Rick Wiener Uncovered

An interview by Jake Friedman
*Originally published in the November 2005 issue of aNYmator Magazine

If you haven't caught Seth MacFarlane's new show, "American Dad," you should check it out. Like "Family Guy" was six years ago, this show is in the baby stages of what could be a runaway hit. Rick Wiener had started out as a writer on such shows as "Mad About You" and "Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place" before joining the "American Dad" team as co-executive producer and writer. Here he shares his two cents.

JF: What do a co-executive producer and writer do?

RW: A co-executive producer is mostly in charge of writing stuff -- breaking stories and doing re-writes and what have you. The executive producer often times has to deal with casting, editing, network calls and a thousand other things. Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman are the guys who created the show, with Seth MacFarlane. And when they're not there, they need someone keeping the writing process moving forward. ... When you break a story it means that you propose a story, the beginning, middle and end, and all the scenes. And that's really time consuming, so they rely on their co-executive producers to break stories, then they come in and review them. And then after the story is broken, it's written by a particular writer, and consequently after that everyone reads it and does notes on it and we re-write it together as a staff.

JF: How does writing for an animated show differ from a live-action show?

RW: It's harder to find a story that works, it's much more intricate and faster. Here you can do whatever you want, so the trick is not getting carried away with that, and making sure that the stories fall back on the characters and are really grounded in who the characters are. ... In a regular television show you write the script, and then you have a table read, and then you do some run-throughs, and by Friday you've shot the show. Here, you have a table read; and then you need a storyboard of how the characters will portray those words that you've written; and then another four months later we do something called the animatic, which shoots the sotryboards with the camera and you hear the voices on top of it; then you do a re-write on that and then another five or six months after that it comes back to us from Korea. It's really such a long process.