I'll Be There For You. Kelsey Miller
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a pitch, but just a vague concept about a guy who’d grown up watching old TV shows, which popped into his head like funny little thought bubbles. Or something like that. They got home, dropped their bags, and called the studio. “And they said, ‘Come back.’”
Kauffman and Crane’s airplane pitch would become Dream On, a cult HBO comedy series about a divorced father who, like so many of his generation, had been raised in front of the television. In each episode, his fantasies and thoughts appeared, literally, on-screen, via clips from his favorite childhood TV shows. Airing from 1990 to 1996, Dream On was a quirky mix of nostalgia and humor. Most importantly, it was, as the critics put it, “adult.”
Dream On was one of HBO’s first forays into scripted series, debuting at a time when premium cable was stuck in a dangerous rut. The draw of these channels was the luxury of being able to watch feature films at home, without commercial interruption. Since launching in 1972, HBO had been on a steady, exponential rise. “But then the bubble burst,” the Los Angeles Times reported. VCRs, pay-per-view, and new basic-cable movie channels like TNT and AMC were now incentivizing viewers to ditch pricey premium subscriptions. In 1990, HBO’s customer base grew by only 1.8%, with 4.5% of existing subscribers canceling every month. In creating original programming, HBO couldn’t just deliver a show that was good. If they wanted to survive, they had to give people something they couldn’t get on network television. Two things, really: sex and swearing. Kauffman and Crane turned in their first draft to Executive Producer John Landis, who sent it back with two notes: “It needs to be funnier, [and] it needs to be dirtier.”
Other than that, Kauffman and Crane could pretty much call the shots. They had zero experience and total creative authority. They were thrilled, but panicked, and rightfully so. Shortly before beginning production, recalled Crane: “We were actually talking to a couple writer friends, going, ‘Okay, so you hire writers…and then you sit around talking about what the episodes could be? And then does someone go off and write it? Or do you write it as a group?’” The general feedback from their fellow writer friends was something along the lines of “I hate you.”
So they winged it. They had a staff of three writers and a warehouse in North Hollywood, where they whipped up a show that they thought was funny, and hoped everyone else would, too. In the end, they didn’t win over everyone, but more than enough. Dream On was HBO’s first definitive hit, as well as Kauffman and Crane’s, though today its legacy has been largely lost in the shuffle. Watching it now, it feels very much like a relic of its time: one part a standard story of a divorced dad muddling through middle age, and the other part a naughty cable show, where everyone swears like a sailor and walks around with their nipples out. But look beyond the titillation and it’s a quiet triumph.
Dream On was often mixed with the critics; the most typical complaint was that the language and sexuality seemed a little too deliberate, which, of course, it was. But it was a solid success, and signaled a sea change for premium cable, and for HBO in particular. Dream On was quickly followed by shows that further cracked the mold of traditional television formats, allowing for both sophisticated and oddball comedy, nuanced and polarizing drama, and the kind of stories that simply didn’t sell before, because no one knew if an audience would buy them. It proved that television didn’t have to cast the widest net possible in order to be successful. A show could be smart and specific and sellable, all at the same time.
Dream On is not often mentioned alongside those other early series—The Larry Sanders Show, Oz, The Sopranos, Sex and the City—which would come to define HBO as a leader in innovative, high-quality entertainment. Indeed, it doesn’t belong on the same list as those series. But there is no doubt that Dream On was the launch pad for them all. In the wake of all the behemoth successes that came after it, Dream On has faded into relative obscurity—an artifact from an era when it was still risqué to drop an F-bomb or display two whole butt cheeks in the same frame. But without it, there would be no Sex and the City, and almost certainly no Friends.
With Dream On, Kauffman and Crane had a hit under their belt, an Emmy nomination,2 as well as the experience of running a show. Most importantly, they now had Kevin S. Bright. “When we first started, technically speaking, we weren’t partners. I was their boss,” Bright later explained during his own interview with the Television Academy Foundation. Along with John Landis, Bright was an executive producer on Dream On. But it became clear very quickly that Bright was a natural—and necessary—collaborator in the Kauffman-Crane partnership. “He’s really good at a lot of stuff that a) we’re not great at, and b) we really don’t care about,” Crane explained. Bright knew how to pull together a great crew, manage all the nuts and bolts of producing, and usher a show through postproduction. “[Dream On] was a show that lived and died in the editing room,” explained Crane, and that was entirely Bright’s domain. Plus, they just clicked. “We had shorthand with each other,” Bright explained with a shrug. “We were three ex–New Yorkers.”
Two years into Dream On, the three of them formed Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, the company that would produce not only Friends, but Veronica’s Closet, Jesse, and, finally, Joey. Shortly thereafter, their deal with Universal was up for renewal, and while Dream On was riding high on its surprise success, the studio didn’t seem all that eager to make them an offer, or even meet with them. “It was one of those things that happens in television, where the company you’re working for feels you owe them,” said Bright. “Rather than they owe you for creating success for them.” Every other studio was very much interested, though, and after meeting with Les Moonves (then president of Lorimar Television, which soon combined operations with Warner Bros.), they signed a development deal, and left Dream On.
The team had only two real deal breakers in mind when it came to future projects: first, no single-star shows. Dream On’s premise had required lead actor Brian Benben to appear in nearly every scene of every episode, an exhausting demand that often made shooting difficult for him and therefore everyone else on the production team. That was a relatively easy ask given that few network shows relied so heavily on a single character. The second ask was trickier. “We said to [Moonves], ‘The only thing we don’t want to do is a family in a living room with four cameras.’” It was 1992, the golden age of families in living rooms: Blossom, Roseanne, Full House, Home Improvement, Family Matters, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Networks were minting money with these multicamera comedies, and not much else. If you weren’t a family in a living room, then you’d better be football.
Thus came Bright/Kauffman/Crane’s next show, and first major flop: Family Album. It was one of two series they developed during their first year with Warner Bros., the other being Couples—a single-camera comedy about three couples living in the same apartment in New York City. That show, they said, was the obvious winner. It flowed right out of them, Crane recalled: “We wrote it in, like, a week! We love it… It’s smart, it’s single-camera, it’s got everything we want.” Family Album, on the other hand, was multicamera, family-focused, and in terms of writing, “[like] pulling teeth.” No one wanted a show like Couples, no matter how good it was. They wanted, as one network executive told them, “a white-collar Roseanne.”
Backed into the living-room corner, they did their best. “We did everything right. We drew on our own lives. It was about this family from Philadelphia. We had characters based on our parents…and yet, for some reason, the DNA was wrong, and it was incredibly hard to write.” Still, Couples was passed over,3 while Family Album was picked up and ran on CBS. For six weeks.
Family Album was no one’s dream project, but its cancellation was still a blow. “Around that point we were feeling not so much like the cable wunderkinds anymore,” recalled Bright. “We were more like the cable disappointment.” Dream On had been a hit, but one hit (and a surprise niche hit at that) is a meager track record. “It was interesting to us how fast the hype about you can change. ‘Golden children, eh. You’re golden children with tarnish now.’”
That same year, The Powers That Be, a show