writer or director was to do an ‘ABC Afterschool Special,’” says Baer, who eventually put his medical training to good use as an executive producer on “ER.” “The ‘After School Special’ was like doing a small movie over 45 minutes, and many directors got their start doing them, as did actors, like Michelle Pfeiffer,” he says.
His 1989 entry, “Private Affairs,” the story of a teenager who discovers that her father is having an affair, aired at 4 p.m. “But it might as well have been a prime-time show, or movie, because it meant the world to me,” says Baer.
Where was he when it aired? “I was with my wife in our house,” Baer says. “And I remember, before it was on, they would do these promos, and I was so excited to see the promos that I had ABC on 24 hours a day for weeks before the show aired. I had to hit the right button to get the VCR working.”
For some of these heavyweights, that thrill never goes away. Just ask Klarik, who, as executive producer of “Episodes,” could keep his name on the screen as long as he wants. He jokes, “I’m always saying to the editor, ‘Stay on our names longer.’ If I made up the rules for these things, it would be mostly my name, and then a few minutes of show.”
“It’s a little silly at this point in our careers,” says Crane. “But it feels good, just for a minute, to see your name up there.”