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Burbank, California It happens every autumn, Emmy night. Television's best and brightest stars, from Gangsters to Castaways to Desperate Housewives, gather for one fabulous evening to celebrate themselves before a television audience of 20 million viewers. As a child I used to watch the awards and wonder what it would be like to receive a nomination, walk the red carpet and hobnob with the stars. In 1989, I found out. In February of 1988, I was wrapping up the second season of the hit ABC series Head of the Class. Steve Papazian, the president of physical production for Warner Brothers feature films, was then studio vice-president of TV production. Steve was responsible for getting me the Head of the Class job, and now he had me in mind for another project. He wanted me to interview to produce the pilot of a proposed CBS series called Murphy Brown. The pilot was shooting during my hiatus from Head of the Class and wouldn't conflict with my responsibilities on that show. My interview with the husband-and-wife executive producer team of Joel Shukovsky and Diane English went well enough. They hired me to help them transform Diane's 42-page script into 23 minutes of filmed entertainment. We were lucky enough to cast Candice Bergen in the title role, and that April we shot our pilot. The following month we learned that CBS was putting the show on the fall schedule. By the November 14, 1988 Murphy Brown premiere, I was midway through another season of Head of the Class. Fortunately, we were shooting Head of the Class on Warner Brothers' Stage 5 (later to become the home of Everybody Loves Raymond). Murphy was being shot on the adjoining Stage 4 (now the home of George Lopez). When seeking a stage for Lopez, I picked Stage 4 hoping Murphy's karma still inhabited the stage. It does. The proximity of the two stages allowed me to stay connected with the Murphy cast and crew.  The Murphy Brown cast won numerous Emmy Awards. Author Frank Pace got a tux. Murphy got off to a slow start with audiences but was an immediate success with critics and industry insiders. When the Emmy nominations were announced in July of 1989, Murphy Brown received six. Four of those nominations were for the pilot episode I had produced. Included in the nominations was Best Comedy. When a show wins a Best Comedy award, an Emmy statue goes to each member of the producing team, in this case Diane, Joel and me. I was going to the Emmy Awards. The 1989 Emmy telecast was September 17th at the Pasadena Civic Center. My wife Karen was really excited. Little did I know it was because she purchased not one, but two gowns for the occasion, waiting until Emmy day to decide that she would wear the shorter of the black ones. I was married in a rented tux (what man wasn't) but decided I wasn't wearing a rented tux to the Emmys. I called the men's costumer on Head of the Class and asked him to pull the finest tuxedo in the wardrobe department for me. (I had to make up the gown money somehow). One of the nice perks of working at Warner Brothers in those days was that whenever you were nominated for an Emmy, the studio would send a limo to your home, drive you to the festivities, take you to the after-parties and bring you home. Who cares if we lived only five miles from the Civic Center, we were taking everything we had coming to us. On Emmy night, Karen and I stepped from our limo onto the red carpet as flash bulbs popped and thousands of people lined the entrance wondering who we were. To confuse them just a bit more, I waved. Once inside, we saw all the same people I worked with on a daily basis, the only difference on this night being that everyone was dressed up. We were assigned seats in the auditorium. Each seat was numbered so if the director was looking for Ted Danson, all he had to do was look at a chart. "Make sure your spouse doesn't sit in your seat," we were instructed. Right, like the director would be looking for me. "And decide who will speak for the show," we were told, "one person per show." Since Diane created the show, wrote the script, cast Candice (and hired me), it was pretty obvious who would be thanking her mother, father, agent and the most talented cast and crew in show business.
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