A Hollywood screenwriter just revealed the weird reason most TV characters don’t have cats as pets.
Exciting information provided by TikTok user Michael Jamin (@michaeljaminwriter). With over twenty years of experience as a TV writer and producer, Jamin has worked on shows such as King of the Hill, Wilfred and Tacoma FD.
However, his knowledge of TV cats came when he was the executive producer of the sitcom Maron, which starred comedian and podcaster Marc Maron.
As Jamin explained in his viral clip, Maron is known for having multiple cats, which is why he and the other showrunners wanted to include that detail in the show. But when it came time to actually pull it off, things got very, very difficult.
According to Jamin, he and other producers hired a “trained Hollywood cat” for the scene in which Maron eats salmon alone in his house.
“We just wanted to end the scene with the cat jumping on the table,” says Jamin. “In real life, you can’t keep a cat away from the table when someone is eating salmon.
However, as soon as they called for action, the cat froze in place. Jamin said he seemed completely flustered by the silence during the scene – and it took about an hour to get him to jump.
“And that’s just for five seconds of screen time,” Jamin added.
Jamin seems to think that even a trained cat is intimidated by the natural silence of the TV. Ultimately, an hour of persuasion and encouragement is not worth the short screen time.
The alternative, according to Jamin, was to let the cat roam freely around the stage. But this creates a continuity problem, because if they use multiple takes of the same scene, the cat will always be somewhere else.
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“[If you do that], the cat in the background will jump like a magical cat,” said Jamin. “It’s going to be very strange and distracting.”
In that moment, according to Jamin, he understood why so many shows don’t use cats.
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“That’s why we don’t work with cats,” he added.
There are, of course, some exceptions to Jamin’s “no cats” rule. Salem, the cat from Sabrina the Little Witch, may be one of the most famous TV characters of all time, but he has often been portrayed as puppets.
Pumpkin, the cat who played Crookshanks in the Harry Potter films, reportedly did most of her own stunts. And then there’s Reggie, the cat who played Goose in the 2019 movie Captain Marvel.
However, TikTokers pretty much got Jamin’s point of view. There seem to be a lot more TV dogs, and many of the most famous TV cats are animated (no offense, Garfield).
“Never noticed,” wrote one user. But now that I think about it…
“So interesting,” agreed another.
“It will probably only work in an animated show,” added another.
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