Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Ryan Raddatz: In season one, Cedric the Entertainer opens the front door. The two neighbors are there with a bunch of board games. It’s board game night in this scene that was going to get a big laugh. And our showrunner at that time said, oh, we need to add Cedric walking up to the window and looking through the window and saying, oh, the Johnsons are here before he opens the door. And my thought was, why does he have to announce who they are? And this was a thing he had learned from some other showrunner before him, was always tell the audience everything except the punchline on show night. He was totally right when Cedric said, the Johnson that are here now, we’re all excited to see what’s going to be going on behind the door, as opposed to if we had done it my way. You open the door, you have to think, oh, the Johnsons are here. Oh, and this funny thing with the board games.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us, as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Ryan Raddatz is a Los Angeles based tv writer and producer who has worked on numerous broadcast sitcoms and kids shows, including The Neighborhood on CBS, Word Girl on PBS, and he’s developed more than a dozen pilots at various networks. Ryan won two daytime Emmys for his writing on Word Girl and another three for his work on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Before writing and producing, Ryan made a living as an actor and composer while failing to make a living playing in indie rock and bluegrass bands. So for all those reasons and many more, I’m truly delighted to welcome the prolific writer, producer, actor and composer Ryan Raddatz to StoryBeat today. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Raddatz: Hey, Steve. Hello. Thank you for having me.

Steve Cuden: Oh, it’s a great pleasure to have you on the show, believe me. So let’s go back in time a little bit. You’ve been at this for a while, and I’m just wondering, how young were you when the bug first bit you? When did you think to yourself, wow, I would like to be in the Entertainment business and comedy and music and all the rest of it.

Ryan Raddatz: Gosh, I feel like it’s interesting because I have an eleven year old son right now. my wife and I do, and he is a performer at a much younger age than I was. I didn’t discover performing, really, until, I think I was in high school and I saw people doing improv comedy. I grew up in Milwaukee, and we happened to have comedy sports, which was sort of a very approachable, fun version of improv comedy, pretending to be a competition, but it was really just a fun comedy show. And we had high school, we had leagues for it in high school in Milwaukee, back in the nineties. And so I was very lucky to be at a high school that had a team of improvisers, and basically it was just the theater kids. And I started doing improv, and I had always played a lot of music, but improv was where I started collaborating. And so then improv led to being in plays, and that led to being in musicals. And so I thought I was going to be an actor for. And I was an actor, in LA for a long time, but, I would say high school and improv comedy, and that I come back to improv all the time when I’m feeling stuck or uninspired, because that, for me, was the gateway drug.

Steve Cuden: So Improv told you that you could do things that were funny, or did you know you were funny before that?

Ryan Raddatz: I guess, looking back, I probably, in certain contexts, I was funny. I had friends and we would joke around and stuff, but, getting up on stage and improvising and being a part of a group that didn’t know what was about to happen, but knew that we’d have each other’s backs, I never wanted to stop doing that. And furthermore, I wanted to find a way to do that and get paid for it, which I think, ultimately, I’ve stumbled into. Writing and producing for television has been a way to collaborate and make cool stuff with interesting people. so it was never the plan to be a tv writer, but I arrived after a couple other careers in the Entertainment industry, and, I’m here now. I also don’t know where I’m going to go. maybe I’ll be a tv writer for the rest of my career. It could change again. The industry is changing so fast right now, that I’m just. Every year I’m glad I get to keep kind of playing.

Steve Cuden: What is changing quickly, in your estimation? What’s the most off setting thing that’s happening right now that’s changing rapidly?

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, gosh. that’s a good question. There’s so many, we’re coming off of the big, strikes last year, which I think were a, ah, success for the writers Guild and I can’t speak for the actors, as I’m not really one anymore, but it was a success, but it was really hard and devastating for a lot of people’s careers. But beyond the strikes, I think the industry is changing in the sort of business framework of it. And this is out there if you.

Steve Cuden: Read the article, streamers and so on.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah, well, and streamers and the way people consume content has changed. It used to be scarcity. People could explain this way Better Than me, but from where I’m sitting, there used to be scarcity for the last 60, 70 years of television. You had to turn on the tv when it was on and that’s when the advertisers would advertise and that’s how they’d make money. And there was a business model that facilitated a lot of shows, scripted shows, and a lot of episodes per show. And the new model, the subscription model, for the streamers is from where I’m sitting, we all know it’s shorter episodes, shorter number of episodes, fewer number of episodes. So shorter seasons. And so from a day to day writer standpoint, it’s harder to be employed as consistently. There’s beginning to be fewer shows, but even those shows have fewer episodes. So, the, the sand is kind of shifting. I feel like television is competing with social media, it’s competing with video games in an interesting way. It’s going to be interesting to look back 20 years from now and say, oh, that’s where media and Entertainment and people’s attention went.

Steve Cuden: Do you think AI is going to impact the way shows are written?

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah, I think it’s God, that’s going to be really interesting. I don’t know what it’s going to do, but I think it’s going to do a lot. Maybe not for scripted television right away, but I think there are going to be advances in. I hate the term attention economy because it sounds like when people talk about creating content and there are so many tech terms that have wormed, their way into the Entertainment industry, which we already have our own ridiculous terms. Well, we don’t need to talk about content and attention economies. But I feel like when I look at my eleven year old and where his attention goes for Entertainment, it is split much more, between many more things than it was for me at his age. For me, it was coming home to watch Gilligan’s island reruns every day. And then I remember after school at his age, in 6th grade, watching Gilligan’s island every day, until all of a sudden it was in black and white again. And I realized, oh, at some point I realized I’ve started over at the beginning because the first season or two was in black and white.

Steve Cuden: Black and white, sure.

Ryan Raddatz: But I didn’t understand as like an eleven year old, oh, I’m watching reruns from 30 years ago. This was the eighties in Wisconsin, and I’ve watched them all and now they’ve repeated where I only had a limited amount of things available to me to watch, and there were pluses and minuses to that in retrospect. But when I look at my son now, his attention can be on any number of things that aren’t just scripted Entertainment. So as a person who writes scripted Entertainment, I hope it sticks around. I think AI is going to blow industries wide open in terms of what we expect. However, I’m hopeful that there’s a human element into storytelling that won’t be replicated.

Steve Cuden: I’m going to be very surprised if we lose the human element. And my reasoning on that is, at least for the foreseeable future, is that somehow humans still can make a plus b equal GKl and computers can’t do that yet. And I don’t think they’re going to do that easily. Although, who knows? I mean, the way that they’re talking about AI, maybe they will. And I think it’s that human connection, the brain, that takes you into leaps that are flights of fancy.

Ryan Raddatz: Absolutely. It’s When I watch a story I want to watch somebody’s not literal experience, but I want to watch a story being told by someone who’s had experiences. And maybe that’ll change down the road where, who knows what that entire universe will look like. I guess my feeling is I’m not terribly worried about what AI will do for writing scripted Entertainment right now, but I’m very curious to see what it does for everything in our cultural landscape and what types of Entertainment it provides that we don’t even have yet. I think if you went back 20 or 30 years and talked about video games, I think people would be surprised that you would have them on your phone and your iPad, and that you would always, you would have a constant opportunity to put your attention there. So I wonder where that will go.

