The Full Story of ALF · The Hardest Easy Job in Television

A puppet was pulled out of a plastic bag under a conference table, did something disgusting to the arm of the president of NBC, and sold a four-year primetime series in about five seconds. The set that resulted was built four feet off the ground and riddled with open holes, and the actors standing on it spent four years quietly afraid of falling in. A twenty-five minute episode could take two days.

ALF premiered on NBC on September 22, 1986 and ran until March 24, 1990, four seasons and 97 episodes, created by Paul Fusco and Tom Patchett. Fusco wrote the character, voiced him, and operated him by hand from beneath a raised stage, which is why the shoot became one of the most punishing in 1980s primetime. The cast said so publicly in 2000. Fusco has disputed their account ever since.

The pitch that two people remember differently

Bernie Brillstein had managed Jim Henson for years and was not looking for another puppet act. Then Paul Fusco came to his office.

"If anyone knows how to sell puppets, God knows it's me," Brillstein told the Television Academy Foundation in 2001. "Paul Fusco, who created ALF, came into the office, took this thing out of a bag, and it was basically a Don Rickles puppet. Fusco's humor was as mean as humanly possible. And I got hysterical, you know?"

The meeting with NBC came fast. "One thing about Brandon, it wasn't a week from Tuesday, it was come over tomorrow," Brillstein said. "He had the upstairs conference room ready. Fusco had the bag ready with ALF in it."

The pitch itself went badly. "Tom Patchett started to pitch the show and wasn't really doing well. I kicked Fusco under the table."

What happened next is the founding story of the show, and the two men who were in the room do not tell it the same way.

Brillstein's version, in 2001: "He took out ALF. He went, excuse me, hachoo, sneezed on Tartikoff's arm and took off a glob. That's how we sold it. That's how we sold the show. That's how creative we are."

Fusco's version, to The Hollywood Reporter in 2012: "It looked like he was sitting at the table right next to Tartikoff, and it was just silence... they didn't expect that," Fusco recalls. "And everyone was waiting for you to say something incredibly funny or something in the moment. And ALF didn't really say anything. ALF just kind of looked around the room and picked his nose and wiped it on Tartikoff."

A sneeze or a picked nose. Same room, same target, same instinct that the way to sell a family sitcom is to have the puppet deposit something on the network president. Nobody has reconciled the two.

Brillstein was also unsentimental about what he assembled around it. "And it's probably the worst casting ever done," he said. "Max Wright I brought in from Buffalo Bill and other people. The cast for this show wasn't really good. Great actors, just didn't work." His verdict on the character was the opposite: "You couldn't kill that character with a stick."

He also had to settle things with his most famous client. "Jim Henson and I had a little talk about ALF, but it was as far away from what the Muppets do. There was no puppetry involved with the voice. None at all. So we straightened that out. But Jim wasn't thrilled with it."

The machine under the floor

Everything hard about ALF follows from one decision: ALF is not a costume, he is a hand puppet, and hand puppets need somewhere for the hands to be.

The stage was built on a platform raised four feet off the ground, with trap doors cut at many points so ALF could surface almost anywhere. Fusco worked underneath. He controlled the mouth with his left hand and ALF's right arm with his right. A second puppeteer, Lisa Buckley, worked beside him below the stage operating ALF's left arm, and in seated full-body shots ran the left hand by cable for small finger movements. A third, Bob Fappiano, drove the face and ears by radio control from offscreen. Fusco wore a head-mounted microphone to record the voice live.

The trap doors had to be reset repeatedly, sometimes more than once inside a single scene. The unoccupied holes stayed open and, in the archival description, deep and treacherous.

The consequence for the show's form was total: with that many mistakes and retakes, ALF could not be recorded in front of a live audience like every other sitcom of its era. The laughter you hear was added afterward.

The rare exception to the puppet was a person. When ALF was shown walking in full body, that was Michu Meszaros in a suit, uncredited. Writer Al Jean, who worked on the show early in his career, says it barely happened: "Although you saw in the credits a little person in a suit running around, that almost never happened. It was Paul Fusco, the puppeteer, manipulating the puppet."

