The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
LIFE BEHIND THE LAUGHS
Riverside grad’s career includes time crafting laughs for ‘Cheers,’ ‘Frasier’ and ‘Modern Family’
O’Shannon, whose impressive list of credits includes stints writing for and producing series including “Newhart,” “Suddenly Susan,” “Frasier” and “Modern Family,” says he wrote that line for a 1990 episode of “Cheers.” The joke popped up on a couple of other shows the following season, he says, and spread from there.
“It was one of Chandler’s first jokes on ‘Friends,’” he says, “and then people started saying it in real life.”
You may hear about that — and certainly more reflections on his career — on Aug. 12 when Cleveland’s Music Box Supper Club hosts “To Hollywood & Back with Great Behind the Scenes Stories — Dan O’Shannon,” an entry in its Cleveland Stories Dinner Parties series.
While he still has a home in the Los Angeles area, O’Shannon says he has spent much of the last couple of years — in part due to the novel coronavirus pandemic — at his place in Lakewood.
In fact, he spent the last television season working “Los Angeles hours” from Cuyahoga County as consulting producer on the freshman CBS sitcom “B Positive.”
“The actors were on stage, but (the show) took extreme precautions, and it changed the way we had to write,” he says. “Writers would say, ‘We’ll do a scene in a bar, and it will be crowded and people will be dancing.’
“And people like me would be like, ‘Uh-uh. COVID.”
In that example, he says, a crowded bar becomes a bar at closing time with only a couple of extras milling about the space.
“Trying to make it look like a non-COVID world but shooting it in COVID times was really a challenge.”
(The show will return for a second season, but O’Shannon declined to be involved, he says. “It wasn’t a great fit for me, and I’ll enjoy the time off for a while.”)
When you spend a life crafting TV comedy for a living, some things are going to stick. ¶ “I’ve written literally thousands and thousands of jokes, and some of them, I think, are fall-down-funny,” says Dan O’Shannon, a longtime television writer who grew up in Northeast Ohio and graduated from Riverside High School in Painesville Township. “But there are one or two that escaped into the aether, which is to say they became things that people say. ¶ “If you ever hear somebody say something and look around and say, ‘Did I say that out loud?,’ that’s me.”
O’Shannon, who recalls going to his Riverside senior breakfast with pal Greg Brumbraugh in pajamas — he wants it known it was Brumbraugh’s idea — knew he wanted to get into comedy that far back.
“But in Ohio, in 1980 when I graduated, there was no Internet,” he says. “So there was no way to Google ‘how to become a TV writer.’ And nobody I knew had any clue how to go to Hollywood and start writing TV.
“Some people didn’t even understand what it meant to write for TV. ‘What do you mean?’”
After briefly attending Cleveland State University, where folks in the English department told him they didn’t know how to teach him what he really wanted to learn, he dove into the burgeoning stand-up comedy scene of the 1980s.
“That taught me a lot about comedy construction — certainly about jokes, about audiences.”
After meeting a guy who was going to LA to pursue a similar dream who offered O’Shannon his couch for a while, he took the man up on it.
“I left a note on our kitchen table, and I had a hundred dollars in my pocket and a one-way ticket and flew out to Los Angeles.”
He worked a job, did stand-up, learned how to write a script, learned how to write a BETTER script and eventually landed a TVwriting gig.
“It took me literally six months to learn what now someone could Google in 30 seconds.”
He made it to “Newhart” in the late 1980s and then went on to “Cheers.” At both stops, he teamed up with writer pal Tom Anderson, a Willoughby native who followed him to LA a couple of years later.
“I met Tom a few years earlier when we were both doing open-mic nights at (a) Cleveland comedy club,” he says. “We had a good creative chemistry.” O’Shannon went on to write for “Suddenly Susan” before landing around the turn of the century at acclaimed “Cheers” spinoff “Frasier,” where he later become the showrunner.
A period on that series — in which Kelsey Grammar’s psychiatrist character from “Cheers,” Dr. Frasier Crane, moved to Seattle to be close to his father and brother and host a radio show — was the the most creatively fulfilling time for O’Shannon, he says.
“I got to experiment with storytelling, and the cast and the writers trusted me. If I came in with some crazy idea, rather than shoot it down, they would say, ‘OK, how do we make it work?’
“We did some story structures that I hadn’t seen on other shows — and still haven’t.”
Of course, all shows aren’t “Frasier” or, for that matter, “Modern Family,” the longrunning onecamera series on which O’Shannon worked for its first five seasons. When they’re not, you make the best of it, he says.
“You find what it is about the show that connects with you. You find the strong spot. You find the character that you connect with — or the characters that you connect with, and you write the hell out of those,” he says. “There have been a couple shows I’ve worked on that I didn’t connect with, but I wrote some really good scenes or characters.
“You find your spots, and you try to be amazing on them,” he adds. “Every show is an opportunity to write something you’ve never written before.”
On the other hand, he says, some shows are fertile grounds for that.
“‘Modern Family,’ ‘Frasier’ — you could write whole episodes or things that nobody ever saw before and be super proud of them,” he says. “The planets really have to align for a show to be a success, and in those shows, we had really strong casts. There were really good writers; I’m not saying that I’m necessarily a really good writer, but (those shows) were created by geniuses.
As for those talented actors, they do some heavy lifting, he says.
“They’ll take bad stuff and make it pretty good; they’ll take good stuff and make it amazing. And that’s true of the cast of ‘Cheers,’ ‘Frasier’ and ‘Modern Family’ right down the line.”
O’Shannon has written for more than TV comedies. On his IMDb page, you’ll see drama (“Jericho”) and science fiction (“Star Trek: Enterprise”) — he notes he borrowed a storytelling device he saw on an episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” for an episode of “Frasier” — as well as books including “What Are You Laughing At?: A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event.”
“At the end of the day, sitcoms are kinda where I live creatively,” he says. “What’s great is when I go off and do something else, like sci-fi or high drama or whatever and I go back to comedy, I feel like have some new tools to use in the comedy.”