Steve Cuden: And for the time being, those need to be written by humans.

Ryan Raddatz: They do. And that’s. Boy, that’s so interesting, because a lot of my career, I would love to be a, ah, narrative game designer and I’m very interested in games. I love playing games. An interesting challenge in my career has always been paying the bills while finding the overlap of something I’m really interested in doing. There are creative things I can’t wait to do and learn about that I can’t pay the bills at right now. So game design is a unique skillset, and there are people in the tech world, in the game design world, who have broken new barriers for narrative Entertainment. In my experience, there are video games I’ve played that are. That have blown my mind narratively.

Steve Cuden: What does, blowing your mind narratively mean in terms of a game?

Ryan Raddatz: Like, there was a game came, out about maybe ten years ago called Life is strange. And it was released episodically, as kind of as fast, I believe, as the game designers could make it. But you were playing this character in a world. It was almost like a soap opera, but there was a Sci-Fi element to it. But it wasn’t just a shoot em up game. It was a narrative game where you’re making choices. And that, to me, is the difference between a game and a movie or tv show. And a movie or tv show. You’re on the ride, you don’t get to make it.

Steve Cuden: So when you make the choice, you’re able to then go down one path or another.

Ryan Raddatz: Exactly. And it changed. And now there are a million games like this. The first one that really grabbed me in the modern gaming era, where my choices really impacted it was this game, life is strange, and it was, I think it was probably about ten years ago. I was just completely captivated by it. The decisions felt like I was making real decisions. I was just invested in it in the way that I get invested in a movie or tv show. But it was a different feeling because I felt like I had a choice. And I feel like that kind of narrative is. I think AI is going to influence those types of narratives in a meaningful way very soon because it requires a writer or maybe an AI to write a ton of material. The new game, Baldur’s Gate three, which is, winning. It’s a huge dungeons and Dragons game. Has human made, not an AI made game, as far as I know, but, the studio has. They had to write and record endless amounts of dialogue, because part of the allure of the game is how many narrative trails you can go down. And that, to me, I think, is a really captivating experience, different from watching the passive experience of watching tv and Film, that I think our technology is going to change. And frankly, it’s a new art form. In the same way that cinema is 100 years old, video game narrative design is a very 2030, maybe 40 years, where they’ve really been stories in video games. And I think in another ten or 20 years, we’re going to experience universes within those games that have a flexibility and an engagement that, will, may continue to challenge the scripted Entertainment too.

Steve Cuden: Do you think we’re going to lose the passive, sit back and watch a single narrative story with no opportunity to influence it?

Ryan Raddatz: I don’t, I don’t think so. We might not have as much, I don’t know, but I don’t think we will. Because I do find playing those games takes an amount of energy from me, literally the decision making. It’s interesting. You could have, you know, there are people who say you have a certain amount of decision you can make per day, in terms of your energy, and you can have decision fatigue. Those games, sometimes, at least for my brain, can be tiring, as though I’m going through the experience. It really tricks my. They’re amazing. And I think a tv show or Film is usually relaxing, so I think people are still going to want that. But when you look at where kids are spending their time right now, I’ve been told by kids, tv executives in the last few months that some, of them, some networks feel like they’re losing six to eleven year olds, which used to be the main kids tv that was not preschool was six to eleven. Based on their metrics and their data, they are losing them to video games and social media. Like, that’s where those kids, their attention, where my generation 30 years ago was addicted to Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, these kids are on Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite. And so I think there will continue to be a shift. And who knows? I think people talk about the metaverse a lot, which I’m really interested in, which is when I watch my son play Fortnite and when I play it with him, because it’s super fun, it’s, there’s kind of a narrative. They’re mixing up characters from all different genres, but it’s also a game. There’s a game within the game. It’s social, but you can play it alone. I think where we put our attention creatively, the creative stuff that asks for our attention is going to continue shifting in the next few years. I’m excited for what it is.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that this is impacting the attentions of young people? Where they’re going to have attention deficits all over the place because they can’t follow a single line, that they’ve got to find things that are going off in many directions at once.

Ryan Raddatz: I’m less worried about that than I thought I would have been now that I have a kid. Because it’s funny. My wife and I laughed at like, oh, the first thing we did when we came home from school in middle school was like, turn on the tv and just have a, you know, like I was saying, I watched all of Gilligan’s Island a million times through. I think the, as culturally we will have a challenge with avoiding distraction. And I think we all have this interesting relationship with social media. Personally, right now I’m so mad. Like, the Internet has become this thing that I feel sucks energy from me as opposed to in the late nineties, it was the coolest, most magical universe, right? And so it’ll be, I’ll be interested in that in ten years. But yeah, I don’t know, it’s. I guess I’ve gotten us off topic a little bit. But we talked about AI. I think there will always be stories to be told. And I’m really glad for this chunk of my career. I’ve been able to make money in the scripted tv universe. I’m not sure how much longer it’ll last historically.

Steve Cuden: And when I say historically, I mean serious history. It’s been 2700 plus years that humans have followed this notion of, here’s a story it has a plot. Aristotle says there’s a beginning, a middle and an end, which is simple to say, but harder to actually construct properly. And this has been going on with plays and then ultimately movies and tv and so on for 2700 plus years, going back to the greeks. So now, all of a sudden, this is being upended by what you’re talking about with multiple storylines that may or may not have a conclusion. They may be left open ended or left for you to construct something at the end of the day as opposed to the story finishing off in a construction. And this is, I think, seriously challenging the minds of humanity in a way that we have no idea what’s going to happen with it because it’s a societal experiment.

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s an interesting notion. My take on that would be that I think these narrative and you can, certain games are more narrative than others. That game I was talking about, life is strange. Definitely had a beginning, middle and end, no matter which way you played it. So it was built. It was built to be a story But here is this is the difference I see between the last 2700 years and what these interactive Entertainment experiences can provide. My experience of playing the game. And I think this is good and bad. My experience of playing Life is strange, was unique compared to anyone else’s, as opposed to my experience of watching a great tv show. Breaking Bad was the same, and we could talk about the same episode, right? So I think there’s a collective, there’s something is lost in the community when everyone has their own individual Entertainment experiences. But I will also say, if you look back at, like, folk music and folk stories and folk, like, we go back before tv and Film, there was never one version of Paul Bunyan. There was never one version of John Henry, right, of, the Odyssey. All the greek myths, like, stories grow and change. The difference to me is the interactivity that people can have with them now. So I’m less worried about, like, will stories survive? I’m more worried, will I make enough money to have health insurance next year? Like, there’s a. This was. I heard this line 20 years ago when I was starting tv writing. Someone said they want to participate in the slow, lucrative death of television. Because it said, you know, back when in the nineties, there were like 30 multi camera sitcoms on the air per week, and they would shoot 20 pilots a year at every network. And I have absolutely benefited from the last. In the last ten years. Early in my career, there were way more shows being made. It was easier to get on staff. It’s harder now. I’m confident, especially with the strength of our unions, that we won’t lose all those protections we fought for. But I look at the music industry and I look at the era I grew up in. Albums were normal again, the monoculture. There was an expectation that a band would have single, then they would have an album. There was an industry that brought talented new groups in. There were gatekeepers. The economics were. I mean, a lot of artists got screwed over, but the economics at least were there in a marketplace. And whats happening in tv right now is that marketplace is not cost effective for a lot of these streamers. It’s just the business model has been flipped on its head in a way that I think there’ll be a lot of disruption. And I think it’s exciting if this is my optimism speaking. But if I were a new writer or creator trying to break in right now, it would be scary because the old foundations are falling down. But there also is. There’s about to be an opening for what’s next. And I don’t know what’s next. I’m at the point in my career where I want to help people tell their stories in the what’s next? But, I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s going to be an interesting five or ten years listening to this. Who knows?

