How to hide the miracle of life

Was at a party recently and bumped into Shelley Long (who looks fabulous, by the way!). She mentioned that her daughter just turned 22. Wow. It seems like just yesterday we were in the third year of CHEERS and Shelley was pregnant. Whenever an actress on a series gets pregnant it presents a tricky dilemma for the writers – especially if you don’t want her character to get pregnant as well. I don’t know what they would have done on the FLYING NUN.

On CHEERS, if Diane had a baby it would alter the entire series, taking it in a direction we didn’t want to go. So the question became – how do we hide it?

I thought the staff came up with a pretty ingenious solution. Diane and new beau, Frasier would vacation in Europe. We could film those scenes early in the season before she was showing and then place them in episodes later in the year. During the early stages of the pregnancy she deftly hid behind the bar or a tray. And when it was impossible to hide her anymore we had the Europe episodes in the bank.

Since those Europe scenes were independent of the main stories they could sometimes be shuffled around. I remember watching an episode at home one night, written I believe by Sam Simon. I was laughing and enjoying the story and then they cut to one of these vacation scenes. It was odd. I felt a weird déjà vu. I knew this was a first run episode I hadn’t seen yet this scene was vaguely familiar.

And then it hit me – David and I wrote this scene. It was taken out of our show and inserted into this one.

There have been many times I’ve watched scenes and thought to myself, I wish I had written that. This was the first time I watched a scene and said, “Oh my God, I did write that!”

I imagine whoever wrote the vacation scene that appeared in our episode had a similar reaction.

Things were so much easier with Rhea Perlman. She got pregnant several times during the run of the series but since it was established that her character, Carla popped out kids like a Pez dispenser, it actually made things easier for us.

Starting with Lucy (didn’t everything start with Lucy?) all the way to Amanda Peete on STUDIO 60, writers have dealt with series stars getting pregnant. And they’ve always found solutions.

Except one. On BEWITCHED they never could explain which Darren was the father of Tabitha.










Late tomorrow: My weekly AMERICAN IDOL review. I'm anxious to see how many of the finalists have even heard of Tony Bennett.