IN HIS PRIME TIME (original) (raw)

Richard Appel is having the last laugh. Sitting in his office in Century City, Calif., the 35-year-old executive producer seems, if not quite relaxed, then full of equanimity, someone who is precisely where he wants to be. Dressed in desert boots, jeans and a pressed T-shirt, he is compact but energetic, a small man whose gray eyes dart constantly behind steel-framed glasses. Although his mop of wiry, dark hair is just starting to exhibit its first few errant strands of gray, more than anything he gives off the impression of an overgrown kid, for whom life has taken on an almost dreamlike aura of good luck.

It’s an impression Appel is hard-pressed to dispute, given what some might call his meteoric rise through the ranks of the television industry. As recently as 1993, after all, he was about as far from Hollywood as you can imagine, living in Manhattan where, after graduating from Harvard University and Harvard Law School, he spent two years clerking for a federal judge and three more as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Now, along with Greg Daniels, who co-created the series with Mike Judge, he’s one of two “show runners” for the Fox sitcom “King of the Hill,” where he went to work last fall after nearly four years as a writer and producer on “The Simpsons.”

Being a show runner is a tricky job, carrying the responsibility to make sure things go smoothly, both among the writers and in the larger sense of a show’s standing in the world. For Appel, such issues are complicated by “King of the Hill’s” growing pains as it begins to emerge from the shadow of its Fox cousin “The Simpsons” and stake out a pop culture territory of its own. There”s a friendly edge of competition between the two animated shows, encouraged by a certain overlap of talent–several “King of the Hill” writers, including Daniels, honed their skills at “The Simpsons”–as well as “King of the Hill’s” former status as younger sibling in the Fox lineup on Sunday night.

But this fall, Hank Hill, the steadfastly suburban propane salesman and family man of the series’ title, was finally given a lineup to anchor, after a heavily promoted move to Tuesday nights. Still, some members of the series’ brain trust have privately expressed reservations about losing their time slot between “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files” for the uncertainty of playing lead-in to a new show like “Costello.” Their concern was borne out with “Costello’s” swift cancellation and a “King of the Hill” ratings plunge from the top 20 last year to somewhere around the bottom 30.

Yet as Appel eats a takeout lunch of dill salmon at a small, round table, he seems to feel that these concerns are almost inconsequential, as if the complications of putting out a weekly TV show are secondary to the thrill of doing it at all.

“I grew up watching `The Dick Van Dyke Show,’ ” he says, “and always thought that what Rob Petrie did for a living was what I wanted to do. That’s not to say there aren’t many days when, as in everything in life, you’re driving quickly because you’re two minutes late, and you get to the office, and you don’t think about it very much. But I still get a kick out of it because I’ve only been doing it for 4 1/2 years, and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

Appel’s not just blowing smoke when he says that; in the sitcom business, 35 is just this side of ancient, and the fact that he didn’t get started until he was 30 means he has had plenty of time to consider and plan. Even now, there is within him a tenuous balance between lawyer and comedian, a dichotomy reflected by his office. On the one hand, there are the tools of the TV trade–a computer work station, a pair of comfortable couches, and a video monitor and VCR. The walls are decorated with photographs of his wife, novelist Mona Simpson, and their 5-year-old son, Gabriel, as well as several posters, including one of “The Simpsons” inscribed by its creator, Matt Groening, “So long Rich!!! Thanks for hanging with the show till the bottom fell out. . . .”

At the same time, Appel’s windows look out on the bustle of Century City, with its lawyers and businessmen, and its office towers angled like knife blades against the sky. And as if to make the connection explicit, above the table where he eats hangs a diploma-like citation, signed by then-Atty. Gen. Richard Thornburgh, commemorating Appel’s appointment to the U.S. attorney’s staff.

It’s a long way from the U.S. attorney’s office to “King of the Hill,” a distance greater, to some extent, than mere geography, having more to do with states of being, states of mind. For Appel, though, there’s a thread of continuity between these disparate locations, one that stretches back to childhood.