Steve Cuden: Well, let’s talk about what is as opposed to what’s next. So you’ve been working on, sitcoms and on children’s shows and on, chat shows for a while. So you have a pretty varied level of experience in different ways. What are the main differences for the listeners that don’t know between writing for a sitcom versus writing for a kid show or an animated show versus writing for an Ellen DeGeneres?

Ryan Raddatz: Some things are the same. Coming up with stuff, being great at working with people and collaborating and being open to getting notes and throwing ideas away and all that stuff. But, in general, every show is its own monster. Most kids shows I worked in kids animation a lot.

Steve Cuden: well, you know, I did that for 20 plus years.

Ryan Raddatz: Absolutely. So, you know, so kids animation, at least that shows I worked on, we didn’t have a writer’s room. You basically had a showrunner type person who then had handed out freelance episodes to a group of writers. so for example, on word girl, this PBS kids show I worked on, I think over the course of the, of the show, we did 220, 811 minutes episodes. So it was a lot. We ran for a long time. And I started out as a voiceover actor on the show. I did the voice of the dad and, word girl’s friend, a newspaper reporter at her school. And then I begged them to let me write an episode. And they finally did. I talked them into it, and, I ended up writing like 32. Over the course of the next five or six, I always had an episode, so, but they were written completely at home alone. I would, in my experience in animation, as just a regular writer, I would pitch a logline. I would pitch like three different. One sentence. Here’s what the episode could be. The showrunner would pick one. I would write a paragraph. They would give me notes. I would write it out as a one pager. They would give me notes. I would write a first draft, a second draft, and a polish. And at every step I’m getting notes from the showrunner. My mission is to make their job easy and so they don’t have to rewrite anything. And, if you do it well, they’ll come back to you and give you more episodes. And you get paid a flat fee per episode. I’m imagining that was your experience.

Steve Cuden: It’s exactly what it is in animation. And there’s no residuals.

Ryan Raddatz: There’s no residuals. There was no unions. I only got, I’ll probably talk about health insurance a lot because that, to me, is such a benchmark of having made it in the industry. Like, making enough money to get health insurance through your union is such a difficult thing. And in some ways it’s a low bar. When I first move out here, you’re like, oh, yeah, health insurance. But sometimes it’s been a very high bar and it’s a big, big.

Steve Cuden: Just to explain it for the listeners, it’s because you have to earn so many hours within the union system, within union shows in order to maintain your health insurance. And if, you’re saying word girl was not a union show, is that right?

Ryan Raddatz: Well, that, but that was the secret weapon of this show was for some reason, the voiceover stuff was in the screen actors. So the voiceover was in the union. The writing was not.

Steve Cuden: Okay, so there is a writers union or called the Animation Guild. It’s a guild that will oversee certain animated shows, but they don’t have contracts with all of them. Obviously, World Girl did not have a signatory contract with the animation guild.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah. So I was very lucky that I was also, I, did the voices for a few characters so I could write my characters into my episodes and make enough money. And it was the, it was the best group of people both on the writing side and on the voiceover side. That was just a wonderful experience. So that was writing for animation. It was very individualized in that. Like, my work was done at home alone for a flat fee, and then just getting feedback over email or phone calls. Writing for sitcoms is in many ways almost the entire opposite. most of my work in sitcoms, you are in the writers room with a bunch of other comedy writers. When it’s a good room, it’s the most fun room you’ve ever been in in your Life. It’s, it’s. People are laughing. You all know each other, you trust each other. It can be terrible if you have poisonous people and bad vibes, but, Because you can be stuck there until two in the morning. But sometimes it’s as exhausting as it is. It can be fun to be there at two in the morning, even though you would rather be home. So, sitcoms, you might leave the room to write your episode, like a rough draft of your episode, but then you’ll bring it back. And the sitcom room is very collaborative, and hopefully every room is different. But typically, especially in a multi camera sitcom. Should I explain multi versus single camera?

Steve Cuden: Is that helpful? Sure.

Ryan Raddatz: in a sentence, multi camera looks like an old school I love Lucy, the honeymooners. And it looks like you’re watching a play. You know that it’s fake. There’s no fourth wall. That’s how you know it’s multicore.

Steve Cuden: And there are numerous cameras. Three or four or five cameras.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah, that’s why they call it. They used to call it three camera, but I heard that when. This might not be true, but when Robin Williams was on mork and Mindy, they needed to add another camera because they didn’t know what he would do. So they called it multi camera. So a multi cam is shot often in front of a live studio audience on a stage, like a play. And, those are rewritten constantly throughout the week. Every day of the shoot week, you have a run through or a table read where you hear or see the actors do it. And then the writers, at 04:00 go back to the writers room and fix everything and rewrite it all, sometimes completely from scratch. and you never know. Sometimes the best episodes need ten complete rewrites. Sometimes the worst episodes sail through and then they just don’t work. You never know. But that’s a multi cam. M so that’s very collaborative. A single camera sitcom looks like a film. It looks like a dramatic tv show, except it’s funny. they’re shot often in real locations or on sets where you can turn around and see the whole. There’s like, in a multicam, you won’t see the tv that they’re watching because it’s where the audience is. But in a single cam, you’ll see it. Those shows are produced, without a studio audience. And they’re shot like films. They take forever to shoot because you got to shoot one side of a scene, then stop for half an hour while they move the lights around. But they’re written similarly, in a collaborative way. And then the third part of your question was, writing for, I wrote on the Ellen DeGeneres show, just for one season. That was completely different writing. It was like a newspaper you would prep for your show that day. So this is a late night style, I would say, or a daytime style show. You write a bunch of stuff. Maybe you prep it for a week, but on the day of the show, you’ve used all your material, and then the next morning you have to do it again. So you’re constantly throwing. You’re just churning through because it’s topical.

Steve Cuden: You’re talking about the stuff of the day.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah. And there’s people being interviewed, and my job on Ellen never had to do with the interviews. It was writing her monologues. It was writing sort of like the. We called them, I feel like we called them into. There was a word they had for it, but like a desk bit, you know, writing like before the, you know, like a funny Ellen goes around town kind of a thing. and then writing the games. So that’s what I did for that. That was for a year. And, that was a totally different style of writing. Interestingly, it did share a lot with sitcom writing because writing for Ellen was writing a character as opposed to a sitcom where you have ten characters. There was one character. Her name was Ellen. She was the star of the show. So it was similar in that you had to be a joke writer and able to pull it off, but it was one constant voice, and you were writing for a real person, which was also interesting because then, Ellen would, you know, everything that she said, she would have gone over with you three or four times during the course of the day, leading right up to the.

