About 100 things that your kid will do that will surprise you and break your heart and it will be a combination of fact based therapy, medically advised kinds of passages accompanied by celebrity anecdotes and just some funny stuff to lighten the load.
There are psychological repercussions to illness and we need a little more help to get through the effects not only on the afflicted but on the family. And I think there's even a place for humor in that.
My advice, it's get involved in any and every aspect of the business that affords itself to you.
I have few other characters to relate to other than myself. I have enough of a body of work now that the paternal side of Alan Thicke gets a lot of play. I do get a lot of calls to play dads.
There is no doubt in my mind Bill Cosby was a bad boy.
I'm a big proponent of having a mental health component go along with whatever the physical realities are.
We look for opportunities to play together including basketball, tennis, swimming, riding bikes and touch football. I try to provide a loving environment where we can play. I think that's good on so many levels - emotionally, for family interactions and, of course, physically.
In 'The Goods,' I'm Ed Helms' dad, and I was known all those years as Kirk Cameron's father, and now I'm known as Robin Thicke's father, so I find myself playing myself a lot and, frankly, living up to expectations of what the public's image of me is.
I wouldn't call myself a standup in the presence of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock, but I do my share of it and it has been and remains part of my activity and I like it.
So there was a constant flow and a thin line there between reality and television and yes, much of what I was experiencing in my real life was also what was going on in the television show to the extent that I had to take writers' advice and from the counselors around.
If it is a first offense, you ground them and have a talk. The second offense would call for counseling.
So we had psychiatrists and counselors and therapists around the set regularly, especially for those scenes in which Jason would be dealing with a patient to make sure we were doing it all appropriately.
Part of the mystique of shows like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' is the idea that they begin with a couple of plot lines, and then a bunch of geniuses improvise dialogue. It's not quite that unstructured and loose. It makes for a good urban myth, but everything's a little more tightly scripted and programmed than that.
When I started out, at the CBC in Toronto, there was so little work. It was a different world from what it is now. Now we're blessed with so much production in so many Canadian cities.
I have some realistic humility which comes from my first career as a writer. I wrote for other people for ten years. I saw some incredible egos not based on any reality. They were great when they were on top and awful when they weren't. I learned a lot about how to treat people.
My advice to Robin is listen to your heart, do what you feel. Follow your heart in love and marriage as you would in careers, and you'll be fine. Robin has a great heart. He's a fabulous father.
I was discovered, or mentored, by Norman Lear, who plucked me from the grinder of relative obscurity.
I'll be on my third honeymoon, so I'm more of an authority than I care to be.
If one tends to be a humorous person and you have a sense of humor the rest of your life then you can certainly lighten the load, I think, by bringing that to your trials and tribulations. It's easy to have a sense of humor when everything is going well.
I'm not doing anything Jack Nicholson turned down. Any part that required a character distanced from myself would have been a reach. But the one thing I've always done well at, and I'm most devoted to, is my children.
