"And that's what the audience was feeling too, as they watched the show and as they watch it now. And overriding all of that is the way it was written. It was written honestly. There was never any manufactured laugh. There was never compromising of character"
About this Quote
Moore is quietly drawing a line between comedy as product and comedy as craft. When she says the audience was "feeling" something, she’s resisting the familiar story that sitcoms succeed by keeping viewers breezily entertained. The verb matters: feeling implies recognition, maybe even relief - the sense that a show is naming a life you’ve been living but haven’t seen reflected with any dignity. For an actress who helped redefine what a female lead could be on American television, that’s not nostalgia; it’s a claim about why the work lasted.
Her real charge is aimed at the machinery of TV: "manufactured laugh" evokes punch-up writers, audience-wrangling, broad mugging - the whole industrial pipeline that can flatten people into joke delivery systems. "Written honestly" isn’t moral posturing; it’s a specific aesthetic standard. The laughs, she implies, came as a byproduct of truthful behavior, not as an excuse for it. That’s why the second clause lands hardest: "never compromising of character". She’s praising a discipline that’s rare in long-running series, where the temptation is to sand down complexity into catchphrases and easily repeatable bits.
The subtext is almost defensive, because it has to be. Sitcoms - especially multi-cam, laugh-track-era sitcoms - are often treated as lesser art. Moore insists the opposite: that the most sophisticated comedy is built on integrity, on characters allowed to remain themselves even when the joke would be easier if they weren’t. That’s the cultural flex: a standard for popular television that refuses to apologize for being popular.
Her real charge is aimed at the machinery of TV: "manufactured laugh" evokes punch-up writers, audience-wrangling, broad mugging - the whole industrial pipeline that can flatten people into joke delivery systems. "Written honestly" isn’t moral posturing; it’s a specific aesthetic standard. The laughs, she implies, came as a byproduct of truthful behavior, not as an excuse for it. That’s why the second clause lands hardest: "never compromising of character". She’s praising a discipline that’s rare in long-running series, where the temptation is to sand down complexity into catchphrases and easily repeatable bits.
The subtext is almost defensive, because it has to be. Sitcoms - especially multi-cam, laugh-track-era sitcoms - are often treated as lesser art. Moore insists the opposite: that the most sophisticated comedy is built on integrity, on characters allowed to remain themselves even when the joke would be easier if they weren’t. That’s the cultural flex: a standard for popular television that refuses to apologize for being popular.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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