Steve Cuden: Moment when you said, ultimately, she’s got to be super comfortable saying whatever you’ve given her to say.

Ryan Raddatz: Yes. And the craziest part, absolutely the craziest part of that job was she’s reading the monologue off a teleprompter, right? So these late nights, you know, Colbert and Kimmel and Jimi Fallon and everybody, they’re reading a teleprompter. And so there’s a control room that looks like mission control for NASA, where the director is sitting there and they’re pointing. It’s everything. It’s like, it looks like a newsroom. It’s really shot like a news experience. But, the most intense part was right before Ellen went on stage. We writers, whoever wrote her monologue that day would run her monologue past her one last time with whatever changes. And if there were changes, they had a great system that worked. But, boy, was it down to the wire, because you’ve got 200 people in the audience. They’ve been warmed up by the warm up comedian. The year I was there, they always played the same song right before she walked on stage, which was moves like Jagger by, like, by Maroon five, I think. Like, so I have that song in my head forever because she would say, great, change this joke or whatever, or, like, add that line back in from before. And then she would have to go walk straight onto stage to start. And you’d have about 90 seconds to, this is how crazy it was. You’d have to run across the hallway to a computer and put in the changes, save it to a flash drive, run that flash drive to the next room, the control room, and hand it to the teleprompter person, who is a expert. She was this nice lady, who, had been there forever. I believe her name was Betsy. And you would hand the flash drive to Betsy, who would then put it into her PC. Coming from a Mac, it always seems strange to me. The teleprompter program ran off this PC laptop. She would throw it into her teleprompter and throw it up on the screen. By the time Ellen was on stage and the audience had stopped clapping, so it was, they called it live to tape. So the way those shows are taped is there’s a live audience. They’re going to shoot right at that time every day. There’s an element of, it’s the Muppet show. You’re really hustling. So sometimes you’d have to come up with jokes on the fly if she wanted to change. And then it was really fun when she would do her monologue is you’re standing over that teleprompter person’s shoulder, helping them with a little dial that they’re turning to either speed up or slow down the teleprompter. And in front of you is, you can see a little screen with your words that you’ve written that she has approved. And then another screen is the close up of her, and there are moments when you can tell, oh, she doesn’t like that joke anymore. Move forward. We’re skipping that joke. Move faster. Like, she can kind of communicate through it. She was very good at reading off television.

Steve Cuden: You know how Carson used to do it?

Ryan Raddatz: Well, I’m guessing cue cards.

Steve Cuden: Letterman had cue cards. They kept cutting to the cue card guy, Tony whatever his name was. But Carson, they had a very long board that was essentially the, width of the entire stage. And so if you ever go watch Carson’s monologues, you’ll see he starts to the left, he favors the left, and then he comes to the center, and then he starts to favor the right, because that’s where the jokes are written all the way across widthwise on the stage.

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, my God. I came away from, I was only there a year on that show, and I came away very impressed with the production team. in terms of the camera team and the director, and just the way that the flow of information happened every day. So that was a very intense experience. Production.

Steve Cuden: It sounds like they were a well oiled machine.

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, yeah. I was there at season eleven. I think they did at 19 season. So I left to do scripted half hour situation.

Steve Cuden: How challenging was it for you to jump on that moving train?

Ryan Raddatz: It was hard. Hard, but interesting. There were enough writers that I was eased into it, but it was, it was interesting. They had a file, and I’m sure they have this on all the late night shows. We weren’t a late night show, but it was run like that. They had a file of all the monologues that had ever been done. so I was able, in my downtime, to go, literally read a, ah, season’s worth of monologues. And when I talk about, like, we were writing for a character who was Ellen, because sometimes they were her ideas she wanted to talk about. Other times we would have an idea and pitch them to her. But it was really interesting to have read all of the other writers monologues over the years. I will say there were some people there who were way more talented than I was at being able to nail her voice because they’d been there forever, and at being able to be in that flow. The pace of that show was tough for me. I’ve come to learn. I enjoy, the longer process of.

Steve Cuden: Doing episodic, a little more laid back, not so intense. Right up in your face every day.

Ryan Raddatz: Well, it comes and goes. It can be super intense. Boy, can sitcoms, m especially multicams on tape night, they can be the ultimate intense.

Steve Cuden: But that’s only once a week.

Ryan Raddatz: Exactly. And so there was, an arc to the week of a multicam that, I’ve enjoyed. So, yeah, those are sort of the three different writing experiences I’ve had. Some in person, some intense, and then, a whole bunch. Every show, every sitcom I’ve worked on has been totally different in terms of how we write the episodes and who writes them, who breaks them, that process in production.

Steve Cuden: Correct me if I’m wrong, that’s because whoever is the executive producer of the show sets that tone and that system.

Ryan Raddatz: Absolutely. The showrunner. There will be a lot of executive producers these days, on anything.

Steve Cuden: Well, I always think of at least one person or one team is the actual overarching executive, and that’s the showrunner.

Ryan Raddatz: And that would be the showrunner, which is not an official term, like in the credits, but everybody knows who’s the showrunner and yeah, the showrunner absolutely sets. and I’ve gotten to work with some amazing showrunners who, especially when I was just starting out, who really helped give the younger writers the opportunity, the newer writers, we weren’t all necessarily younger, but the writers who were newer, the opportunity to be on set, to go to post production, to help out at a, sound mix, like learning, how to produce and stuff. In the last five years for writers, it’s been really challenging for new writers to get production experience because they’re often staffing on shows that are only eight or ten episodes on streaming. Those shows tend to write all their episodes before they go off to Vancouver and produce them or whatever. And I’ve written on some of those, but it’s a bummer for the younger writers on those shows because they often don’t get to go to the set and they don’t get to go produce their episode. I was lucky to start off on broadcast shows that did sometimes 23 episodes per season. Or even when you’re doing just ten or twelve and you’re writing them while you’re producing them, there are always needs for, hey, we need somebody to run to editing right now. We need you to go talk to the art directors and figure out the set for the scene designer. And so there are fewer opportunities for writers on shows that are writing separate from production. So I hope that changes. I know the Writers Guild has fought to include writers in production more because that’s where the next generation of showrunners comes from. It comes from people having the experience not just of writing, but of being on set and helping build the thing that they.

Steve Cuden: It’s fairly well known and common for productions to not want the writers to be around.

Ryan Raddatz: Well, I will say I think there’s a distinction between, at least I’ve seen between tv and Film. Sure. On, that front. In Film, I would say the writer is typically the person who provided. They’re the architect who they hired, and now they’re going to. The director is in charge and going to be essentially the contractor who builds the architectural designs that they’re. To belabor that metaphor, but in tv, at least, especially in comedy, the showrunner is that person who hires the director. And part of that reason, I think, for that difference is that in tv, typically the directors, again, this is mostly on comedies. Often the directors go from show to show. so they’ll do an episode or two of a show, and so they’re sort of a guest who comes and goes while the showrunner stays through.

