The slowdown reached the point where after the final night's curtain, Winer asked his son if he was OK.
"And you know what he said?" Winer recalled. "He said, 'I didn't want it to end, Dad. I slowed it down because I just didn't want it to end.' I knew then this was the business for him."
Twenty-two years later at age 36, Jason Winer has made it very close to the top of that business as the director and an executive producer for one of the most successful new network TV series of the fall, ABC's "Modern Family." The Wednesday-night ensemble comedy about three generations of a decidedly postmodern family has averaged about 11.5 million viewers a week since its debut last month and finished first or second for the night each week in the all-important 18-to-49-year-old demographic.
Better yet, it draws more young viewers than its powerhouse lead-in series, "Dancing with the Stars." And best of all, it's a fresh, smart and savvy take on the American family that has drawn critical praise for writing, acting and Winer's innovations in sitcom directing. "Time" magazine and the trade paper "Variety" called it the funniest new comedy of the season based on the pilot. And already such Hollywood heavyweights as Columbia native Edward Norton have signed on for guest appearances. Thursday, ABC ordered a full season of episodes.
The pilot that Winer directed, which debuted Sept. 23, was far and away the most-talked-about comedy pilot of the fall -- celebrated for everything from its easy-going but enlightened take on multiculturalism, gay identity and family life, to its use of multiple cameras in achieving a new, improved and energized version of the single-camera, mock- documentary comedy look.
"I think this family is a different kind of TV family in that the jokes don't come because this family is dysfunctional or these people are broken in one way or another, which has been the M.O. of TV development over the past five or six years," Jason Winer says. "Ultimately, the members of this family really love each other, and so there's a sweetness at the core of the show."
In terms of a December-May marriage involving the family patriarch (Ed O'Neill) and his Latina bride (Sofia Vergara) and a gay couple (Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson) with an adopted Vietnamese baby, Winer says, "I would say we deal with matters of multiculturalism and gay issues quite matter of factly. It just exists, and it is accepted. Look, this family that the show is about has been dealing with and accepting it, and we're plopped right into the middle of their lives, so shouldn't we deal with it and accept it in the same matter of fact way that they do? ... In some way, Cameron and Mitchell, the gay parents, are the most traditional family in the show."
Before we get to Winer's explanation of the camera techniques he used to create a network-sitcom look cleverly keyed to a YouTube sensibility, you need to get to know him better. His mind races a mile a minute, his enthusiasm is infectious, and the narrative of how he got from child actor in Baltimore to the director of one of television's hottest shows is one of remarkable focus and singularity of purpose.
Winer was onstage at local synagogue productions by age 8, his father says.
"Strangely enough, I can still remember the title of his first production: 'If It's Dark Enough, You Can See the Stars,'" says the elder Winer, a commercial real estate developer who lives in Stevenson. "I think it was at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation or Har Sinai."
It was, however, the boy's "terrific auditory memory" that really got young Winer launched on a TV career. His capacity for memorizing long stories resulted in a librarian asking the elementary school student to serve as an assistant storyteller. A Baltimore County schools channel taped him telling stories at libraries and made him a "star" on public access television.
By the time he was middle school, Winer was a correspondent focusing on youth stories for WJZ's "Evening Magazine."
At 14, he went to the Middle East and did a one-hour special on Israel for WJZ titled "Friends in the Holy Land." A year later, the station gave him his own Saturday morning talk show, "4-1-One," aimed at students in the fourth through 11th grades. The new show earned the teen talk-show host a profile in The Sun.
"Picture a kid who does four hours of homework a night, who dresses neatly, who has acted like a grown-up 'since he was 2,' according to his grateful mother, and who also happens to be a budding Baltimore television star," The Sun piece begins. "What you have is 15-year-old Jason Winer."
