Hamish is still baffled about the premise of Who’s the Boss (which I never saw). The woman has a job and the man stays home! So who’s the boss? Oh my lord, this is just soooooooooo crazy!!! Right.
Yeah, “Seinfeld” isn’t creepy because these supposedly nice people are actually creeps. Seinfeld is creepy because openly creepy people are acting like creeps. Seinfeld’s comic breakthrough was the realization that if real-life people acted like “nice” people do in sitcoms, they’d be hideous monsters that belonged in either jail or a locked psychiatric hospital.
George Costanza is the poster child for “unloveable loser”, a counterpoint to all the supposedly “lovable” losers in other sitcoms. George is hateful, petty, vicious, annoying, selfish, and lazy…and those are his GOOD qualities. And people on Seinfeld–except for Jerry, Kramer, and Elaine–all clearly see he’s an asshole, and treat him like an asshole.
No, no, he was hired help, not her husband. But he ran the house and the woman’s kid liked him better. As did her mother. As did we, frankly. The employer was a twit, the hired help was a cool guy who everyone went to for advice, including his employer.
I couldn’t agree more. I hated that bunch and think it’s depressing that it was such a popular show. I figured the writers had their characters end up in jail because people were never supposed to like them and a lot of the audience didn’t seem to get that.
Raymond’s another hateful show. I’m glad they’re both over.
Something that has bugged me for a long time is the portrayal of men as hopeless boobs that, essentially, have to be mothered by their wives.
I did like Mad About You, though. It seemed more realistic; both had their good moments and their bad moments. Sometimes he was being the twit and other times it was she; overall I liked that they worked out their differences and didn’t let problems get in their way. Well, until the end at least.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train"Gilligan’s Island": How is it that nobody on the island realizes that the Professor (note that he’s the only one with a private hut) is keeping them there for some unstated neferious purpose by always coming up with some brilliant plan for escape and then putting the unwitting eponymous charcacter in a lynchpin role where he causes the plan to fail. These people are too stupid to live. [/QUOTE]
Hmmm…
People marooned on a island. Person (or people) with unstated, nefarious, possibly “scientific” motives keeping them there. (He *was * "The Professor.) Yet the maroon-ees somehow remain clueless.
Seems to remind me of another show. Coincidence? I think not.
I think Pepe is more of a stalker than a rapist. Not that it makes it any better, of course.
Why, exactly, do you never see any black people in Mayberry? What are Andy and Barney up to, late at night, that makes black Mayberrians afraid to walk the streets of town?
The sociatial rules were such in those days that it was unacceptable for a straight male to live with two women. Landloards had the right to require whatever building rules they wanted as long as they were not illegal.
Cohabitation was frowned up by the older generation. My girlfriend whom I had been living with for almost a year had to stay in a separate bedroom when we went to visit my parents in the mid 70s.
For an example of serious spousal abuse in a sitcom, may I put forth The Battling Bickersons.. I’m not sure if it was a television sitcom, but it was definitely a radio sitcom.
I would also suggest the Julie Newmar, Bob Cummings sitcom of My Living Doll where Newmar was a life-sized robot who was at Cummings’ beck and call to do “anything” he wanted was a bit out there.
The 50s sitcom Topper which had ghosts going invisible and lifting up dresses and the like was also a bit unsettling and boardering on kinky at times.
And honestly the terrible sitcom My Mother the Car used to send shivers up and down my spine. The whole idea of driving my mother around as she talked to me was just irritatingly weird.
Homosexual rape at that (not that any rape is good - but the whole idea of a cartoon about potential homosexual rape entertaining little kids is just weird).
Er…what?
I can’t think of any PlP cartoons where he went after a tomcat. It was always a female he was trying to bag.
The one I’m surprised nobody mentioned yet is Hogan’s Heroes. Oh, look at all the zany Nazis!
Yeah, I know that Werner Klemperer was Jewish and having a great time playing Colonel Klink. But still…
Homosexual? I’m pretty sure the cat was female. At least, I recall that it often had a big pink bow around its neck at the beginning of the cartoon, which usually got removed in the process of somehow getting that white stripe painted down its back.