Steve Cuden: The showrunner is the actual producer of the overarching producer of the show. So in tv, correct me if I’m wrong, in tv, the writers are also the producers. In films, there are producers who aren’t writing it normally.

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, yeah. But also in tv, there are a ton of not what they call them, non writing producers, which is such a funny term. A non writing producer is typically a production company that’s producing the show and.

Steve Cuden: Then the showrunner producer, the unit production manager. Those people.

Ryan Raddatz: And, those are separate. But. No, but those are separate. Yeah, I’m describing a. So typically, if I’m going to go sell a tv show, typically what I do is I have the idea and I take it around to production companies. And these are not like what we would call line producers or unit production managers, the people who actually figure out the budget. These are the very connected, talented, interested people with great taste who will take my idea and say, let’s go sell this to Sony, or let’s go sell this to CB’s or Netflix. Those are non writing producers. And so they’re executive producers. You’ll see them in the opening credits of shows. some of them are hugely, hugely successful. Some of them are actors who now have production companies and stuff, but typically those are not the writers. The writer is a different executive producer who’s also the showrunner. So produce, the term producer can be super confusing, especially within the writers ranks, because half of the lower level of. It’s like, I don’t know how it arrived at this, but there’s this rank of writer titles and you don’t hit producer until the middle. You hit co producer at a certain point and then you have different producer terms. So, you can always tell when you’re watching a tv show who the actual line producer is, meaning the person who handled the budgets and told the caterers when to show up and, the trucks where to park. It’ll say produced by, and that’ll be right at the end of the opening credits. So it’ll say executive producer. 500 people who either owned the original ip or they’re non writing producers or they’re the showrunner. Then at the end it’ll say written by, directed by, produced by, and that’s the line producer. And those a good line producer who understands budgeting, understands networking with the studio and figuring out how to make, how to afford things. They’re, they’re worth their waiting.

Steve Cuden: Absolutely. They are running the production. The show runner is running the creative end of it.

Ryan Raddatz: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And that part. I’ve gotten to watch some of those partnerships be effective and, you know, towards the end of a season, when you want some set that’s going to cost a Crazy amount of money, and they go, hey, look, we saved money in our music budget, we can move this over. it’s great. It gets back to the improv thing of it’s really fun to work collaboratively with other people, solving problems.

Steve Cuden: So how often have you worked on a specific episode, perhaps one that’s got your credit on it, and at the end of the day, and you don’t need to name names or titles, but at the end of the day, you’re terribly disappointed in the outcome. Has that happened to you?

Ryan Raddatz: Terrible. And I don’t know if I’ve been terribly disappointed or, it didn’t rise.

Steve Cuden: Up to your expectations.

Ryan Raddatz: It’s hard to say. that’s a good question, though. I try to keep my expectations pretty low.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s helpful.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah, well, because especially in a multicam. So if we’re shooting in front of a live studio audience, I have found when I finally watch an episode on the air, it is never as exciting or as funny as it was when I was standing on that stage, 20ft away from Cedric the entertainer and Max Greenfield and to Sheena Arnold and Beth Barrett. Like being on a set with an audience laughing on a soundstage. So I have sort of learned that when the final episode comes out, it can be a good episode of television. It can get great ratings. It’s so fun to have your name something and people call you up and that’s the best. But for me, the real win is getting to be there when it’s, when it happens. Because that, it’s never quite the.

Steve Cuden: Same on tv as you’re sitting in your living room. You’ve got this distance between you and it. No matter how much the sound is enhanced in your house, it’s not the same as hearing a live audience laugh.

Ryan Raddatz: Well, absolutely. And I try to like I’m not making the highest art in the world. I want people at the end of the day to have a good time turning on a show that I wrote, right, so they can relax. We talked before about narrative design in video games and engagement versus relaxing. Most of the shows I write, if you’re making dinner and you’re hearing somebody in the background and you laugh at a joke, that’s great, that’s a win. So that’s when I say I try to keep the bar low. Earlier in my career, I had an ownership over. I would feel viscerally if a thing worked, or if it didn’t work and got cut, I would feel like I had messed up. I have come to learn that the game is letting it go. How quickly can you let go of your idea? How quickly can you let go of that brilliant solution to a problem that now, because the production changed, you don’t get to do it? Those letdowns can be a real bummer, I think, for younger writers, understandably, because when I was a younger writer, I felt like this was my one shot. And, I know my first episode of Word Girl, I wrote. I exhausted myself for that 17 page script to make it just Perfect, and it came out fine. And they. And, you know, it wasn’t. It was a good episode, but by the time I was writing my 32nd episode, I wasn’t holding on to every little idea strongly, because I know there’ll be another one. I know somebody might have a better one. I know I can give it away. So that’s.

Steve Cuden: So for the listeners who are thinking about trying to become writers in the industry, in any part of the industry, here’s a very good lesson that, Ryan is explaining, which is, and I’ll say it in my way, which is in the beginning of your career, it’s kind of like everything is precious. These are your words, and they are yours, and they represent you, and they’re precious to you. If you’re in it for any length of time, you quickly learn to become. And here’s the word, mercenary. You are doing a job. They’re paying you for the job. You don’t own the copyright, so it’s not really yours, even though it has your words in it and it’s got your credit on it, but it’s not really yours. It’s a whole bunch of other people’s as well. So I learned early on, and that’s the word that I think of as a mercenary, that I’m a hired, gun. I’m going to give them 110% of my best effort, creatively and otherwise. I’m not going to try to hang on to some kind of precious ownership of it.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah. And I have found that would be the only way for me to keep going and to make a career out of it is to be ready to be flexible with it, because I will also say when you see somebody’s name, especially on a, comedy, if you see written by whoever, if it’s a comedy, it was a room full of people contributed to that, of course. But I’m saying, a room full of writers before you even get to production, and all the brilliant, talented people who.

Steve Cuden: They’Re going to plus it even further, aren’t they? The actors?

Ryan Raddatz: Oh. Oh, my God. To have written, I was, I was on the neighborhood for three years, and we had such a talented cast that could turn, and once you understand how to write for these, for these actors who could turn jokes that were like a five or a six into a ten just in front of an audience, and it was. It’s amazing. So everybody’s contributing, but literally, when it comes to a name on an episode, most of the shows I’ve worked on, in fact, on the neighborhood, they were almost all written in the room. People didn’t leave when I was on the neighborhood, people did not leave to write their own episode. It was kind of gone through. It was, whose name is up next to be on an episode? And that’s how you get residuals down the road. So there had to be a name on the episode, but it wasn’t like somebody went off and wrote that. Now, on many shows, people do go off, and it is. The goal is how much of my own stuff can stay in it. But I love the collaborative stuff. I’ve punched up shows for pilots. Often, if you are friends with the showrunner or, you know, people who are working on it, you might get in to punch it up and add jokes to a pilot script, because everybody wants the pilot to be as good as it can. So there’ll be these roundtable sessions where you’re not getting paid, you’re there to help your friend, hopefully get their show on the air. And those shows, I’ve had jokes get into shows that get on the air, and I’ve ended up not on those shows. And that’s great. There’s enough to go around in terms of, I’m sure I’ve benefited from people’s jokes with my name on them on the show.

