Maxine Lapiduss: From "Roseanne" and "Ellen" to Variety With a Twist

After Roseanne, Lapiduss co-executive produced and wrote for Home Improvement (1992-93), then signed on as a writer for the short-lived The Crew (1995). The Crew was executive produced by Marc Cherry and Jamie Wooten (Desperate Housewives) and Lapiduss remembers it fondly as “The worst show ever with the best writing staff ever. It was the most ill-conceived show you could ever imagine about a bunch of flight attendants. But nine-tenths of the staff was gay (not even by design—they hired me based on my spec script), and it was the most wonderful open hilarious staff. The show was dreadful, but we just had a ball.”

In 1998, Lapiduss joined the TV series Ellen as consulting producer/writer in what would be the last season of the show. After the exuberant coming out of the lead character (played by Ellen DeGeneres) in the previous season, the show struggled with low-ratings and criticism for storylines that were “too gay.”

Lapiduss thinks the reasons for the eventual decline of the show are much more complicated. “What really happened, from my perspective, was that Ellen DeGeneres. had an agenda. And her agenda, from my observation, was that she was in a place in her life where she wanted to be out. She had been keeping this bottled up for a long time, and she had made this decision that she wanted this character to come out. And in her mind, she was gonna come out fully blown.” However, Lapiduss notes, “Every gay person I know just tiptoes out of the closet, then they go back in for awhile, then they have another toe that they put out. It's a very slow and thoughtful process.”

Lapiduss was the only gay person on the writing staff for the show at that time, and she adds, “I thought it was curious, because it was such an agenda for her, and yet it was being guided by a very straight male perspective of what the show should be. The person executive producing the show was a straight guy and all these other straight people were coming up with all the story lines. They would pitch them to her and she would okay it or not. But as far as really scheming on how the show should take that turn, it was a very straight perspective.”

She remembers, “I felt like I was carrying the torch--I would try to interject and say, ‘That's not really how it would go. It would go maybe a little more like this' and sometimes those things would get into the stories and into consideration and sometimes not.”

Ultimately, Lapiduss says, “I think the bigger issue was that Ellen herself was impatient and she wanted the stories to be moving along quickly. And if I'd had my druthers I would have done them differently. Because I feel like it was a little forceful. You could have brought it along in a different manner and kept the gay and straight viewers.”

Lapiduss wrote a particularly memorable Ellen episode, “Just Coffee,” revolving around the character's awkward early dating experiences. ”It was about this woman asking her out for coffee, and she was trying to figure out if that was a date or not. And it was really fun, because it's that early titillation when you know you're attracted to somebody but you don't know if they're gay or they're straight, is this a date? So I was kind of thrilled with that episode because it was very sweet and she wound up kissing the girl in that episode. It was the first kiss of that season.”

Lapiduss is eager to see the entire final season of Ellen when it is finally released on DVD. “I think the staff was incredibly talented and really smart and funny. And I think they got a bad rap on a lot of those stories because we were coming out of the gate more forcefully. I remember them being very well-crafted, but a bit brazen.”

When asked to consider the Ellen legacy in relation to the television shows that followed it, Lapiduss admits disappointment. “I was shocked and angered by how asexual Will & Grace was. I felt we had made some ground and even though Ellen wasn't a popular success in that last season (and I think there were many, many reasons for that--it was pre-empted constantly, there were all kinds of issues that were going on), I did think that we lost ground with Will & Grace. Will & Grace was hilarious and well-written, and I loved Sean (Hayes) and Megan (Mullally) on it. But it was just so pedestrian.”

She's even more discouraged when it comes to the decline in sitcoms in favor of reality television. Her own venture into reality TV, Bravo's Situation: Comedy (2005), yielded mixed results. The show offered viewers a rare glimpse of the television production process, from script selection to the taping of a 15-minute episode.

Lapiduss and her fellow executive producers (Sean Hayes, Todd Milliner, and Stan Zimmerman) enjoyed the process of selecting and producing two winning scripts from a pool of 10,000 entries, but you wouldn't have known it if you watched the show. The edited version of the production experience appeared to be grueling and tension-filled.