This is a speculative script I wrote for the situation comedy News Radio. I never wound up submitting it to them because Phil Hartman was murdered before I finished it and one of the running gags involved the interplay between Phil's Bill McNeil and Matthew (Andy Dick).
News Radio was one of the funniest and best written sitcoms that I've ever seen. For reasons that are hard to understand, it never took off. Thankfully, the show is being rerun on A&E at 6:30 pm EST, giving others a chance to see a show that they might have missed the first time around. News Radio never recovered after Phil Hartman's death. Even though Phil was only one of a superb ensemble cast, and wasn't even the star, much of the show revolved around his character. Bill McNeil was sort of Ted Baxter with intelligence and an attitude. His bullying of Matthew was a constant source of gags, but Phil managed to do it without being wholly unsympathetic. Bill was also a thorn in the program director's side--and pretty much everybody else for that matter. It didn't matter whether Phil Hartman's character was part of the main plot, Bill McNeil was somehow pivotal in getting the main story going or in delivering some key punch lines. Phil Hartman could eke a laugh out of almost any line and the antagonism between his character and the others always ensured that he'd get some of the best laughs out of every episode.
Without Phil Hartman, News Radio could not sustain itself. It wasn't solely his passing that did the show in. The writing wasn't as going downhill. Characters became caricatures. They loss any semblance to reality and existed solely to create jokes. Plots shifted from having a reality base to being total fantasy (on the Titanic and even in space). Stephen Root's Jimmy James was a terrific comedic character. Jimmy was a high-powered businessman and the news radio station was only one of his many business acquisitions. Stephen played him so that he could alternate between serious and silly in a heartbeat and make it work. He could be a tough negotiator, but seemed to be a guy so satisfied with his position in life that he could loosen up and be playful. It was a fun portrayal to watch. By the third season, Jimmy James became a country bumpkin that didn't look like he could run a radio station, let alone a multimillion dollar empire.
Andy Dick's Matthew character had things to do around the station the first couple seasons. He'd occasionally be on the air or preparing a story, but eventually his role at the station was playing solitaire on the computer and fall down a lot. In the real world, he would have been fired. The same goes for Beth, the secretary. Vicki Lewis played her to perfection with a sassy attitude and a unique fashion style. She seemed to have some core capabilities for the job early on, but became another comic relief that would otherwise be jobless in reality.
Things got to a point where even the scripts were acknowledging that most of the characters would be fired if the station was being run the way it should. Once the show lost the ground truth that this could be a functional radio station, the jokes became jokes for the sake of telling jokes. A person might as well listen to a Henny Youngman album. Contrast the inept staff that the characters became in News Radio to the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was roughly the same concept. The characters essentially remained real right up to the show's end. They could be quirky and sometimes outrageous, but they retained a core reality. There was little question that they could run their TV news station. Ted Knight's Ted Baxter often ran a tight line to almost being a lampoonish character, but he looked and sounded like a newsman once he was on camera. There was the occasional word flub on the air, but those flubs were treated as a problem and Ted Baxter would regularly get chewed out by Ed Asner's Lou Grant for them.
With News Radio, characters and plots eventually got so over the top that I eventually lost interest in watching the show. Had the writing been what it was the first few seasons, it could have survived. Once it became clear to me that the people writing and producing the show didn't care about the characters, neither did I.
The first few seasons were so good that News Radio remains one of my favorite sitcoms of all time.
The links to my speculative script are below. I make no claims to the characters or anything else that belongs to the copyright owners of News Radio. This was a script that was written for submission to the show.
