At the end of the dress rehearsal, the question seemed to come down to this: Was it O.K. for Monica to have sex with Paul on the first date?
On one side of the issue were the NBC executives who had come to monitor the nascent sitcom produced by David Crane and Marta Kauffman. After the rehearsal, they huddled with the producers on a set designed to look like a Japanese restaurant. Over plastic sushi, they said they were concerned that Monica did not care enough for Paul to hop into bed with him. On the other side were the Warner Brothers studio executives, who even produced some patently unscientific research to back their position: As the spectators who watched the rehearsal left the set, they were asked to fill out a brief survey, and most indicated that sex on the first date was no big deal.
Mr. Crane and Ms. Kauffman clearly shared the studio's attitude. But after conferring with the NBC executives, they did what any sensible television producers trying to get a show on the network would do. They went back to their office and rewrote Monica's part. By the time the pilot episode of the sitcom was filmed, two days later, Monica didn't just sleep with Paul, she really cared for him.
May is judgment time in television land, the month when the networks put together their fall schedules, deciding which pilots will live and which will become video fatalities. (The odds of survival are less than one in three.) It is a time when even the most cursory comments -- referred to in the industry as "notes" -- from network big shots can send writers scurrying off to add new story lines or eliminate characters, days, or even hours, before the show is shot. And Now the Lobbying
The networks announce their schedules over a period of weeks -- ABC will lead off on Monday -- and in the meantime the studios mount the kinds of lobbying efforts that would make the National Rifle Association proud. They ascertain which time slots will be opening up on which networks, and which shows from other studios are competing for those slots. Often, through back channels, they even manage to get hold of the competition's pilots. Then, armed with focus-group research, they set out to persuade the networks why their shows are the ones that deserve to get on the schedule, and at the best times.
Mr. Crane, Ms. Kauffman and a third partner, Kevin Bright, have been at work on their pilot for NBC for more than six months now. It began as a sitcom about six young singles living in New York, and now, with the pilot episode filmed, edited and about to be delivered to the network, it is still about six young singles living in New York. For that fact alone, the producers consider themselves lucky.
Still, there have been plenty of changes along the way, more than a few of them having to do with sex. Like geological ages, these changes can be charted by the color of the scripts.
When the team delivered the original script to the network back in March, it was printed on white paper. Since then, there has been a blue rewrite and a pink one, followed by a yellow rewrite and a green. Along the way, the show's title changed; at first it was "Friends Like Us," but after ABC introduced a sitcom this spring called "These Friends of Mine," it became "Six of One."
The scene that proved most troublesome in the rewriting concerned Paul, who had claimed to be impotent, having an erection. Although it was never explicitly mentioned, NBC executives found the reference clear enough to violate network standards. Between the white script and the green one, the whole scene was cut.
Mr. Crane describes this particular network-mandated change as positive. "It made the show subtler and smarter," he said. Even making Monica more caring, the writers decided, turned out to be a good idea. "We didn't do anything we didn't believe in, except for one thing," Ms. Kauffman said after the final rewrite was completed, one day before shooting. (She declined to elaborate on that one thing.) Three Story Lines
One change NBC requested but the writers refused to make was to play up one story line and play down the others. (Most television comedy episodes are written with a primary story, the A story, and a secondary story, the B story.) Instead, they kept three story lines of essentially equal weight.
"We didn't want to make it like every other sitcom," Ms. Kauffman said.
The last-minute rewriting that goes into most pilots contrasts sharply with the painstaking planning that goes into their production. In fact, far more time and money is lavished on putting together a pilot than on an episode of a regularly scheduled series.
To direct the pilot of "Six of One," for example, Warner Brothers hired James Burrows, who as one of the creators of "Cheers" is among television's most sought after -- and expensive -- commodities. (For a pilot, he is paid roughly $100,000). Such is the premium placed on pilots that Mr. Burrows was already signed up to do three others when the producers of "Six of One" approached him. He agreed to the project because he liked the script, but is not committed to it beyond the one episode.
"I literally had no time," he said. "But I read it, and I said, 'I can't let anyone else do this.' "
At every step of the production process, "Six of One" has been commented on with "notes" of almost Talmudic proportions.
At the early rehearsals, Mr. Crane and Ms. Kauffman reviewed virtually every scene for the actors. ("We need to protect the Mr. Potato-Head joke," was a typical exhortation.) Then the studio executives, led by Leslie Moonves, the president of Warner Brothers Television, offered detailed comments to Mr. Crane and Ms. Kauffman. ("The reference to the barn-raising scene in 'Witness,' is that obscure?" Mr. Moonves asked the writers at one point; they assured him it was not.) Finally, after the dress rehearsal, the NBC executives, led by Don Ohlmeyer, head of NBC's West Coast entertainment operation, gave notes to Mr. Crane, Ms. Kauffman and Mr. Moonves. Just Plain Folks
After the pilot was shot Wednesday night, it was rushed over to an editing studio, where Mr. Bright proceeded to cut roughly eight hours of material -- two hours of film from each of four cameras -- down to 22 minutes. It will now be screened by NBC executives and then subjected to another round of comments, this time from regular people. This is a process known as pilot testing.
Like rival political parties, the studios, which produce the shows, and the networks, which decide whether to buy them, each conduct their own pilot tests. Both sets of tests are done with groups of randomly selected viewers, who screen the pilot, answer questions about it and record their feelings using little plastic dials.
For the writers, this anonymous criticism is often the toughest to take because, with deadlines so tight, there is virtually nothing that can be done to answer it. "It's pretty excruciating," Ms. Kauffman said.
In addition to "Six of One," Ms. Kauffman, Mr. Crane and Mr. Bright have produced another pilot, for Fox, tentatively titled "Reality Check." It is about a high school student -- at first called Harry, now called Jamie -- who frequently lapses into elaborate fantasies.
The Fox pilot went through even more rewrites than the NBC pilot -- "a gazillion," Ms. Kauffman said -- until the final version was printed on salmon-colored paper. In contrast to NBC, Fox was concerned that "Reality Check" was not risque enough. "They kept wanting Jamie to be older," Mr. Crane said. "They wanted him to be driving and already having sex."
At this point, the fate of both projects is out of the producer's hands; it depends on the desires of the networks and the salesmanship of the studio.
On Wednesday, Mr. Moonves flew to New York to lobby ABC on behalf of other Warner Brothers shows. But before he left, he had already formulated the pitch he would be making the next week to NBC for "Six of One."
"This is a very hip show," he said that he would say to Mr. Ohlmeyer. "It skews very young, which is the demographic you keep saying you're interested in. There are a lot of time periods it can fit in, hopefully Thursday night." (Thursday, with "Seinfeld" at 9 P.M., is NBC's highest-rated night. )
Recalling the notes NBC gave after the show's dress rehearsal, though, Mr. Moonves said he was unsure his pitch would succeed. "The show's a little bit edgy," he said. "It may be too hip for them." And then, as if preparing himself -- and the writers -- for the possibility of bad news, he said, "We're going for something different here, and different is harder to sell."