Growing up in Wilmette, he was predisposed toward a legal career. His mother, Nina, is now dean of the School of Law at Loyola University Chicago, and both his grandfathers were attorneys as well. But on the other side, his father, Alfred, a Northwestern University professor of English perhaps best known for his work on Vladimir Nabokov, introduced him to Buster Keaton and other classic comedians at an early age.

“When he was 3,” the senior Appel says, “the first movie I took him to was Laurel and Hardy in `Toy Soldiers,’ and in 1967, the year I annotated `Lolita,’ I had lunch with him every day at 11:30 in front of the TV, because that’s when Laurel and Hardy were on.”

The image of a father and son laughing together is a lovely one, and Appel acknowledges its importance in opening him up to comedy’s charms. But he also cites the influence of his own generation and the role of television in their lives. In the 5th grade, he and a friend from North Shore Country Day School started experimenting with an early Betamax, producing parody news broadcasts and fake commercials. Around the same time, they staged a series of prank phone calls that Appel still seems perversely proud of, if only for the intricacy of their design.

“From my friend’s house,” he recalls, “we called numbers that were one digit off his number, and when someone answered, we’d say, “Hi, Mom, I’m at the movies. Come pick me up.” They’d say, “No, no, you’ve got the wrong number.” And we’d tell them, “That was my last dime. Could you do me a favor and call my mom and tell her I got out of the movie early and she should come pick me up?” Then we’d give the real number. Two minutes later, the phone would ring, and we’d go into this ridiculous thing with accents”–here, his voice takes on a flavoring of German, halfway between Marlene Dietrich and Colonel Klink–” `Just a moment, let me put you on hold.’ Finally, we’d get back on the phone and say, “I’m not picking him up.” We must have done this for two hours one night, until my friend’s mother called us downstairs because there was a cop at the door.”

Even at this young age, Appel’s comedic sensibilities had begun to emerge. By his own admission, he has always been less interested in jokes than in joke sequences, a narrative approach to humor that eschews the quick laugh in favor of something that develops over time. If you watch any of the six episodes Appel wrote for “The Simpsons,” gags rarely just appear and then evaporate; rather, they build upon each other subtly, creating a ripple effect on the action. In one show, Appel brings back Homer”s long-lost mother, whose wallet full of aliases–in what may be the ultimate in-joke, one identifies her as “Mona Simpson”–leads to the revelation that she”s a former 1960s radical gone underground, while in another, a field trip to the police station gives Bart the idea to tape 16 bullhorns together and turn them on, creating a feedback loop that reverberates like a nuclear explosion, blowing out every window for miles around.

By high school, Appel had begun to fantasize about becoming a comedy writer, creating small routines and sketches and posting them on the yearbook office door. Still, he says, “although I thought I’d love to do something like that, I didn’t know anyone who did it, and it didn’t seem like a career that was open to me.”

Instead, he went to Harvard, where ironically he stumbled upon a humor laboratory at The Harvard Lampoon. Back then, the Lampoon was hardly the Hollywood pipeline it is now, but the high-octane, competitive nature of the place encouraged Appel to sharpen his wit, and by the time he graduated in 1985, a subtle shift had begun, keyed by two classmates, Conan O’Brien and “King of the Hill’s” Greg Daniels, who began writing for shows like “Not Necessarily the News” and “Saturday Night Live.”

“One reason I caught up to my contemporaries is that when I started to send out my scripts, the idea that I’d been on the Lampoon, even 8 or 10 years before, was a credential I could use,” Appel says. Yet while there’s some truth to this, it belies Appel’s ability to hold his own. His senior year, in fact, he won a school competition to give the Ivy Oration, a comic graduation address for which he beat out both Daniels and O’Brien.

“Everyone thought it would be Conan automatically,” recalls journalist Tad Friend, a friend and former classmate, “but Rich’s speech was funny and self-deprecating, in a way that was both silly and profound.”

