Some Fawlty Towers episodes required as many as 10 script drafts before John Cleese and Connie Booth were satisfied.
That figure reflects the unusually exacting writing process behind the sitcom. Cleese and Booth were determined to make every episode work structurally, with tightly connected misunderstandings, escalating complications and carefully timed reversals. According to the production history, some episodes took four months to develop and went through as many as 10 drafts.
The care was not limited to the wording of individual jokes. Fawlty Towers plots often depend on characters entering and leaving at precise moments, secrets being revealed in the right order and physical comedy building from earlier mistakes. A small change in one scene could therefore affect the rhythm of the entire episode.
This is one reason the series produced only 12 episodes across two series. The limited run is sometimes mistaken for a sign that the show was cancelled, but the slow writing and production process was central to its quality. The scripts were later collected in The Complete Fawlty Towers, published in 1988.