I’ve mentioned a few times before how I had been purposefully avoiding putting Madison in any of the old time radio comedies. The main reason was she is snide and snarky (who? Madison?) and when put into the silly slap-stick style comedies of OTR, she’d just come off as a Mean Girl attacking everyone. While I love the mean girl side of Madison, I also strive to have as much land on her as she doles out, so we can still enjoy following Madison in all of these different series. Early on in year one, I had read a bunch of different comedies. “Our Miss Brooks” was recommended to me multiple times, as was “The Great Gildersleeve” and the prequel to “I Love Lucy,” “My Favorite Husband” and even another comic-turned-radio show, “Blondie.” But nothing was working for me. The talented and amazing David Gallaher had introduced me to the Archie series to which I’d binged half the episodes. So it had been simmering in my brain for a while. Could it work?
The key was really Archie’s dad, Fred Andrews. He’s such a wonderful foil, being demanding and unreasonable, that he could take the heat for being the “mean” one and Madison would just be doing her brand of humor in response to his behavior. Although the episode was a large undertaking. You know how on sitcoms they often write the supporting characters so fun that they start to eclipse the leads? Where in order to appease the audiences and be guaranteed laughs, “Will & Grace” suddenly became “Karen & Jack”? In going through the Archie episodes, I found very little Archie and a LOT of Jughead. He’s more fun to write and a definite crowd pleaser. In our episode “Wallpapering,” most of the exchange is between Fred and Jughead, sending Archie to the store and out of the scene EVERY TIME. Well, that wasn’t going to do for Madison’s show. So while I wrote her in for Archie, I also gave her Jughead’s scenes. However, Jughead does “stupid” things that Madison wouldn’t do. So another way to pump up Fred as the foil was to make him do those mistakes. Like wallpapering over the window wasn’t originally Fred’s mistake. Jughead and Betty had done it. But then the trick was to still keep Fred as his original character (not turn him into a bumbling father character that was so popular in 1990’s sitcoms). He still was the authority figure that the kids all listened to. Even with his foot in the bucket of paste.
I am a trained multi-camera sitcom writer. There is no denying it’s my wheelhouse. From the three jokes a page to the one-liners to the scene tags, that’s what I do best. And so getting Madison into “Archie Andrews” was quite a lot of fun. Now that we’ve gotten over forty episodes under Madison’s belt, I am definitely planning on giving those other comedies a second look. She’s also grown a lot since the beginning. But the main constant for Madison is her Taoist attitude. Just go with the flow and take each new adventure as it comes.