The trenches, and what the cast was not saying

Al Jean, interviewed by the Television Academy Foundation in 2013, gave the clearest account of what that machinery did to the people standing on top of it.

"So they had to open a trench underneath the actors where he would be standing so that ALF could be on the same level as the actors," he said. "And every scene, you would have to open a new... a new trench for ALF to get into and close the previous trench."

Then the part that reframes every performance in the show: "And I found out long after the actors were really getting terrified of falling into one of these trenches, because, you know, you'd have to do the scene and not act like it was there. But if you fell, it would probably be a bad injury."

The actors were being asked to play an ordinary living room while standing on a floor that opened up next to them, and to show none of it.

Fusco does not dispute the physical facts. By his own admission to THR the tapings were long and grueling, and it could take two days to shoot a single twenty-five minute episode.

The rule that ate the scripts

The writers had a structural problem that had nothing to do with the trap doors.

"Oh, ALF was filled with restrictions," Jean said. "That was part of the reason it was really huge." He rated it, with a comedian's precision, as probably the highest-rated thing he ever wrote, and remembered the second season as "number 10 in the ratings, and it had, I think, 24 million viewers or something enormous."

The core restriction was that nobody outside the Tanner family could know ALF existed. That closes off most of the ways a sitcom generates story.

"So, you know, one person pitched a blind person, you know, another person pitched, you know, there was like one kid that could see him, but, you know, nobody believed him," Jean said. "And they're like, you run out of people pretty quick."

Inside the room

The producer-level account of the shoot is the bluntest thing anyone involved has said on the record.

Thad Mumford, a supervising producer and writer on ALF, opened his Television Academy Foundation answer about the show by hesitating and then saying it plainly: "I did not have the best time on the show."

Mumford had worked with Tom Patchett before, when Patchett was still partnered with Jay Tarses, and remembered him as a different kind of collaborator then. By ALF, in Mumford's telling, the merchandising had changed him. The show was selling everything with an alien on it, and the pressure ran downhill.

"And you could tell it was a fight," Mumford said. "And he, the part of him that had always been kind of nurturing and respectful became very critical." Mumford's own tenure ended roughly where that suggests it would: "And he almost fired me."

He was equally clear that it worked. "He was determined to make it be a hit. And it was."

What the cast said in 2000

Ten years after the show ended, the four leads talked to People, and the result is the reason this row exists.

Max Wright, who played Willie, admitted to being "hugely eager to have ALF over with." Anne Schedeen, who played Kate, described the atmosphere and the arithmetic: "there was no joy on the set... it was a technical nightmare... extremely slow, hot and tedious... A 30-minute show took 20, 25 hours to shoot."

She was fond of the children she worked with and less so of the grown-ups, saying some adults had "difficult personalities. The whole thing was a big dysfunctional family." Her sharpest line is about the gap between the product and the process: "It's astonishing that ALF really was wonderful and that word never got out what a mess our set really was."

Andrea Elson, who played Lynn, put a limit on it: "If ALF had gone one more year, everybody would have lost it."

And Schedeen described the last night of taping. "There was one take and Max walked off the set, went to his dressing room, got his bags, went to his car and disappeared... There were no goodbyes."

Wright himself softened later, in the same piece, and the softening is worth as much as the complaint: "It doesn't matter what I felt or what the days were like, ALF brought people a lot of joy."

Fusco's answer

Fusco has never accepted the characterization, and in 2012 he said so directly.

"It was just the nature of the beast. There was no way we could have made it go any further or any faster," he insisted to The Hollywood Reporter. "So no, I think it was frustrating that it would take so long, but people got paid for what they did. Despite what people thought, that there was a lot of tension on set, there really wasn't."

Read carefully, he is not contesting the conditions. He agrees the days were long and that the pace was frustrating, and he had already conceded the tapings were grueling. What he rejects is the word tension, and the idea that the difficulty was anybody's fault rather than a property of shooting a hand puppet at eye level with human actors.

The same interview shows how completely he inhabited the character. "When I used to write an episode and couldn't come up with a line for ALF, I needed something really funny, I would actually ask ALF," he said. "I would actually put the character on, and the character would just tell me what the line was."

