In music, a way of dramatically vocalizing material that's not quite speech and not quite singing. Sprechgesang uses rhythm and tempo like song, but not pitch and specific notes. There's a good demonstration of it here.
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Last week, the Fox cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine got canceled, then renewed by another network after a torrent of fan commentary. One item that got shared a lot in defense of the show was a recent cold open they did featuring an unusual police line-up:
It's a brilliant short bit from a show that has a history of good cold opens from a showrunner who has a history of good cold opens. (A cold open is a short scene that happens before the credits, before the audience is "warmed up.") Showrunner Mike Schur, previously of The Office and Parks and Recration and a student of classic TV comedy structures, spoke a year-and-a-half ago about how to write a cold open and what some great ones are:
Different shows use them for different reasons. At The Office, Greg always wanted to celebrate and accurately portray the small moments of everyday office life, and cold opens were a perfect medium for that. Eventually, there emerged a sort of meta-cold open, where some small thing from the Office writers room would be transferred to the fictional world of the show. We all got obsessed with our writers room DVD player screen saver thing, where the little cube bounced around the screen in an irregular pattern, and once every ten minutes or so would perfectly strike one of the corners of the screen. Jen Celotta turned that into a cold open where Michael Scott was giving a boring presentation and everyone was cheering on the cube, ignoring him, but he thought they were reacting to what he was saying.
At Parks and Rec, they started similarly — as just little fun standalone comedy vignettes — but in later years we would often just take the first beat of one of the stories and make it into the cold open, if it had a good blow. Brooklyn is more the Office model, I think. The Dianne Wiest one from the other night is my favorite of all-time. (I was not around for its inception, but Luke Del Tredici told me someone just wrote “Charles has a Dianne Wiest infection” on the white board, and then later when they needed a cold open they were just like, “Well, we have *that.*)
Good Place cold opens are almost always picking up right where the previous episode’s cliffhanger left off, but we tried to give them the same feeling of standalone cold opens: build them as little comedy sketches, to the extent that it makes sense for the story.
You can see read the whole bit of the interview over at Alan Sepinwall's blog.
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