Steve Cuden: And you’re also showing that you’re a team player and that you’re willing to throw your two cent into something even though you may not get credit or money for it.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah, it’s something I learned on the Ellen DeGeneres show from some of the other writers, was every time there was a joke that wasn’t quite landing, our mission would be to fix it. And this is true now in multicams as well. But for Ellen, it was interesting because we were, again, just writing for her, and there would be writers in that room who would go, well, how many angles are there? Meaning literally, this joke is about lines at the supermarket, whatever the joke is. And there were, like, there would be, like, five or six ways into that joke in terms of punchlines. There’s a comparison. One who knows? I’m just. But I’ve been lucky to watch more experienced writers than I am treat this moment of a joke as there’s no one best joke. There are five or six different ways into this joke. We might be able to tweak it a little bit, but I’ve had showrunners who have been great at going, this is good for now. Let’s move on. We’ll fix it if we need to. And that has, hopefully. I think it’s instilled in me, a, non preciousness when it comes to this one joke or this one story

Steve Cuden: Well, especially when there’s many fingers in the pie. It’s a little different if you’re the solo, writer. So, I mean, if you truly want to have total control over your work, become a novelist 100%, I will say.

Ryan Raddatz: There’S no better feeling than being in the right. Stuck in the writer’s room on a late night rewrite. You’ve already ordered dinner, you’ve called your loved ones and said you won’t be home in time, and said good night to your kids over the phone or whatever. There’s no better feeling than pitching the joke that finishes the script, and you get to go home. So there is an ownership. You get to be the hero of the day. And sometimes my favorite moments in the writers room have been when that joke pitch has come from the writer’s assistant or the script coordinator, or the writer’s pa who poked their head in. Right. I love it when the best idea wins and you can, and the showrunner then gets the chance to point to that person and go, great job, we’re all going home.

Steve Cuden: How often does that happen?

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, well, that’s the thing. A lot of these support positions are filled by people who are already incredibly.

Steve Cuden: Talented and just there because they’re hoping to find a way in.

Ryan Raddatz: They’re there to learn, hopefully, and they’re there to find a way in. And I’ve worked with a ton of writers assistants and script supervisors, and coordinators who then have gone on to create their own shows and get on the track of being writers. There’s a lot of talented people and not enough spots at the table.

Steve Cuden: That’s the main path in for most sitcom writers, I think, is to somehow become attached somehow to a show. It’s not the only way. But it’s a major way.

Ryan Raddatz: It is, but it can be tricky. It can be a bit of, I’ve seen it be also a bit of a trap because if you are really good at that job, which you want to be to impress all the people on the show, I’ve seen those people get kind of stuck in that job because they make themselves so essential. But I’ve also seen a ton of very generous showrunners move those people into staff writer jobs. I will say I have always made it a point on shows that I’ve been on to let the assistants know, hey, if you in midway through the season, we all know each other. We’re all friends now. Hey, if you ever have, if you want me to read anything that you’ve written, hand in my way. Right. Like, I’m always trying to look for avenues in to get a seat at the table because I think it’s harder than ever and I think a lot. I happen to be a big, straight, white dude, and, when I started, almost everybody in the room 15 years ago were big, straight white dudes. The door just was not open. If you did not happen to look like me, and there was always there would be one woman on staff, or one person who wasn’t white on staff or whatever, but the door has opened up a lot. But it also happened right before this collapse of this streaming model that is now making fewer shows. And the writers who do get shots might not get production experience. So I am excited when I work with showrunners who are looking for opportunities to bring in new voices and give people a shot. And often, like you said, that is the people who have already found a way to get the assistant job. But I’ve also seen a lot of people get those first jobs by not attaching themselves to a show and sort of hoping they get that gig, but by making cool movies on their own, being a part of a cool artistic community, writing killer pilots, there’s no set path to a seat at the table, but being an assistant is definitely one.

Steve Cuden: If you’re smart, there is never a harm to making those connections. That’s a big part of it, is just making becoming known. People know who you are in the industry. You’ve hopefully made friends, and maybe somebody can refer you later down, the road. That’s part of that process. I’m going to ask you a hard question, which is the old line is dying is easy, comedy is hard. It’s almost impossible to define. But can you state what your feelings are and what makes comedy so difficult to do?

Ryan Raddatz: Well, gosh, what makes.

Steve Cuden: I said, hard question.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: what makes comedy comedy? What makes it work?

Ryan Raddatz: Well, what makes it work is hopefully surprising people, interrupting routines. I play a lot of music, and so for me, rhythm has always been a part of it. but I don’t know because it’s so funny. There are days in the comedy writers room where I will daydream about being a drama writer and think, oh, it must be so easy. But I have tried to write something. It’s very hard. I was on this show that we were informed this was a cable show years ago. We were informed halfway through writing a season of television that we needed every Act break to be a cliffhanger, and this was a comedy. So we all, as comedy, writers, had to learn how to become mystery writers, essentially. And we brought in another whole bunch of whiteboards, and we figured it out, and it took a lot of work. So I have tons of respect. Whenever I hear, like, comedy is the hardest thing, I’m like, yeah, it’s all really hard. I will say my experience with comedy is that 80% to 90% of the time that I’m in a writer’s room working on a comedy, we’re not working on jokes. We’re working on an actual emotional, relatable story that hopefully is specific to our characters, but will somehow hit the universal and telling that, like you mentioned Aristotle, a beginning, middle, and an end within the limitations of our network. So, do we have, how many Act breaks do we get right? That is most of the thought. And we’re talking about character and connecting our characters to each other. And if you do that well, the jokes are the easy part. I’ve heard people describe it as, it’s like a Christmas tree. You’re building the tree, and the jokes are the ornaments on it. The jokes are interchangeable. If you’ve done the emotional part right and, you can get in trouble, I find I can get in trouble. Everybody can get in trouble by holding onto the jokes when the emotional moment isn’t correct. Oh, but I love this joke. But if the underlying emotional moment, if the transaction in the scene, if somebody wants something from somebody else, and that’s not clear or there’s two things going on, that’s the death of comedy. In my experience, the hardest thing about comedy is boiling it down to one thing happening at a time so that the audience is never, in the dark. They’re only in the dark about a punchline, but they’re never wondering what’s going on, especially in multicams. The audience needs to know. Here’s a story from the neighborhood. In season one, we had two neighbors showed up at the Cedric the entertainer opens the front door, and the two neighbors are there with a bunch of board games. It’s board game night. And for whatever in this scene, that was going to get a big laugh, opening the door, seeing them with the board games. And I think I was a part of the pitching of this joke and the working on this joke. And our showrunner at that time said, oh, we need to add Cedric walking up to the window and looking through the window and saying, oh, the Johnsons are here, before he opens the door. And my thought was, why does he have to announce who they are? And, this was a thing he had learned from some other showrunner before him, was always tell the audience everything except the punchline. And on show night, he was totally right when Cedric said, the Johnsons are here. Now, we’re all excited to see what’s going to be going on behind the door, as opposed to if we had done it my way. You open the door, you have to think, oh, the Johnsons are here. Oh, and this funny thing with the board games, right? So he had that, to me, is an encapsulation of my approach to comedy, is hopefully not my approach. An approach I found has worked a few times. I don’t have an approach, is take out all the extraneous information, give the audience all of the info they can possibly have, except for the joke. And so when you talk about the comedy being the truth of comedy being hard and all that stuff, 90% of my time is spent thinking about all the other stuff except the board. The board games. We know that’s the joke. Let’s build it. It’s building the setup to get to that punchline, because any little thing can kill it, even in an actor’s performance. And that’s sometimes difficult to, that’s a tough conversation to have sometimes with a director or an actor, is, hey, this joke might work if you don’t move on it.