Given his success at Harvard, Appel probably could have followed in his classmates’ footsteps, but while he continued to dream about it, he chose to go to law school, then took a job as clerk for Judge John Walker of the U.S. District Court in New York. Partly, Appel says, this was a default option, partly a way to do something for which he also felt an affinity.

“It appealed to me, the idea of being a trial lawyer, the idea that my grandfathers were lawyers, and my mother as well,” Appel says. Whatever his reasons, his timing was perfect; in trials during his two years at the courthouse, Michael Milken was sentenced, Bess Myerson and Imelda Marcos were acquitted, and Walker presided at the trial of Leona Helmsley, a case on which Appel worked.

“It was a fascinating convergence of media and law,” he remembers. “Terrific lawyers, unusual characters as witnesses in many cases, the strategy of both sides at the top of their game.” The same held true at the U.S. attorney’s office, where Appel went in 1990 to prosecute cases ranging from racketeering to computer fraud.

“Rich was an excellent lawyer,” says attorney Geoffrey Berman, who worked with him. “He was good on his feet, articulate, with a sense of the law that was common-sensical, more intuitive than based on books.”

That’s not dissimilar from Appel’s attitude toward comedy, and although he used humor sparingly in his courtroom arguments, there were times when it became a tactic all the same. Once, he was prosecuting a Russian gangster who ran a car wash as a front when the defendant’s cellular phone rang in the middle of the courtroom proceedings. Without missing a beat, Appel announced, “There must be a very dirty car somewhere.”

“Rich was always of two minds,” says former classmate Friend. “It’s his nature to test out the more mainstream, parental-expectation-friendly option, then follow his true colors, which are more anarchic.” Friend recalls that, when Appel began courting Mona Simpson, he spent hours “carefully crafting these supposedly whimsical postcards”–which, Friend believes, is a perfect analogy for the caution he brings to most decisions about his life: “He had to grow up to realize his childhood dream. But first he needed to become disenchanted with the law.”

Appel, for his part, argues that it was less the law he had to overcome than his own fears about writing for television as a way of life.

“It just didn’t seem to be the thing to say to your European-born grandparents or your professor parents,” he says. By the same token, he suggests, “The advantage of law is that when you’re 50, if you”ve played your cards right, some of the most exciting parts of your career are just going to start. You’re at an age with experience, you’ve assumed a certain gravitas and they might appoint you as a judge, or you might become the U.S. attorney in some city, or who knows what? Whereas in television, you”re not going to see a lot of 50-year-old comedy writers. So you have to think of another thing to do.”

It wasn’t until he got involved with Simpson, whom he married in 1991, that Appel began to see how to make a change. An established novelist (“A Regular Guy,” “Anywhere but Here”), Simpson refused to humor him, asking hard questions about how long he felt the dream of comedy writing would sustain itself without substantial action to back it up.

Still, the real turning point came when Simpson became pregnant in early 1993. As Appel says, “It was a liberating feeling. It was a reminder that this was my life and I could shape it. I had fallen in love with a woman, and we’d gotten married and now we were going to have a baby. And I thought, I can make decisions about my career the same way.”

Within three months, Appel had finished a pair of half-hour spec scripts, and had an agent to submit his work.

Four years later, Richard Appel is sitting in a conference room, waiting for his day to start. There’s some small talk as people start to drift in, almost all in jeans and T-shirts, and an assistant pops a tape into a VCR. As the lights dim, the titles yield to an episode called “De-Kahnstructing Henry,” about a conflict between Hank and his Laotian neighbor Kahn. Unlike a finished show, the images here are hollow black-and-white line drawings propelled in static, jumpy motion, a kind of visual rough draft called an animatic. Each week’s half-hour installment of “King of the Hill” takes nearly eight months to produce, and the animatic is the halfway point, an essential tool for taking the pulse of an episode and determining how much work it may still need.

