‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’ Shows How to Edit Hall of Fame-Worthy Comedy by Ignoring the Jokes

Broadcast TV doesn’t allow any wiggle room for extra scenes, extended bits, or even extra minutes before the next commercial break. The margins are razor-thin. That might seem like a bummer when a show like “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” has writers and a cast that are able to blitz a higher joke-per-minute count than Mavis Beacon could dream. But editor Kyle Gilman, who assembled the first two episodes of the NBC show, knows well that limitations can, in fact, be freeing and that the ironclad format requirements are part of why “Reggie Dinkins” hits as hard as it does. 

It seems wild that an editor with comedy reps on everything from “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” to “The Four Seasons” hadn’t done a network pilot that went to series before “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” but Gilman told IndieWire that this was indeed the case — and that working within broadcast constraints really pushed the editing team to hone the show down to an all-killer, no-filler (well, perhaps an all Jersey, no Marvel) version of itself. 

“The director’s cut came in about 37 minutes long, and it has to be 21 minutes and 19 seconds,” Gilman told IndieWire. “We just had to really streamline and focus on what’s the most important thing, character-wise, emotionally.” 

That’s always the name of the game in any kind of good storytelling, of course. But while part of Gilman and his team’s goal is to fit in as many great jokes as they can, the hard limit on the number of frames that the editors had available to them meant a lot more than needing to kill some comedy darlings. With performers like Tracy Morgan, Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Moynihan, Precious Way, and Erika Alexander, there will always be jokes in abundance. When Gilman was able to craft just the right amount of space for the story beats to land, that’s what makes everything funny.

Luckily, “Reggie Dinkins” is ostensibly a documentary constructed by Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) of retired football great — although not (yet!!) Hall of Famer — Reggie Dinkins (Morgan). That meant that Gilman and the editing team had a wider film toolkit they could play with beyond the invisible back-and-forth of network comedy. Gilman looked to his own background in documentary work and short-form comedy videos online to help hone the rhythm of “Reggie Dinkins.” 

‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’ Scott Gries/NBC

“I cut the pilot for ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ and that was another show where it’s a comedy, but it’s an actual documentary and there were a lot of things we had to do where you’ll have an hour long conversation — or more, with the driving aspect — and you have to condense it down into just a 10-minute highlight reel of the conversation,” Gilman said. 

With “Reggie Dinkins,” too, there’s the limitation of Tobin’s indie documentary resources, and also his taste, and these helped distill an abundance of jokes into the jokes that told the story of each episode. “I made rules for myself about how it had to feel like the character could have actually made this. We limited it to two cameras with ‘Reggie Dinkins’ — the idea is that there are always two real cameramen in this space. [We’re] not doing multiple setups,” Gilman said. “This is presented like Arthur Tobin has made this and edited it himself, so in a certain sense you have to imagine how did Arthur edit this?” 

Arthur Tobin’s commitment to the truth overrides any sense of shame, which isn’t always great news for him but is great for “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.” It allowed Gilman and the editing team to make comedy out of the tics of documentary editing itself. 

‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’ Scott Gries/NBC

“I could get in a really good jump cut joke right at the beginning of the pilot,” Gilman said. “[Reggie] says ‘I’m gonna put my producer hat on’ and we jump cut to him wearing a hat, which is not what that means. It’s such a great way of setting up who this character is and setting up the way we’re going to formally play with the format of the show. At the same time, you’re being introduced to seeing the camera in the shot.” 

It’s that kind of efficiency, a combination of script and performance and the edit itself, that allows “Reggie Dinkins” to barrel down the proverbial field to the End Zone of each episode. It’s that kind of efficiency that’s required, when each episode is only 21 minutes and 19 seconds, too. “That whole opening sequence was a real struggle to get as much possible information as you could into as short a time as possible and doing it with all kinds of different collage elements,” Gilman said. 

But once the pilot set up the show’s visual language and rhythm, it allowed “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” to have a lot of fun with it. “I had to leave early to go work on ‘The Four Seasons’ Season 2, and I ended up watching the later episodes just as a fan, and it’s so funny. I felt a little bit jealous,” Gilman said. “I left, and it got even funnier.”

“The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins” is now streaming on Peacock.