Not a sitcom, but it’s always bothered me about Star Trek that these great, noble Federation-types who are so above any kind of prejudice or whatever feel perfectly entitled to make the crassest jokes and stereotypes – and often act seriously upon such stereotypes – about alien species. This goes almost completely unanalyzed (the only counterexamples I can think of are Star Trek VI and one mention in DS9).
I love Trek, but I always get creeped out when this comes up. It was especially bad during Tom and B’Elanna’s marriage in Voyager.
I think I saw two episodes of that show, and yet the creepy premise has always stuck in my mind and it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. The way they presented as so zany, like “OMG, isn’t it so funny when you sleep with two guys and get knocked up and then you don’t know which is the father? I hate it when that happens!” – it’s just “ugh.”
Actually, on Family Matters it was made pretty blatantly clear (usually from things that Urkel said in passing) that Urkel’s parents pretty much hated him.
Steve: “The last time I had a birthday party at home, my parents put trick candles on my cake.”
Laura: “Oh, the kind that don’t blow out?”
Steve: “The kind that blow up.”
Steve: “My parents decided to go to seperate places for their second honeymoon, to avoid making the same mistake they did on their first honeymoon.”
Carl: “What mistake was that?”
Steve: “Me.”
For added creepy-value, I’m sure you all remember Stephan Urkel, the result of a science experiment that succeeded in making Steve a cool suave guy, who Laura became rather enamoured of. To make things worse, he still made fun of Carl, but now instead of coming off as cute and tactless, it was just mean.
For a similar effect, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and compare Xander mocking Cordelia and the various bullies in high school to Xander continuing to mock pretty much everyone around him, even though he was pretty much the only member of the gang (not counting Giles) who was any degree of a success in his life, except for his fiance Anya, who he gave even more grief than anyone else. Of course, Buffy, while a delightfully campy show, isn’t a sitcom, and having all the Scoobies sniping at each other constantly all through season 6 was pretty much the point of that season.
All four regular Nazi officer characters were played by Jews. All but one of whom were born in areas that were, during the war, under Nazi control. Werner Klemperer was born in Westphalia, John Banner (Schulz), and Leon Askin (Burkhalter) were both Austrian. (Howard Caine, who played Hochstetter was also Jewish, but he was from Nashville.) All 3 fled during the Nazi regime.
Robert Clary, who played LeBeau is also Jewish, and lived in France when the Nazis took over. He thus ended up in a concentration camp. According to Wiki, so did Banner, although the situation in the camps was different when he was there, and he ended up getting released. If true, this is something I totally did not know about the camps. It did not, however, save some of his relatives.
The reactions to HH always make me wonder if people are misremembering it as taking place in a concentration camp, rather than a Prisoner of War camp.
You need professional help.
One of the greatest scenes in Deep Space Nine was when Sisko gets taken down a couple of rungs by Quark, of all people. Towards the end of TNG and into DS9, we see the Federation portrayed as much less of a happy peaceful Utopian society than it’s presented as earlier in the series. The highlight reel includes the Enterprise being dispatched to forcibly remove the residents of a human colony near the border of Cardassian Space, Starfleet ships going into combat with noncombatants (scientists, as well as women and children in numerous cases) aboard, and at least one attempted coup d’etat on Earth. Oh, and that whole Section 31 thing.
Also, you notice how the Federation is great because it includes all these alien species (who get token representation aboard Starfleet ships), and yet every time they meet ANOTHER star nation with a similar approach (The Borg, the Dominion, and as it later turns out, the Romulan Star Empire), they’re unambiguous bad guys?
In some states, it was, and still is, illegal for unmarried male/female couples to live together.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17360273/
Broadcast standards probably figured into the deal, too. Networks are a lot looser about such things today than they were back then.
For my nominee for this thread, I choose Roseanne. Most of the women in that household were intolerably manipulative, controlling, and just plain mean.
You occassionally see black people in crowd scenes. And there’s not a large black population in western North Carolina.
Here’s a collection of stills showing black extras.