A-I-S

Advice For Married Couples

This is a story about a theme in search of a plot.

Shelley had signed us up for a weekend couples’ retreat in Pasadena. As I recall, we weren’t working through any particular problems. It was essentially a seminar for couples to improve their understanding of each other and to learn to communicate more effectively.

In other words, “Ugh.”

About halfway through the weekend, the facilitator instructed each of us to take a piece of paper and list the things that bothered us about our spouse.

I smelled a trap.

To me, this was a minefield, a suicide note, a forced confession that would be waved in front of the jury at my show trial. Tangible words on paper, not words spoken into the ether that later could be denied. “I never said that!” “You must have misheard.” “What I meant was….”

I stared at the blank page, frozen, like an actor who heard his cue but couldn’t remember his lines. At a loss, I snuck a peek at Shelley, who was scribbling furiously, working one of those golf pencils down to the nub.

I knew I had to come up with something lest I be accused of not taking the exercise and the whole weekend and thus the overall improvement of our marriage seriously. Whatever I put down couldn’t be silly or petty or a joke. It had to be honest without being a Molotov cocktail that would burn down the house. Shelley glanced at me while taking a moment to stretch the fingers of her hand, cramped from her zealous effort to draw up her lengthy catalog of charges. I pulled my paper close so she couldn’t see that I hadn’t written anything yet. She exchanged her worn pencil for a sharpened one, took a deep breath, lowered her head, and dove back into my multi-count indictment.

As the leader of the retreat counted down the seconds to the end of the exercise, I desperately thrashed through the recycling bin of my brain looking for something, anything that would bring back a deposit. Finally, I caught a glimpse of something.

I wrote, “I don’t like that you always make me late.”

“Pencils down!”

I don’t remember any of the things Shelley wrote that bothered her about me. Come to think of it, that could have been one of them, not remembering the things that bother her about me. However, I was oddly unconcerned, calm. A warm blanket of serenity had settled on me. Not just because I had completed the exercise or even that we would deal with my complaint, but because, as soon as I wrote those words on that paper, I knew I had an episode idea for Everybody Loves Raymond.

Most of the television shows I have written for were relationship comedies. To come up with ideas, I learned to have my antennae out at all times for any fragment of a conflict or irony I could use from real life. Inevitably, the spouses and partners of comedy writers pick up on this endearing trait. Shelley talks about how, in the middle of an argument, she’d notice my eyes suddenly shift into the distance. She knew what was happening and would       put her foot down.

“This is not for the show!”

Then I explained how much the network paid per episode.

She picked her foot up.

“Okay, this one’s for the show.”

We eventually got to the point where sometimes we’d extend an argument artificially just to get a second act.

My good friend on the show, Lew Schneider, tells of the time he and his family went on a ski trip. When Lew, his wife, Liz, and their three young sons got to the lodge, their room wasn’t ready. They were invited to spend some time relaxing in the hot tub. So they pulled their bathing suits out from under the ski equipment in their minivan and headed off to soak. At the end of the soak, still in their suits but now holding their street clothes and newly activated room keys, Lew and Liz wrangled their three wet, rambunctious sons into the elevator. In the process, Lew’s car and house keys dropped out of his jeans into the slot in the elevator floor. All their other worldly possessions were still in the minivan. Practically naked, and embarrassed[1] because there were other guests in the elevator, Lew, cursing, desperately tried to fish the keys out of the crack while Liz kept hip-checking the relentless automatic door that insisted on banging shut.

Seeing Lew’s exasperation and being wise to the idea that in our line of work a bad situation could eventually pay off, Liz offered, “Well honey, maybe you’ll get a story out of this.”

“No! No!” Lew replied through clenched teeth. “We already did an episode where Ray dropped his wedding ring down a heating grate! We’ve done this story! This is just something shitty that happened!”

But Liz knew. Story ideas are rare, precious gems. Digging out a shiny new one is the hardest part of writing. Every time I turned in a script, I couldn’t help thinking, “Okay, that’s it. This is my last idea. I will never have another one.”

That’s why even though I had been reluctant to go on this couples’ weekend, on the way home, I thought this had been the greatest retreat since Dunkirk.

That Monday in the Raymond writers’ room, I brought up the subject of lateness. I explained how I liked to be punctual. I’m no Prussian field marshal about it, but it makes me anxious to be late. To me, being on time is a sign of respect. I have a reasonably good sense of how much time it will take me to get ready to go out. But Shelley didn’t have the same sense or the same attitude. She wasn’t going to rush if she wasn’t ready.

Everybody in the room had an opinion about it. Apparently, it was a sore subject in a lot of households. But it wasn’t an issue defined by gender. In many cases, the men were the tardy ones. It provoked a long and enthusiastic discussion that obviously struck a nerve one way or another with everyone. Phil Rosenthal, our showrunner, talked about how when he and his wife are leaving a party, she goes on what he called “The Goodbye Tour,” leaving him standing at the door for half an hour while she checks in with every person at the party one last time. I took in all these anecdotes, and Phil sent me off to figure out the story.

And that turned out to be a problem. It wasn’t really a story. It was a theme. How do I dramatize that theme, turn it into a story?

There was definitely something there, but I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe I could use the couples’ retreat as a backdrop, but that didn’t lead anywhere interesting. It couldn’t be a story about discovering the complaint. It had to be about the complaint itself.

In this business, there are few things more frustrating than getting excited about what you think is a great idea, then not being able to execute it.

