The first time the show tried to tape its pilot, it was a disaster: A bomb threat was called in for the lot (determined to be unfounded), the studio air conditioning broke, the microphones weren't working, and there was barely any laughter from the audience. Brooks and Burns had no idea what to do with the script, but Marge Mullen, the script supervisor, focused on one piece of feedback from the audience polling: They'd all hated the character of Rhoda, played by Valerie Harper. "There's this little girl who's Phyllis's daughter," Mullen said. "If the little girl likes Rhoda, it'll give the audience the opportunity to love her, too." In the retaping, actress Lisa Gerritsen, playing the daughter of Mary's landlady, Phyllis, said, "Aunt Rhoda's really a lot of fun," and that seemed to make all the difference. The audience laughed at the line and the rest of the taping was a success.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
