The animated show

Steven Davis, Holly Schlesinger, and Kelvin Yu have all been writers on Bob’s Burgers since the first season. When I ask them what the first day of the latest season was like, they can’t remember. It all blurs together because they have been working non-stop since they started writing for the series in February 2010.

“It’s kind of like a running lazy river here. We don’t have a first day of school and last day of school,” says Yu.

Since Bob’s Burgers is an animated show, each episode spends a longer time in production, meaning that unlike most live-action shows, they have never had a hiatus. Work from one season to the next blends into each other. The upside to this schedule is that most nights the writers can be home by 7 or 8 pm. Writers on a live-action network show with an order of around 24 episodes a season (such as Modern Family or New Girl) can expect to be ordering late night dinners at the office almost every night. The trade-off is they have 25 or 26 intense weeks of that schedule and then they’re done, with a couple months of a hiatus before things start up again.

The Belcher family’s adventures are self-contained to a single episode and don’t have over-arching season storylines, so the staff does not need to outline an entire season in advance. They’re more likely to have story days (“Mostly an excuse to get breakfast delivered,” Davis jokes), where each writer comes in with ten ideas and a bunch of one-liners. Even outside of story days, the work is idea-driven before anything ever gets written. Schlesinger runs me through her process.

“I usually bounce my ideas off of other writers first, to see what they think. It’s basically been the same staff since the beginning with very little change, so we all know the show pretty well. I’ll say ‘I’m thinking of doing an episode about __. If people don’t react to the idea very well, you know it’s not a good one. But if people spark to it then you can think, okay, maybe I’ve got something here. Somebody might help you brainstorm your idea more, so that when you go to present it to Loren [Bouchard, Bob’s Burgers’ creator and executive producer] and Jim [Dauterive, Bob’s Burgers’ executive producer], it’s formed enough so that they can see where it’s going to go, that it has some legs.”

Schlesinger says that usually the entire writing team does not outline each episode together. They break into smaller groups of three or four writers to figure out the beats of the story. When the writer feels confident she has the beats of her story, she goes off to write the outline on her own. The outline will then be presented to Bouchard, Dauterive, and maybe a few other writers who will weigh in and make sure the outline is super solid before the writer goes off to write the script.

The writer takes about a week to write the first draft of the script and then it goes through the process of having the entire writing staff read it to make it stronger, both story-wise and joke-wise. The writer then has at least a week to re-write the script before a table read happens with the cast and the network.

“The night before the table read, we call it the close out. Everybody on staff gets together in the writers’ room, and we go as late as we need to make the script great. Usually, the episode’s writer is the person who is typing on a laptop and the script is projected on a wall so everyone can see. We go from the very first line all the way to the end to make sure it’s reading okay and it’s as funny as it can be,” says Schlesinger.

After the close out, there’s a table read in front of the network, then the episode is recorded with the actors. The writer is there for that along with Bouchard, helping to pick the best takes. Then the takes go into the various stages of production and animation. Throughout any part of this process, lines of dialogue can be subject to re-writes.

“Yesterday we had a thematic screening, which is the roughest initial animation,” says Davis. “It’s a lot of circles with crosses on their faces. One of the writers went and screened that with a director and our showrunner. Just based on that, we needed to punch some areas. The story was working, but some of the stuff wasn’t that funny and so we came up with ten areas that need to be punched. You get five writers pulled into the writers’ room and you pitch jokes. And you give alts. The funniest will get selected by Loren.”

It’s much easier to have H. Jon Benjamin or Kristen Schaal re-record a line at their convenience than to reshoot an entire live-action scene, which means that the writers at Bob’s Burgers get more involved in the entire production process. They are involved in composing and performing the music, as well as the editing to see if certain jokes work better with a longer hold or pause.

“With animation you have a piece of dough that you can futz with for a year,” explains Yu. “From conception to the airing of the episode, you have 14 to 17 months. So the day-to-day is figuring out where your resources are best used.”