ROBERT BRESSON, the French movie director, once said that a movie goes through three births: when it is written, when it is shot, and when it is constructed in the editing room. He was not talking about television shows, but his truism was borne out in the making of Significant Others, the short-lived Bravo series that first aired in March 2004 and ran for a total of 12 episodes, which are now available on DVD from the prolific Shout! Factory.
The difference with Significant Others was there wasn’t much writing to begin with. The regular cast of six–eventually eight–actors, most of them veterans of improv troupes like the Groundlings in Los Angeles, relied instead on brief outlines and what the show’s creator Robert Roy Thomas called the particle accelerator. “We throw an idea out there, it hits the wall, and goes to a million pieces, and the scene sucks, but you go: ‘That one part, that’s at the heart of it.’ So you throw everything else away and focus on that one idea.”
