Dragnet started on the radio, where half-hour dramas were far more common.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?
This one hurt. I would still love to see a modern, dramatic take on Land of the Lost.
Mr T and Dwight Schultz were much funnier than Quinton Jackson and Sharlto Copley.
Same with early television. It’s hard to find hour-long dramas. (With continuing characters; the prestige drama anthologies were usually hour-long.)
I’m not sure on how you rate them - does Buffy the Vampire Slayer count or not?
Well, if the production order was flipped I’d count it…
Yeah, I misread. Sorry.
The length standard for drama/comedy was not all that long lived and was ended in 2021.
The Brady Bunch TV show was so unfunny, I would almost count the two (much funnier) movie versions as candidates for this thread. Which begs the question, how rare is it for a comedy of any sort to be satirized?
Well, Mad Magazine included comedies amongst its movie and TV show satires.
Batman was a comedy TV show based upon a serious comic book.
Pretty much all of the shows mentioned did. None were laugh-track sitcoms like the actual comedies on the networks of their era, but there were definitely a lot of tongue-in-cheek situations and light laughs on all those shows, save maybe “Dragnet”.
Certainly the TV versions of The A-Team, CHiPs and The Fall Guy were as funny as they were serious.
That one’s the other way around- the movie came first; BTVS the Movie was definitely a comedy, and a surprisingly funny one, but BTVS the TV show that followed was not nearly as comedic.
I consider The A-Team to be a action comedy. The Avengers was a British comedy.
Not exactly satire, but the movie Saturday The Fourteenth inspired a slew of horror comedy movies.
It started out serious, became more and more comedic and ironically about a year or so before the TV series came out went back to serious again.
I consider The Singing Detective dark comedy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bNH5pfcLWE
It’s been a long time but I remember The Fall Guy as being more comedy than serious. I watched some late night Dragnets and there were certainly some less serious moments usually with a B storyline. There were moments that weren’t supposed to be laugh out loud but left Joe with a bemused look usually at Bill’s expense. The audience was also supposed to be bemused.