Producer Robert Carlock offers some details on Thursday’s live ’30 Rock’

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30 Rock is planning a live episode this Thursday and although it’s not as dangerous as it sounds (most of the cast are either from Saturday Night Live, Broadway veterans or stand-ups), there’s still the whole curiosity factor.

I know that I’ll be watching both episodes (thanks Slingbox!).

Producer Robert Carlock talked with the New York Times about the upcoming show.

Q. How long have you and the “30 Rock” team been kicking around the idea of a live episode?

Then during the writers’ strike, we did a benefit at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Manhattan, where we did a live staged reading with very crude blocking. I say we because I got to play James Carville, who had a cameo in the episode, and I wore a T-shirt that said James Carville on it. We did two performances of it, and it just confirmed everything we knew about our actors – how great they are in front of an audience as well as in front of a single camera, which is such a different set of skills. I think Tina really enjoyed that immediate reaction. So what actually drove us to do it this year? I don’t know. NBC called our bluff, and Studio 8H was open and we figured, we’ve got to do this.

A. The thing we confronted when we looked back at the UCB experience was the fact that that show probably was 45 minutes long. The big challenge from a writing standpoint has been doing all of our scenes, our cutaways and our story that we try to pack into 21 minutes. We’re trying to have weird ways that we do flashbacks, still, but we’ll do live flashbacks with a different actor or actress playing Jack or Liz or whoever. We can’t do as much of it, but we’ve got a couple little weird live elements that we’re trying out to make it feel that way.

Q. I know you’re still keeping things under wraps, but what can you say at this stage about the plot of the live episode?

A. One of the reasons that we thought, O.K., it makes sense for us to do a live show, besides the hope of having just one night of shooting and then getting drunk, is the fact that it’s a show about a live show. It suggested that maybe we could use the live show as a framework. So the episode starts just before a live “TGS” show begins and it ends just after it ends. The stories take place between the characters amid the energy and activity and backdrop of the live show.

Q. The live episode is going to be performed twice on Thursday night, once for the Eastern and Central Time Zones, and then three hours later for the Western and Mountain Time Zones. Why?

A. To make life harder for ourselves, mostly. Tina and I both think that suffering is the base state in life. We’re actually making little changes – I don’t want to get into too many details, but these little flashback elements, or the fake commercial when we throw to commercial, we’ll change them for the West Coast. We might change some jokes within the body of the show, but we’ll see about that. We briefly toyed with doing one [live broadcast] for the Midwest but that was deemed impractical. We have a lot of Ohioans and Chicagoans on the staff. We felt a certain duty. Mountain was [doomed] the whole time. We couldn’t do anything about that.

Q. How wrong could things possibly go?

A. I’m a great lover of things falling apart completely. One of my favorite moments at “SNL” was in a John Goodman show, and we had made a change between dress and air. There was this sketch that was supposed to end with a baseball being thrown by a prop guy from off-stage. But unfortunately we didn’t coordinate with stage directors: there was another cue, much earlier in the scene, for an entrance or something, and the prop guy thought that was his cue. So he threw the baseball and the cue card guy went to the last card, and the actors wrapped it up two minutes before they were supposed to. We were running out of time in the show, and we went from two minutes over to two minutes under in like a second.

For the full article, click here

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