The reaction in the room is good. People laugh as Hank and Kahn try to one-up each other, and when the screen goes black, there’s sustained applause. As quickly as the noise dies down, Appel and Daniels have the writers organized and on their way to the writers’ room. If a television show has a nerve center, this is it, a combination rec room and command module, whose informal layout–there are a few beat-up chairs and couches, and a long, low table slung between them, its surface covered with magazines and snack food–disguises its importance as the place where most of the significant decisions about an episode are made.

Today, the session is a pretty tame one, with Daniels leading a discussion among the dozen or so writers about a few small story points that don’t seem to work. One writer worries about the portrayal of Kahn’s wife, Minh, whose greedy behavior may be the stuff of racial stereotype. Another jokingly suggests an alternate ending, in which the camera pulls back to reveal the show”s fictional setting of Arlen, Texas, suspended on a flower held by an elephant, a la “Horton Hears a Who.” As the conversation ebbs and flows, however, Appel and Daniels stress one simple question: “What is this episode about?” This is the basic issue faced by any narrative, and hearing it aloud helps keep the writers on track.

What’s surprising about a series like “King of the Hill” is just how fluid its creative process is. Even now, with the dialogue tracks recorded and the broad shape of things already in place, there’s still time for significant alterations. From the time an idea first comes up until the show goes on the air, there are at least a half-dozen opportunities to rework the material, including after animation is completed, when single lines can be redubbed (as long as the mouth movements match). It’s an obsessive style of working, and it raises the question of diminishing returns.

But while Appel acknowledges the danger, he insists that “in five years, I’ve never seen a script get anything but better through rewriting in the room.” The reason, he suggests, lies in the delicate balance of collaboration, the way that, at its best, the writers’ room functions as a collective intelligence, where an individual’s voice is most important for what it brings to the group.

“I like the collaborative process,” Appel says, “because it’s a source of constant reinforcement and help. This isn’t to say that I think what we do is easy, but it is a different thing to have the safety net of the room.” That sentiment is echoed by David Mirkin, who, as executive producer at “The Simpsons,” gave Appel his first television job. “A writing staff is like a family,” Mirkin explains, “and putting it together is one of the few times in life that you get to create your own.”

Mirkin’s comment says a lot about both the dynamics of the sitcom situation and the odd mix of pressures–a combination of the personal and the professional–involved.

“It’s very important to have someone who can do a lot of things,” says Greg Daniels, who brought Appel over from “The Simpsons” in part because of their history as friends and collaborators, dating back to The Harvard Lampoon. “It was essential that Rich was a good writer who could deal with people, who could help manage the business in the room. But equally important was the fact that he was someone I could trust, who had a similar sense of taste and values.”

When Daniels talks about values, what he really means is sensibility, a consistent way of seeing the world. More than anything, he believes, that’s the key to a successful series, beginning in the writers’ room and extending to the show’s situations and characters themselves.

“When I first came here,” Appel says, “up on the board, they had exercises, and one was a poll with questions like, `Did Hank and Peggy have sex before they got married?’ Then there’d be a tally of what percentage of the writers thought yes. There were 50 questions like that, and it was really interesting. That first season, they spent days and days thinking of backstory for each character, which they could then draw on over the course of the year.

“It might be something as small as the fact that Peggy has big feet, and she’s ashamed of that. But it helps flavor the characters for the writers, and gives a better sense of what they’re like.”

Such a process is especially important for a show like “King of the Hill,” which, taking place in a recognizable landscape (the suburbs of Austin) and involving a cast of lifelike characters, relies on quiet, reality-based humor, rather than the outrageous satire of “The Simpsons” or the slapstick of many cartoons. This, of course, is the great paradox, for no matter how true an episode appears, there’s no denying that these characters are, as Appel puts it, “all painted and drawn.” At the same time, Daniels argues, “Animation is a way of expressing anything,” a point of view Appel takes to heart.

“Having watched and loved cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck growing up,” Appel says, “I think you’re so primed when watching one to think it’s going to be crazy and zany and Wile E. Coyote’s going to die a hundred deaths, that if a show hits a number of signposts of reality, you almost think “‘s more realistic than it is.”

