Kellen Blair, Joe Kinosian, and Tim Kashani explain how to read a room during script readings. Watch for audience comfort and flow, not every laugh. Coughing and watch-checking mean something needs fixing. Writer friends give you how they'd write it, not what's broken. Cold reads expose missing information when new readers stumble.
What do you watch for in that reading to tell you, ah, this needs to change, hmm, that song's not working?
Well, on the positive side, there's an intangible, like, easygoing good feeling you get when things are really clicking, even if, like, not every laugh is there or not every song gets a tremendous response. There was a big section for our new show at the reading. I could just tell it was like things were rolling, people were comfortable. And to your other point, I mean, it's kind of just the inverse. It's like, it's an intangible feeling that people are checking out. They're coughing. They're— I think it's also, you know, they're checking their watches.
It's never about the, I think the individual feedback you get from people because oftentimes, especially, you know, a lot of our friends we invite over are writers. Oftentimes when you get feedback from a room full of writers, they'll just tell you how they would write your show. And that's often very unhelpful. Like a lot of times somebody will give a specific idea for something that would help, and it's like, okay, forget about the idea, but the point is they were confused about that moment. They clearly didn't get what we were trying to do. So you just listen for those moments when it's not quite making sense. And it's also interesting, 'cause we were having our friends cold read it. So even just in the way they were reading it for the first time, It was clear that certain character arcs weren't working because they weren't reading it like they were working. So something was missing in terms of that information being conveyed that they should be changing. So I thought that was really telling.
