In his just-published memoir, “Sitcom,” Chuck Lorre doesn’t turn his life into a joke, exactly, though the voice that fueled series as disparate as “Mike & Molly,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Mom” and “The Kominsky Method” also knows how to land a punch line in autobiographical prose.
And for a story that chronicles Lorre’s literal rags-to-riches rise from, as he describes in the opening chapter, “an alcoholic, acid freak, pothead, college dropout, failed musician” with near-fatal colitis, to a career that generated enough hits for him to be anointed the “King of Sitcoms,” the book is remarkably short.
The memoir portion runs just 181 pages, 30 of which are devoted to some of Lorre’s signature “vanity cards” — those brief, humorous and often pointed messages he wrote in the space traditionally reserved at the end of an episode for a creator credit or production company logo.
(Don’t worry, the events leading to, and the aftermath of, Charlie Sheen’s firing from “Two and Half Men” get their own chapter, which Lorre, showman that he is, saves until the end.)
The memoir’s propulsive energy is not surprising. The 73-year-old (74 as of Sunday) mastered his craft at a time when the tale had to be told in 22 minutes, with the anxious knowledge that should any of those minutes lag, viewers would simply switch channels.
“I wanted it to be entertaining,” he said during an interview in the Chuck Lorre Productions office on the Warner Bros. lot, where the walls are lined with posters from his seemingly endless string of hits.
Yet amid the “tell-all” tales, there is also more than a little soul-searching.
“It was cathartic,” he added, as if still surprised by this. “There’s a little bit of therapy going on in this book. I got to say some things out loud that in the past I would have kept hidden because they were embarrassing.”
Including the 10 years he spent as a Scientologist — perhaps the book’s biggest surprise.
“It was one of my darker secrets,” he said. “I was so humiliated. It was a decade of my life.”
In 2019, after a character on his Netflix series “The Kominsky Method” appeared remarkably fluent in church lingo, reports surfaced of pre-TV career church membership. Lorre’s comment to the Hollywood Reporter at the time was characteristic: “I did a lot of crazy s— when I was young.” “Sitcom” offers a more concrete outline.
Then a struggling musician, Lorre was introduced to the church in Columbus, Ohio, through its fundamentals communication course; when he moved to L.A., he continued to take classes. After receiving what he describes in the book as “a full-court, hard sell,” he joined Sea Org “for … wait for it … one billion years.” He lasted two days as a Sea Org recruiter, meaning, he writes, “contractually, I owe the Church of Scientology a billion years of labor minus two days.”
“Broke, hopeless, searching, frightened,” he says now, “I was absolutely the perfect recruit. They promised me the tools to succeed. When you’re 21, 22 and you’re scrambling to succeed, that’s very appealing.”
Financially strapped, Lorre lucked into a gig writing for “Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats.” At some point between music and television, however, he and his then-wife Paula Smith became disillusioned with the church and decided to leave it.
The only further mention “Sitcom” makes of Scientology is in reference to “Dharma & Greg” star Jenna Elfman, who is a Scientologist. When Lorre pitched her the series, he writes, “I let her know I was quite familiar with the Bridge to Total Freedom, although I fudged the part about jumping off that f— space ship years ago.” “Dharma & Greg” ended after five seasons and when Lorre, experiencing a lull in his career, approached Elfman with another potential series, he writes, “She informed me that as a ‘blown Scientologist,’ and therefore considered to be a ‘suppressive person,’ she couldn’t work with me. I found this a little upsetting and told her to f— herself.” A representative for Elfman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
When asked if he has any concern about writing about a church that has a history of pushing back hard against critics, Lorre shrugs. “Not particularly. I told my truth.”
“I don’t have any regrets. The road that I took led to here,” he said, gesturing to his suite of offices where he continues to make television, including the “Big Bang” universe expansions “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” and “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” as well as “Leanne.” “I had this magnificent, lucky career. I worked my ass off, but I’m very fortunate.”
Gratitude is a major theme of “Sitcom,” which is, perhaps, a bit surprising. In his heyday, when he had four hit series running at once, Lorre was often characterized as … prickly. In interviews and via his vanity cards he would, occasionally, rail against television critics, network censors, reality TV and the Television Academy, which consistently overlooked his series in the best comedy category.
He is still quick to mention that he has never won an Emmy, though now with more humor than bitterness. While it would be disingenuous to describe the Lorre of “Sitcom” as “mellow” — in a cavalcade of bitingly humorous characterizations and scathing observations, his sardonic humor is on full display — he does praise the multitudes with whom he has worked.
“It’s important to say that these are collaborations. In and of myself, I’m probably going to fail, but allied with talented people I have a better chance,” he said.
He’s even fairly kind when discussing Sheen, who was famously fired from “Two and a Half Men” after his alleged domestic violence and spiral into addiction were capped by a tirade against Lorre that smacked of antisemitism. He pulls no punches about the pain and suffering Sheen caused, but there is nothing vindictive or angry about it.
