Re: TV's Top Earners

On Wed, 16 Feb 2011, Karl D Swenson wrote:
> Why do comedies pay so much more?

I'm just pulling this answer out of thin air, but my hunch is that 
comedies rely more heavily on their stars, and on the comic personae that 
these stars have.  Dramas can always replace their lead actors and still 
maintain some sort of continuity (e.g. NYPD Blue continued long after 
David Caruso left, right?).  But lose the lead in a comedy series, and you 
run into trouble.  (Supporting characters are a little more replaceable, 
e.g. the different girls and landlords on Three's Company, or the 
different leading ladies etc. on Cheers -- but could either of those shows 
have survived without John Ritter or Ted Danson, respectively?  And of 
course, with tight ensemble shows like Seinfeld and Friends, the actors -- 
all four or six of whom share the "lead", in a sense -- will often band 
together during contract renegotiations to make sure that *all* of them 
get *equally* big raises.  I don't think I've ever heard of that kind of 
solidarity among dramatic-show actors, apart from isolated couplings like, 
e.g., William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy tag-teaming on Star Trek.)

Plus, how many comedy shows have been named after their stars (a la I Love 
Lucy, or Seinfeld, or The Cosby Show, etc.), and how many dramatic shows 
have done the same?  Nothing's coming to mind, right now, for me.

Admittedly, you get bizarre cases like Valerie, which started out in 1986 
as a sitcom vehicle for Valerie Harper... but then, during the second 
season, she quit the show over salary negotiations, and so she was 
replaced by another actress, who led the series for the remaining three 
and a half years... and so they changed the name of the show to Valerie's 
Family... and then they changed it again, to The Hogan Family.

But even a convoluted situation like that just proves the point: has any 
*dramatic* show had a casting/title-changing history like that?

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