How ‘The Upshaws’ Editor Angel Gamboa Bryant Makes Sure the Comedy Lands Every Time
What made “Buy Now” a standout episode?
Angel Gamboa Bryant Regina Hicks, who is the showrunner and one of the head writers, was also the director of this episode. What I love about the way she did it is she artfully crafted the scenes in a way that I was able to cut and create a lot of comedy with smash cuts, which not a lot of directors, believe it or not, want to do, and then we can’t, in the edit bay, make the comedy land the right way. There’s a scene where Bennie [Mike Epps] goes to the bank and he’s trying to give the loan back and when he’s leaving, he stands behind a window and there’s vertical blinds in front of him and he yells, “I should rob the bank,” and then we smash cut into him behind bars in jail saying, “I guess you can’t say, ‘I should rob the bank’ in a bank.” That’s a smash cut when it’s almost the same image in one shot, with the vertical blinds in the bank, to the vertical bars of the jail cell in the next shot.
Multicamera comedies seem to be a dying art. How do you feel about their place in the current TV landscape?
The thing about multicamera sitcoms, I think, that people take for granted is they’re very hard to direct. In a single-camera comedy, you know what you’re covering. You watch the scene play out as you’re directing it, and you can follow along with your actors’ lines the whole way through. If you have four cameras set up, sometimes you can miss things because you have a camera on one actor, you have a camera on another actor, maybe a two-shot and maybe a wide shot [angle], so you might hear that the actors said all their lines, but it’s very hard to watch all four cameras at once. Some people think it’s easier that way; it’s so much harder.
Does that make editing a multicam comedy more difficult?
I always dig through all of the takes, so I’m still crafting the edit like I would a single-camera show, but one of the things that makes it artfully different is the live studio audience. I am of the mindset that if an actor has a big comedic moment and everybody onstage is kind of rolling with it and cracking up, then that’s a beautiful moment to have in the show. But otherwise, you really want to cut scenes fast. You only let it breathe when you have big laughs.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
