For my senior capstone, I wrote and produced the pilot episode of an original sitcom while researching how production design shapes character, comedy, and worldbuilding in modern television.
Project Overview
RA On Duty began as a production design capstone and evolved into a fully realized sitcom pilot. The project combined academic research, industry interviews, set construction, screenwriting, and film production into a single creative challenge.
My goal was to explore how production design contributes to storytelling in ensemble comedies by creating a sitcom “home base” from the ground up. To do that, I wrote and produced the pilot episode, “Free Housing”, while designing and building the show’s primary set myself.
Why Production Design?
Production design has interested me for far longer than I knew what it was called. As a kid, I spent hours making miniature furniture and props for my Barbies, unknowingly practicing many of the same skills used by prop makers and set decorators.
My interest became more focused when my roommate entered the Theatre Design and Production program and began showing me her work, making me curious about what that process looked like in film and television. After designing for a peer’s film during my junior year, I decided to make production design the focus of my capstone.
I was especially interested in sitcoms. As someone who hopes to work in television, I wanted to understand how production design contributes to comedy and ensemble storytelling. This project gave me the opportunity to explore a discipline that was almost entirely new to me while combining it with a format I love.
“Production design is building the story world the director and actors get to play in.”
– Kim Wannop
To better understand production design in television, I studied a variety of modern ensemble sitcoms including Abbott Elementary, Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, and Community. I was particularly interested in how these shows use their environments as storytelling tools.
In addition to watching sitcoms, I read Sitcom Style and regularly listened to the Decorating Pages podcast. I also interviewed three industry professionals:
- Kim Wannop — Set Decorator, The Good Place and Parks and Recreation
- Jena Serbu — Production Designer for commercial, narrative, and experiential projects
- Adam Rowe — Art Decorator and Production Designer, The Good Place and Parks and Recreation
One lesson appeared repeatedly throughout my research: every object matters. Production designers make deliberate choices about furniture, decoration, layout, and color because each element communicates information about character, relationships, and tone.
From Research to Reality
One of the first major decisions I made was choosing between a multi-camera and single-camera format. After speaking with professionals and studying contemporary sitcoms, I decided a single-camera approach best supported the style of storytelling I wanted to create.
The centerpiece of the project became the residence hall hallway. My goal was to create a sitcom “home base”—a location that characters could return to repeatedly throughout a series while remaining visually interesting and flexible for storytelling.
The writing process evolved alongside the set itself. Once I committed to building the hallway, the story began to shape itself around that space. Rather than treating production design as something added after the script was finished, I approached the environment as an active part of the storytelling process.
The End Product
The completed pilot, Free Housing, demonstrates the ideas that guided the project from the beginning. The residence hall hallway functions as a sitcom home base, the production design supports both character and humor, and the world of the show is built through intentional visual details as much as dialogue.
More than anything, the project reinforced my belief that production design is an essential storytelling tool. Every object, texture, and layout decision contributes to how audiences understand a world and the people who inhabit it. What began as an exploration of an unfamiliar discipline ultimately became one of the most ambitious creative projects I have undertaken.