The ending nobody meant to write

ALF's last episode is a cliffhanger because everyone expected to come back.

NBC gave Alien Productions a verbal commitment for a fifth season and then withdrew its support, which turned the season-four ender "Consider Me Gone" into an unintentional series finale, with the character captured and his fate unresolved. It stayed unresolved for six years, until ABC cleaned it up with the 1996 television movie Project: ALF.

Brandon Tartikoff, the executive who had been sneezed on or picked at in that conference room, later told Fusco the network had got it wrong: "It was a big mistake that we cancelled your show, because you guys had at least one or two more seasons left."

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2000, People. The cast breaks the story, a decade after the fact, in the anniversary piece that everything since has been reacting to. Wright's eagerness for it to end, Schedeen's "technical nightmare" and 20 to 25 hour shoot days, Elson's one-more-year limit, and the account of Wright leaving without goodbyes.
• 2001, Television Academy Foundation. Bernie Brillstein, from the executive's chair, supplies the origin: the Don Rickles puppet in the office, the fast meeting with Tartikoff, the sneeze, and a startlingly harsh assessment of his own casting.
• 2012, The Hollywood Reporter. Fusco answers the cast, twelve years later, and disputes the tension while conceding the grind. He also tells the pitch story himself, and it does not match Brillstein's.
• 2013, Television Academy Foundation. Al Jean adds the piece nobody else had given: the trenches, and that the actors were frightened of them, which he says he only learned long afterward.
• Undated, Television Academy Foundation. Thad Mumford's interview, recorded at some point before his death in 2018, gives the producer-level view: a show being squeezed by its own merchandising success, and a collaborator who turned critical under it.

The drift runs in two directions here. On the pitch, Brillstein and Fusco tell incompatible versions of the same instant, and both told it as settled fact. On the shoot, the split is not really about what happened but about what to call it: the cast and the crew describe identical conditions, four-foot risers, open trenches, twenty-plus hour days, retake after retake, and then divide sharply on whether that adds up to a miserable set. Fusco's position is that it was physics. Schedeen's is that it was a mess that the audience never found out about. The unusual thing about ALF is that both of those are supported by the same facts.

The honest bottom line

ALF was a cynical object. It was a merchandising engine with a laugh track bolted on, built around a character whose only real mode is insult comedy, shot on a set so compromised by its own gimmick that it could not do the one thing every other sitcom did and play to a live room. The people making it were exhausted, the writers ran out of premises almost immediately because of a rule the show could never relax, and the lead actor walked to his car after the final take without saying goodbye to anyone.

It was also, by any measure that counts, extremely good at what it did. Fusco built a character strong enough that Brillstein said you could not kill it with a stick, and then hand-operated it from a hole in the floor for four years while the actors above him pretended the hole was not there. Whatever the set felt like, the thing that reached the living room carpet was funny, and Max Wright, of all people, is the one who said the rest of it does not matter.

Sources

• Television Academy Foundation, interview with executive producer Bernie Brillstein, conducted November 14, 2001 in Beverly Hills, part 7 of 8. Quotes transcribed from the archive clip.
• Television Academy Foundation, Writers Guild Foundation Collection, interview with supervising producer and writer Thad Mumford, part 2 of 3. The archive states no recording date for this interview and none is asserted here. Quotes transcribed from the archive clip.
• Television Academy Foundation, interview with writer Al Jean, conducted March 13, 2013 in Los Angeles, part 1 of 3. Quotes transcribed from the archive clip.
• The Hollywood Reporter, "Greetings From Melmac: ALF Creator Paul Fusco on His Star Alien and Potential Comeback", Jordan Zakarin, May 22, 2012.
• People, "Alf: 1986-1990", volume 53 number 25, June 26, 2000. The Wright, Schedeen and Elson quotes are reproduced from the archival record's citation of this piece; people.com returned an access error to a direct request this session and the magazine was not read directly.
• Wikipedia, "ALF (TV series)" (air dates, season and episode counts, network, creators, and the puppetry and trap-door production record, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Small Wonder and the full story of Out of Control. BobbyAndJason.com covers the series in ALF: The 80s Sitcom About a Sarcastic Alien Who Ate Cats.

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