“It was written after the fire had gone out of me,” he said. “I was no longer battered, writhing in anger, resentment and outrage. All of that was gone and that was a blessing. It gave me a little bit more perspective and it gave me the freedom to call Charlie and say, ‘I’ve got a part about a degenerate actor in “Bookie” who’s got a gambling problem.’ I know it sounds treacly, but it was really healing to work with him again.”
In “Sitcom,” much of Lorre’s criticism is aimed at himself. At various points in the book he describes himself as spineless, clueless, arrogant and an alcoholic narcissist.
“I was always running scared that I was going to get sent home,” he says now. ”I was playing out of insecurity for a lot of it.”
Famously, his big break came when Roseanne Barr decided to fire all the writers on “Roseanne,” then the No. 1 show in the country; Lorre was hired as one of the replacements. “I worked my ass off to get on ‘Roseanne,’” he said. “I’ve been hungry, I’ve been broke, I almost wound up with a bag on my hip — I figured, ‘How bad could it be?’”
Brutal, as it turns out. As excited as he was to hear words he had written come out of the mouths of Barr, John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, the hostility with which Barr and then-husband Tom Arnold treated the writers (and the producers and the network) made the 70-hour workweek difficult to bear.
“We were punished, the writers,” Lorre said. “The word ‘cruelty’ comes to mind. And I still don’t know why, why so much cruelty. It wasn’t like we didn’t want to make a great show. We were proud to be on that show.”
Lorre was let go, with no explanation, after two years. Still, he said, “I became a better writer being there. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I did become better.”
“Roseanne” was the start of a series of female-led sitcoms, including “Grace Under Fire,” starring stand-up Brett Butler, and “Cybill,” a comedic vehicle for Cybill Shepherd, that would both launch and almost kill him. The on-set difficulties of both these successful shows were much discussed at the time, and Lorre illuminates some of them with a few choice anecdotes, none of which I will spoil here (though the rumored competition Shepherd felt with her co-star Christine Baranski is hilariously validated).
He is happy to reveal his failures — there is a chapter titled “The Many Wives of Chuck Lorre” and another lists all the series he pitched that went nowhere — and in the chapter “Failing Upwards,” he acknowledges his own bafflement at how the fact that he was never in charge of “Roseanne,” “quit ‘Grace’ and got s—canned from ‘Cybill’ did not seem to alter the perception” that he was a successful showrunner. (It’s worth noting that the career trajectory Lorre describes would have been virtually impossible at the time for anyone who was not a white man.)
He is just as breezy when chronicling his hits, except the times he stood firm about his casting choices — Jon Cryer for “Two and a Half Men,” Melissa McCarthy for “Mike & Molly,” Allison Janney for “Mom” — which are clearly sources of great pride for him.
“They didn’t want Melissa, out of the gate,” he said, adding, in reference to a section in the book, “I had a female executive ask me if instead of hiring Melissa, I would hire a skinnier actress and put her in a fat suit. I didn’t make that up, how could you make that up? But by that time I had stopped folding and insisted on her. Melissa is a singular talent.”
He still cannot believe that “Mike & Molly” was canceled after six seasons, “Mom” after eight. “CBS canceled shows led by Melissa McCarthy and Allison Janney,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t have an answer in the book, I don’t have an answer now except Les [Moonves, then president of CBS] didn’t like older women and women with weight issues. ”
While focused on the specifics of one career, “Sitcom” also offers a glimpse into an era of television when multicam network comedies ruled, drawing ratings that are impossible to imagine today. A time when writers rooms were 70-hour-a-week pressure cookers (and predominantly male) and creators were rarely celebrities, despite their lucrative contracts.
Until Sheen‘s firing put him in the spotlight, Lorre was probably best known for his vanity cards, which he says began as an attempt to extend the laughter.
“The idea of writing little essays started as a joke,” he said. “I thought if I can make the audience laugh reading the vanity card, then it adds value. You get 22 minutes to put on a show, why would you waste any of it? Even on a failed show, you would have 20 million viewers.”
Some of them, he said, got him in trouble. “Lawyers started reading them and very often I’d get a note from ABC and then CBS saying, ‘No, you can’t do this.’ So I would put, ‘This one is censored, but you can read it if you go to a website very cleverly disguised as chucklorre.com.’”
Those cards were his first experience writing prose and undoubtedly informed some of “Sitcom’s” style, which is based less on a precise timeline or deep dives of introspection and more on sketches of situations that lead to a point or a joke (or both) before moving on.
But then, Lorre’s notion of comedy is old-school, relying more on character than plot.
He fears the disappearance of the journeyman experience that a 22-episode network show provided — but he believes streaming offers all manner of opportunities.
“People say there’s too much,” he said, “but that’s like walking into the supermarket and saying there’s too much food.”
When asked about his reaction to the recent closing of the deal between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, Lorre refers to a chapter in “Sitcom” titled “My 28 Years at Warner Bros., or Why Does Mommy Keep Bringing Home Strange Men,” which ends with “Larry Ellison’s kid was banging Mommy.”
Proving, if nothing else, that Chuck Lorre knows how to write a character, including his own.
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