Steve Cuden: You tweak it this way or that way.

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah. Ah. And I think coming from my background as an actor, and often, I’m wrong about it, but it’s sometimes tricky on a show night to be like, oh, that joke is so funny. But for some reason, something is happening in the scene that’s preventing the punchline from landing, and you gotta let those go. But sometimes you can help work with the director, and sometimes the director will catch it, too. And sometimes a joke won’t be working. We’ll go, what’s going on? And the director will be like, hey, move your hand down, or whatever. Some subtle movement. and you’ll be like, well, that’s a genius. And the actors do that as well, so it’s always a group effort. That was a long answer about what is comedy?

Steve Cuden: But I think that that’s a useful answer because there are a whole lot of things that we can chat about that make comedy comedy beyond that. But that’s really critical stuff, that comedy, I think. Well, first of all, I think that the only definition of comedy is, does it make you laugh or not? If it doesn’t make you laugh, it’s not comedy, it’s something else. But comedy is something that makes you laugh. But nevertheless, a lot of it has to do with rhythm, timing, the, delivery of the joke, how you constructed the words one after the other. Then there’s all those theories about whether you need a hard k, in a word, funny numbers, and there’s all that stuff. So there are all kinds of theories about comedy, but ultimately, at the end of the day, I still think what you’re alluding to is also true, that it has to have a great story that takes you to those characters saying something that is at the joke, at the punchline, that just has been led up to brilliantly. And there’s the delivery bang.

Ryan Raddatz: Absolutely. The, the setup. To me, I spend more time on the setups than the punchlines. Absolutely. And I’ll also say another ingredient for it, and this is in a multicam sitcom where you’re in front of an audience, when you’re shooting, a single camera comedy, which means it’s shot like a film. No one is laughing, you’re not pausing for laughs. So you can kind of tell if it’s funny, but there’s a lot of tricks you can do in editing to make it funnier. The timing of the edit in a single camera comedy has the hugest influence on, if it’s funny or not. So a lot of it is done in post. It is much harder, I believe, for an actor to be funny in a multi camera comedy, even though they feel kind of cheesy to us now because we’re so familiar with them. I think I’m in awe of actors who can nail a joke in front of a live audience. One experience I had on the odd couple, I was on the odd couple on CB’s for a couple years and it was a great experience.

Steve Cuden: Wonderful this is the one with Matthew.

Ryan Raddatz: Perry and with Matthew Perry and Tom Lennon. And it, ah, was a lot of fun. I was lucky to do an episode of Reno 911 as an actor a few years before I got to write for Tom Lennon. And that was like, the coolest experience. There was an episode of the odd couple that I think my name was on it. the room broke it, but I felt an ownership over it because my name was going to be on it, and we were going to try and do a farce, like a slamming doors, misunderstandings. Everything takes place at one dinner party, kind of an episode. Frazier did these brilliantly. We were just aiming for the carbon copy. Like, we were just aiming to be a pretty good version. But it was really interesting because we wrote this. A farce is a, very elaborate, intricate talk about setups and payoffs. In the best version of it, it builds on itself until it’s just better and better and better. But in the not best version of it, it collapses under the weight of the complexity of what. And we rehearsed it. We would go down to rehearsal every day and watch them rehearse it. And the actors were very supportive and they were all doing their best. But I remember the day before tape night, they were like, because they were, you know, they’re acting it out, but for nobody, there’s no. There’s no audience laughing. We’re laughing as loud as we can. The writers are like, oh, please keep committing to this. But the actors kind of pulled us aside and we’re like, we’re not sure this is working as a story And I credit to our showrunner, Bob Daley, he said, give it a shot. Wait till the audience sees it tomorrow night. And to their credit, the actor said, we trust you. You’ve done this before. We’ll pull it off. and it was the best feeling on tape night when the first misunderstanding happened, which was some. I forget what it even was. It was something like, oh, a carrot cake versus a carrot engagement ring or some, you know, really silly thing. The first setup happened, and the audience was completely on board. They just loved. They went, oh, we’re in for one of those episodes. Which is all you could tell the audience knew they were in for, like, a kind of unique storytelling experience, at least for this show. And from that moment on, the rest of the tape night went brilliantly. It was just great. And it was such a credit to the actors that they trusted it, but it was also a credit to our showrunner that he was able to be like, please trust it. And our showrunner had supervised the building of an episode that really was all about these setups and payoffs. So again, it wasn’t like, it wasn’t an Oscar winning episode, but it was really fun to have to be a part of a payoff that required not just the writing but all the actors working together and the crew to pull off what felt like a live theater experience.

Steve Cuden: Well, certainly Matthew Perry had a little experience in front of an audience doing that.

Ryan Raddatz: I’ve been so lucky to work with some real talented. I also did, besides working with Matthew, I worked with Robin Williams on the crazy ones on CB’s for a year. And that was a highlight. well, sure.

Steve Cuden: That had to have been a highlight.

Ryan Raddatz: Oh, yeah. And he was the coolest and a ton of people on the odd couple. Yeah, we had Tom Lennon and Matthew Perry. We also had Wendell Pierce from the wire when the funniest thing, he, that guy is the best. He was super cool and he was like the fifth lead on the show. And there would be times when we go up to him and be like, hey, we’re sorry. You know, it’s the odd couple. There’s, you don’t have a ton of scenes this week. And he was always like, I get paid the same amount no matter how many lines I got, like. And to his credit, he would show up and just rocket and steal the show, even if he had two scenes or if it was all about him. So, boy, I’ve been very lucky to work with a lot of super, super talented, collaborative, engaged people.

Steve Cuden: So if you ever want to have the experience of knowing that the script is pretty good, but the acting you have no control over and the editing you have no control over. Write a very good, funny animation script for kids, have it be recorded in another country and then animated in another country where they don’t understand the timing of the joke at all so that the visual comes out completely wrong.

Ryan Raddatz: It is always a battle in this, in art versus commerce, right? Like, it’s going to be cheaper to produce it somewhere else and not in the same location. It’s cheaper to write all the episodes before you go produce them. My best. My best creative experiences have been when the creation and production have been as close to each other as possible so that everybody’s overseeing it together. Because, yeah, I’ve been a part of stuff where something comes back and you go, what was this? And, there’s no time to fix it or there’s no budget to fix it. That’s frustrating.