Appel’s got a point; Hank Hill is less like Bugs or Daffy than someone on a live show, a stand-in, on some fundamental level, for ourselves. In many ways, he suggests, Hank’s animated status actually helps enhance this, since there’s no actor through whom he’s being filtered.

“Hank Hill doesn’t exist in any other context than as Hank Hill,” he explains. “The way we imagine it is as if a Fox executive had stumbled upon this family and said, `Can we make a show about you?’ And this is pretty much their lives.”

Still, as Appel discusses the subject of animation, his voice rises slightly, and an edge of something–insecurity? defensiveness?–cuts quickly to the fore. It’s an understandable reaction, for even now, with “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill” having staked out the territory and several new shows in the works, including Matt Groening’s much-anticipated “Futurama,” there’s residual audience suspicion, as if animation should be only for kids. “We don’t get the respect we’d get if we were doing live action,” acknowledges David Mirkin.

For Appel, though, the matter cuts somewhat deeper. Among his lingering concerns is the perception that he has thrown away his education, and although that’s clearly not the case, he gives the sense at times that he doesn’t quite believe it.

“Even to say that somebody’s dream is to write sitcoms sounds kind of stupid,” he says in an unguarded moment. “Partly, I suppose, that’s my own self-consciousness, but it also has to do with the whipping-boy nature of sitcoms in pop culture, the way that people, I think, tend to dismiss them at large.”

Appel pauses, looking pensive, and runs a hand through his wiry hair. Then he smiles, as if acknowledging that these are the very doubts he has had to fight off from the beginning, the fears that kept him from pursuing a television career all along.

“The fact is that there are some bad shows on TV,” he says. “There are also bad books in the bookstore. But the bad TV show is seen by 10 million people, so it becomes more prevalent, and you think it’s somehow more powerful, which maybe it is.”

The bottom line is still about connection, about catharsis, and the way good television, like good anything, helps smooth our passage through the world.

“Shows like `The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and `Cheers’ and `The Simpsons’ and `Seinfeld’ and `Larry Sanders’ and `Roseanne’ are terrifically funny,” Appel declares. “David Letterman is hilarious. There are a lot of things that are really well done. And I think, well, what did I read lately that made me laugh as much as an episode of `Cheers’?”

Richard Appel is back in his office, staring down the prospect of another hectic afternoon. Given the slow production schedule for each “King of the Hill” installment, he has little choice but to work on several episodes at once. Over the last few days, he has been at the Fox lot, directing the actors as they record voices for an upcoming program, then returning to the conference room to work long distance with country singer Loretta Lynn, who has called in from a Nashville recording studio, where she’s laying down dialogue tracks for a show in which she’ll play Hank’s mother.

“That’s what’s so pathetic,” Appel laughs. “Yesterday I was working on the season finale and next season’s premiere, as well as doing the table rewrite of Episode 22. I just finished the storyboards for show No. 19, and I also did the sound editing for Show 20. That’s five episodes right there. And at some point today, I’m supposed to do design approval for probably another three or four shows.”

As Appel runs down his schedule, it becomes increasingly apparent why television is such a young person’s game. But while he admits the grueling nature of his job can sometimes be a burden, he is also determined to enjoy it for as long as he can.

Already, another set of transitions is in sight; at the end of this season, his “King of the Hill” contract will expire, and next year he’ll move on to a two-year development deal, allowing him to work on creating his own sitcom for Fox.

At the same time, Appel says he can see a time coming when he might want to take his family out of Los Angeles, or leave the smaller world of television for the unlimited vistas of film. That’s reminiscent of the uncertainty he felt about moving to television in the first place, but it’s something with which he has finally come to terms.

“The idea of changing careers once,” Appel suggests, “generally makes you less worried about doing it a third time.”

Originally Published: December 6, 1998 at 1:00 AM CST