I’ve never studied acting, nor have I ever acted, so I might be missing something here. Let me explain…
Last night in the wee small hours of sleeplessness, I came across an episode of Car 54, Where Are You? As a kid, I loved that show (I’d have been 7-8-9 when it was broadcast.) But what I saw last night was horrid!! Apart from the stupid storyline premise, the facial expressions of the characters were so overdone and the “acting” was over-the-top and totally unreal.
Less ancient examples I can think of are The Jeffersons, some Barney Miller episodes, Welcome Back, Kotter, Different Strokes, and most recently, 2 Broke Girls. Yes, I know, they’re all sitcoms, but at least to me, most or all of the characters in these shows seem like they’re acting rather than being the characters, if that makes sense.
When I watch Cheers, I feel like I’m watching a bunch of wacky people in a bar. When I watch Kotter, it’s as if I’m watching some actors trying to be students. And some of the worst strike me as vehicles just to deliver tag lines.
Is this a particular style of acting or is it just bad writing/directing/acting? Am I being overly critical of something I’m not understanding, or is it crap TV?
It’s hard to answer definitively about your specific examples without this post being crazy long. I may come back later and write a crazy long post, but I’m posting from my phone while I drink morning coffee right now.
The short answer is, acting being “realistic” is a relatively recent concept and what is considered to be “realistic” today is 1) not actually and 2) different from what was considered “realistic” even 45 years ago. Two Broke Girls is a case of the writing and timing making it almost impossible to deliver dialog smoothly. I haven’t seen enough of it to be sure if that’s intentional or not, but I don’t blame the actresses.
Anything performed in front of a live studio audience will also feel a bit different than performances that are just for the camera. Different stuff works live than on screen and they play to the audience they have. Also going back to stuff like Car 54, those guys were coming from doing most of their work on stage and that is REALLY different in terms of technique.
The there is the issue of style. Like I said earlier “realistic” is a pretty modern idea. Like a 20th century invention and didn’t catch on with the mainstream until the 60, modern. Other styles exist and sometimes are still used. Your examples aren’t ideal but, the Jeffersons is absolutely not shooting for realism.
When I was watching Car 54 last night, the word that came to mind was Burlesque - maybe I meant Vaudeville. That show ran in the early 60s, so it was several decades from the heydays of those old stage shows, but I suppose the influence could still have been strong.
I hadn’t considered live audience vs. filming without an audience, but I can see how that would make a difference.
Maybe it’s just my personal preference coloring my point of view. If I feel like I’m watching actors acting, it pulls me out of the story. I do like some over-the-top performances when it’s obviously supposed to be like that. But “Di-no-mite!!” or “Sit on it, Malph!” get old pretty quickly.
Car 54 was especially broad and Joe E Ross could only play that way. He was a poor actor and terrible human being. Ed Gwynne, though, has shown he can handle more subtle roles (a Harvard graduate and successful writer/artist).
Sure. And for stuff like car 54 you have to remember that method acting was pretty cutting edge even in the 50s and 60s. Even then it was really only used for Drama (mostly). It wasn’t until the mid to late 60s that it became the default acting style. The group theater wasn’t founded until 1931 and Streetcar was released in 1951. It was still pretty new.
A good portion of the Car 54 actors were old burlesque comics doing schtick, so that is understandable.
Kotter is not unlike many of the teen comedies of today with a stand-up comic at the center. Today, you don’t have a stand up star at the center…They’ve got too much sense for that.
There are two approaches actors can take to playing their part, delivering their lines, etc.:
Be realistic: let the audience see and hear, as closely as possible, what they would see and hear if they were observing a real person who was really in the situation being depicted, saying and doing the things the character is saying and doing.
Produce an effect: Act in such a way as to best convey what you want the audience to experience: e.g. make them laugh, make them understand what your character is feeling, heighten the dramatic tension.
In reality, most acting some mixture of these two approaches. Different types of shows call for different approaches, but I suspect it’s almost always good for the whole cast to be on the same page.
I believe the “older” acting style was called the “presentation” or “presentational” style. In what is probably an apocryphal story, Sir Lawrence Olivier was asked the secret of acting; he supposedly replied “Learn your lines and hit your marks.” That theatrical style was, I think, above all else an effort after a certain clarity of both diction and action. Everything was just a tad louder, a hair slower, and a bit more precise than it would be in real life, so that the audience would not get mixed up about what was happening. You can see it in many American movies from the thirties - early fifties. It was essentially the difference between playing a character and becoming the character - the essence of method acting. A method actor might very well consider playing a drunk character while drunk; a presentational actor - unthinkable. Control was key.
Eh, that’s not exactly right, though it isn’t exactly wrong. No actual professional, surely not a Strasburg deciple, would take the stage drunk. But they might rehearse that way a time or two. You get into weird stuff like Uta Hagen, yeah that will happen, but you don’t see many of her students around anymore. A basdardisation of Meissner, Adler, and early Stanislavsky is what seems to be in vogue right now. But again, don’t let yourself get fooled into thinking this is realistic. It’s just what you are used to. No one even tried to do stuff like Brando I Streetcar anymore because that seems fake now. That Shit about people staying in character for a whole movie shoot, that’s Method and that’s nonsense. Even Strasburg wouldn’t have supported that self indulgence. Unless there is an accent involved. Totally reasonable to keep the accent at all times. That’s hard enough to keep smooth without dropping it and picking it back up all day.
Then there is the British school which is totally different. What Olivier was talking about. Very effective when done well. Go watch Marathon Man and tell me that Hoffman is more real than Olivier. Or that Olivier is “stagey”.
I’ll also agree that a lot of the staginess of early TV shows can be attributed to them not having a reference other than working on the stage. That stuff still gets used on the stage today. Even by method actors. They just learned that you have to play small for movies and play even smaller for TV.
Mostly this, but also, remember that those early TV shows were expected to be watched on much smaller screens, and often in less clear reception, than what we’re used to nowadays.
As a Gen-Xer I grew up mostly watching reruns of high-concept sitcoms from the 60s (Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeanie, The Munsters etc.) The ones from the 50s, the first generation of TV sitcoms, were too silly for me even as a kid. As others have said they were essentially vaudeville acts adapted for television. And before electronic media, theater (especially comedy) evolved glacially slowly*!* Vaudeville has more in common with comedy acts from 500 years ago than it does with anything today.
That being said, anyone who fondly remembers Welcome Back, Kotter as a kid should be prepared for a shock when re-watching it now.
And of course, comedy has its own rules. In a lot of the best comedy (as well as a lot of the worst), the goal is not to be realistic, but to overplay to the point of absurdity.
I had the misfortune to see the 1966 “Alice in Wonderland”. The acting is very wooden. Or leaden. Anyway…very little “affect.” Everyone is stony-faced. They also don’t look at each other when talking to each other, but sort of “past” each other.
And there are some big names in this movie. They all (except for Leo McKern, who hams it up) are stone-faced in this way.
Someone once told me: when one actor in a movie is bad, blame the actor, but when all of the actors are bad, blame the director.