Day Five -- April 27

All systems go. Full steam ahead. I don't know if it's fair to call it this yet, but we had pretty much a regular routine today. We got in at 10am, we marched through the show, rehearsing every scene a few times. We all had a lot of fun. I laughed a lot. We all laughed a lot. So what's new?

Well, at 5pm we did have a run-through for the network. The five or so development big shots from ABC and an entourage of not-quite-as-big shots filled the stage floor for the network run-through. Adding in the number of studio people, we probably had about 50 people scrutinizing our little adventure. This was sort of the final test before the home stretch. If everything went well tonight, we would have a light day on Friday and then start taping Saturday. This was the last great hurdle.

Did we clear it? I thought so. The laughs were there, more so at least than when we only had a handful of studio execs around. Some scenes really went well -- funny, natural, good relationships -- others maybe not so much. We have a pretty good sense of where some of the holes are from working all week and they showed up in the run-through right on schedule. The impression I got was that they were very pleased and were hoping another day or two would be all we needed to bring it together.

As far as Ford's character development goes, he came back a little bit today and it felt better. A snippet of dialogue was taken out of the climactic attic scene which helped him, and in the fight with his wife he does have a moment of pride and self-defense, which is a pretty good fix. He still takes a lot of abuse but any character in a modern sitcom is going to get picked on for laughs. Ford just has to take his lumps.

Go on to Day 6

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