He co-created television’s current top-rated comedy, but Two and a Half Men’s executive producer, Chuck Lorre, originally didn’t even set out to be a writer. The New Yorker had come to Los Angeles to make it as a singer and songwriter, “a guitar version of Randy Newman,” Lorre says. “I was going to die with a Stratocaster in my hands.” Instead, he just may be, as Hollywood buzzes lately, saving the sitcom.

Although Lorre had found limited song-writing success, life as a journeyman musician in bar mitzvah bands and on cruise ships eventually became too unstable for a then-father of two in his mid-30s.

So when his day job—selling FM radios door to door—led him prophetically to offices of the DIC animation studios, Lorre switched from writing songs to writing stories about a certain wiseacre cat. His persistence in pitching the DIC executives led to script assignments for Heathcliff, where “my fi rst writing credit for animation was an episode called ‘An Officer and an Alleycat,’ of which I was very proud. I got $500, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Lorre recalls. “But animation writing is nonunion, and so it’s an unsupervised, Wild West world. It was really punishing work.”
 
Ready for Prime Time
Seeking union health benefi ts for his kids, Lorre set his sights on prime time and landed his fi rst big break on the writing staff of the hit ABC sitcom Roseanne. “Going into the show’s third season, the whole writing staff had been fi red, and no one wanted to be on Roseanne,” he says. But, fi guring that life on TV’s No. 1 comedy would be better than “selling crap door to door on Ventura Boulevard,” Lorre leaped in.

“Whatever else you might say about Roseanne and her eccentricities,” he says, “she was really trying to burn out all of the show’s glibness and mediocrity and tell a real story. It was a defi ning part of my career, because I learned that you can do an ensemble half-hour, four-camera comedy and make it about something.”

The Hitmaker
 After a failed sitcom called Franny’s Turn, Lorre toured Illinois, researching the complicated lives of single mothers and was inspired, both by the women’s “heroism,” as he words it, and by the sitcom format’s opportunity to portray that. His next project, ABC’s Grace Under Fire, became his first hit.
 
In his next two shows, CBS’ Cybill and ABC’s Dharma & Greg, Lorre then began to tinker with the half-hour format, busting some scenes out of the proscenium, multicamera stages he was starting to fi nd too confi ning. Instead, he wrote quicker, more movie-like moments; Cybill’s pilot opened with a very expensive traffi c jam, fi lmed on a not-yet completed stretch of freeway.

 “Ultimately,” he says, “I learned that my feelings about the sitcom genre shouldn’t get in the way of accepting the genre for what it is: a great vehicle to explore the small elements in our lives. Not the big hijinks and great big romps, not events, but relationships and character.”
 
Inspired by “the great glory and power of comedy on a small scale,” Lorre brought a renewed appreciation for the sitcom to Two and a Half Men. “The series is about Charlie and Alan and Jake, and how these three men are affecting each other’s lives. And that can happen on the couch ... it really can.”
 
As other networks try and fail to launch any kind of successful comedy—never mind the traditional, multicamera kind some TV critics pompously deride as outdated—Men, like its youngest star, just keeps growing. Lorre credits the show’s currently unparalleled success to many factors—most notably a staff of a half-dozen writers whom he calls “experienced and brilliant”—but thinks that the future remains bright for other comedies on network television.

“We can’t be an anomaly,” he says. “This is probably the same conversation that people were having 23 years ago, just before The Cosby Show came along. I see TV today as a tremendous opportunity. The fact that everybody’s saying the sitcom is dead—well, that only invigorates me. Run and develop rich, wonderful comedies about characters and relationships and families of all kinds.” Because, as Lorre has learned, that’s the type of sweet music TV audiences long to hear.