Steve Cuden: That’s part of the beast, especially in the very quick world of television, where things are happening relatively quickly. Well, I’ve been having just the most enjoyable, fun conversation for a little more than an hour now with Ryan Raddatz And, I’m just wondering, in all of your experiences, you’ve told us a lot of really cool stories already, but can you share with us an experience that you’ve had that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or just plain funny beyond what you’ve already told us?

Ryan Raddatz: Yeah. this is about. Can I tell a funny story from when I was an actor, even though it’s not about writing chorus. Okay. so this is a story Hopefully there’s a little bit of a point to it as well, which is about your essence. When I was an actor, I, always. I found I kept getting cast as the nerd role, as the guy behind the counter, as the door to door missionary, as the guy who couldn’t get into a nightclub, on, how I met your mother. So I was always getting cast as, like, a loser nerd guy until I was cast in this Katie Holmes movie. It turns out, I think I was cast partly because I’m super tall and Katie Holmes is tall, and they wanted her to not look super tall on, campus. Like they needed people as taller. Taller than her. Anyway, I got cast in this Crazy Katie Holmes movie called First Daughter, which was a PG movie about the president’s daughter going to college. Right. Random, random movie and very randomly directed by Forrest Whitaker. For some reason, legendary, Oscar winning actor Forrest Whitaker was directing this Katie Holmes movie, and Katie was lovely. I got cast as a frat guy. Frat guy number one. I got to work for a month on the movie. And finally, this was a part where I was not the nerd who could not get into a nightclub. I was cast as the brat boy who invites her to a party. A pool party. She shows up to my pool party. We do a funny song to hail to the chief. We sing and we dance around her. We had a choreographer work on the dance with us, so I spent the entire month in production going, hey, look at that. I’ve always been the nerd, and the loser guy. Now I’m in this Katie Holmes movie. I’m frat boy number one. I was feeling pretty good about myself, and we did the scene at the pool party where we sing and dance. When Katie Holmes shows up at the pool party, we sing hail to the chief. And after our first take, the choreographer comes over from Video Village, where she’s been sitting, you know, with Forest Whitaker, who’s been, directing, and they’re all, the producers are over there. And she comes over and she pulls me aside and she goes, Ryan, I just gotta say, we were all talking about your performance over there. She said, your nerd character is so funny. And I, in that moment, realized I had spent a month thinking I was the cool guy. And I had brilliantly portrayed a loser who, because the trick to being a nerd is to think you’re really cool. So it was this hilarious moment for me because, of course, I looked her in the eye when she said, your nerd character is so funny. And I said, thank you. You know what I’m going for. Because what I realized in that moment was there were things about my, who I am that I cannot change, that are going to come across no matter what. Even, more so when I thought I was the cool guy here, they thought I was a nerd. But the great part was, it all worked because that was the right part for me to be playing in that movie. I had just missed. I was a very young actor at the time. I just misunderstood. Right. For me, it’s a story about, especially for actors, but maybe even for writers, too, trying to recognize how other people see you and then writing or acting to that, not that you’re trapped, but because that’s going to be the easiest path to tell your story is if you’re giving them something, that they go, oh, yeah, that’s the person I look to for that type of thing.

Steve Cuden: So I think about, I think especially early in a career, work toward your strength.

Ryan Raddatz: Yes, I’ve heard it, described the producer, Linda Ost, wrote a book called Hello, he lied. And I thought this in an acting class forever ago at Leslie Kahn, they pointed out this quote, which was ride the horse in the direction it’s going, which I loved. Like my horse was, ah, was heading in the direction of guy who can’t get into a nightclub. And it, I had health insurance, I made health insurance being that, that actor in that role. And so, I’m doing the same thing in my writing career where I, you know, sitcoms seem to be where people expect to see me. It’s where I’ve had success. I keep coming back to them even as I brought, try to broaden my, my marketing, and I love writing and creating different things. I keep coming back to, these broadcast, multi camera, single cameras.

Steve Cuden: Well, again, if you want to truly broaden your horizon to your specific desire, go be a novelist. You know, then you can do whatever you want.

Ryan Raddatz: Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: So, last question for you today, Ryan. you’ve given us a huge amount of food for thought and advice along the way here, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give those who are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to that next level.

Ryan Raddatz: That’s a great question. yeah, the tip I typically give. And again, this is what worked for me. Everybody’s experience is different. Early in my career, and this was as an actor before I was writing. I think I benefited from a few things. I had a day job that could support my basic low level standard of living, and I found a community of young, interesting collaborative performers, those two. And that required me living in LA, or I’m sure it would require living in New York or Atlanta or Vancouver, wherever you wanted to, but, like, where they’re making stuff. But the benefit of having a day job and not necessarily in the industry is that that bought me time. I wasn’t showing up going, I need to make it in two weeks because it’s not going to happen. Gary Marshall, the old, legendary producer and writer director. Yeah, I got to work with Gary a number of times in both of our careers. He was a real friend and mentor to me. And he used to say, ryan, out of three talented actors, only one is going to make it because the other two quit. And so he said, stay in the game as long as you can and you’re going to be fine. That was his advice to me, and I. I loved him dearly, and, it’s been true. So the day job advice is buy yourself time and then find the second part for me, that I tell people is find a community. A lot of people come out here trying to connect to somebody way above them in their career, and that can be important, and those people can become mentors and things. But the slow burn of being in a group of people who are, one is an agent’s assistant, one is a casting director, one’s a producer, one’s an actor who’s really about to realize they’re a writer director. I benefited from having a community of people when I first moved out in 1999, who I’m still friends with. I’m going to punch up a pilot in a couple weeks that a friend of mine, is show running. and she and I were roommates in the early two thousands, right in the house off of Melrose. So if you can buy yourself time and find a community of people. You might not end up having the career you expected or even the kind of job path you expected, but hopefully you will have a great experience and you will stumble into that thing that overlaps what I love to do and what I can get paid for. And if you’ve done that, that’s my goal. That, along with health insurance, is my whole goal.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that that’s extremely wise stuff that you just gave us, because in the business of being a writer, it can be a very lonely world, unless you’re doing room writing, obviously. But as a writer, it can be a very insular experience. And it’s really good to have all of those different connections within the industry and people you can talk to about what’s going on. So you can have that feedback and.

Ryan Raddatz: Friendship and camaraderie when it doesn’t go well, because most of the time it doesn’t go well. And knowing that you get to keep playing the game, for me, has been the goal. I mean, talk to me in five years. We’ll see. I might have different.

Steve Cuden: You and me both. Ryan Raddatz this has been an absolutely wonderful hour plus on story night. Can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your wisdom, and sharing all these wonderful stories with us.

Ryan Raddatz: Well, thank you very much, Steve. enjoyed listening to your show and thank you for having me on. This was super fun, really fun to talk to you.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat If you liked this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to. Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tunein, and many others. Until next time, Im Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.