After being stumped for a day or so, I shuffled over to my colleague Aaron Shure’s office next door and told him how I was having trouble wrapping a plot around this otherwise exceptionally relatable theme. He didn’t have the whole answer, but he did tell me about a friend of his whose father had a technique for getting the family out of the house and into the car on time whenever they had to go somewhere. He called it the AIS system. A-I-S stood for “Ass – In – Seat.” The father would set an AIS time and if anyone’s “ass” wasn’t in the “seat” of the car at the appointed time, they were left behind. Aaron told me that when his friend was a kid, it was a foolproof system. No one was ever late. However, when Aaron’s friend was an adult, his father set an AIS time for some extended family excursion and Aaron’s friend didn’t make the time. The father, true to his word, left without him.

This didn’t crack the case, but it was a clue. It was a lead. We brought that AIS story into the writer’s room hoping to get some feedback. As soon as Phil heard the AIS bit, he said, “There’s your act break. Ray leaves Debra behind.”

For the non-writer, it’s important to know that the act break is what defines the story. You’re building to a major dramatic question that will bring the audience back after the commercial or in a theater, after intermission. To do that, the stakes must be high so that the audience is compelled to stick around to find out what happens next and how it will all be resolved.

To me, the emotional consequences of leaving your wife behind because she didn’t make the assigned AIS time were monumental. This question hooked into one of the other key elements of an engaging story, that dark deed an audience can imagine but would never do themselves, the vicarious thrill of watching it play out in the safety of your own living room. How would you ever recover from leaving your partner behind like that? No matter what deal the two of you made. As soon as Phil said, “Ray leaves Debra behind,” I knew we had the story. It literally gave me an uneasy shiver, contemplating what would happen if I ever did that to Shelley.

I told Phil right then, “That is the best act break I have ever heard.”

And it was all I needed. It was the hinge onto which I could attach a beginning and an end.

Now I just had to build up to that simple, bold act, then on the other side of the hinge play out the consequences. That came relatively easy. I wrote scenes where we establish the complaint that Ray doesn’t like how Debra always makes him late. They have a big argument about it until he breaks through to her. She sincerely recognizes that this is important to him and promises she will not make him late the next time. I set up a big black-tie sports awards ceremony they plan to attend. Ray tells her about his father, Frank’s AIS system when he was a kid and sets an AIS time for her. On the day of the event, Debra does her best to be on time, but at the last minute her hair gets stuck in a curling iron, an unavoidable accident. Unaware of this, Ray waits for her in the car. The AIS time passes. He drives off without her.

In front of the live audience the night of the filming, Ray’s watch alarm goes off, he straps on his seatbelt, and turns the key in the ignition. The audience audibly gasped. They had the same reaction I did when Phil pitched “Ray leaves Debra.” They couldn’t believe he would actually do it.

So, what happens next?

I decided that when Ray’s friends at the awards show ask him where Debra is, he would brag and tell them how he had finally drawn the line. They would applaud him for sticking to his guns. Ray would puff himself up with their praise until one of his buddies casually remarks that as much as he admires Ray for following through, he could never have done that. This is Ray’s Bridge on the River Kwai moment, when the Alec Guinness character has that sobering realization: “What have I done?”

Right away, Ray deflates and spirals into a panic. He knows Debra will be enraged. How will he ever face her? How can he ever go home? He’ll never see his kids again because he’s going to have to disappear into the witness protection program.

We cut back to Ray’s house to see everyone, Robert, Amy, and even Marie, side with Debra. I applied Phil’s anecdote to Robert and Amy. While they wait for Ray, Robert relates how when he and Amy decide to leave a party, Amy has to do the “Goodbye Tour.” This was distinctly appropriate because Amy, played by the hilarious Monica Horan, was in real life Phil’s “Goodbye Tour” wife.

Ray finally shows up, humbled and cowering, bearing a peace offering – a centerpiece bouquet of wilted flowers left over from the banquet. He braces himself anticipating that Debra is going to lay into him. Even Frank turns on him for leaving his wife behind. Ray turns on his father. He learned the AIS system from him! Frank responds, “Sure, but I would never actually do it. Marie would kill me.”

Then the issue was what happens between Ray and Debra after everyone leaves. Normally, we would write “the big argument,” a climactic scene where everything gets hashed out, revelations ensue, and ideally - if we do our job right - the audience’s sympathies range back and forth between the two sides in equal measure. But that structure didn’t seem to fit this situation. I didn’t know what that argument was. The two characters had hashed that out in the first act already. What more could they say about it?

In the room I argued that this was now all about consequences. How about if Debra says nothing? That would be the scariest thing for Ray. If she starts yelling at him, he could yell back. Even though he would hate to have her bring the hammer down, it would be worse if Debra stayed under control and just stared, leaving him to his tortured imagination. She would give him nothing to butt up against, no chance to defend himself. This way, she holds all the power. It would be agonizing for him not knowing what was going on in her head, not knowing what she had in store for him. He wants her to yell at him, but she won’t give him the satisfaction.

After the others leave, Ray shuffles up the stairs, the proverbial dead man walking. Halfway up, he stops and asks if she’s coming.

She says, “I’ll be up in a minute.”

This way, we left it to the audience’s imagination what will eventually transpire between them. Everyone could fill in their own idea of what would happen if they were in that situation, a far more varied array of possibilities than if we had chosen one for them. In the tag at the end of the show, we find Ray sitting still fully dressed on the edge of the bed awaiting his fate, holding the centerpiece, whimpering.

The day after the show aired, Meredith Viera, host of “The View,” talked about how she had watched the episode and brought up the subject of lateness with the panel. It was gratifying to hear pretty much the same discussion we had had back in the writers’ room.

This took place over twenty years ago. And guess what? Ever since that episode aired, Shelley has never made me late again. Which finally brings me to my advice for married couples.

If you are having trouble getting through to your partner, you don’t need a couples’ retreat.

Just put it on television.

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[1] “Practically Naked and Embarrassed,” the family friendly version of “Naked and Afraid.”