After reading the 30 Rock and 20 Good Years threads, it occurred to me that I have absolutely no sit-coms on my TiVo list. Mrs. Know TiVo’s Two and a Half Men , but that’s about it. I’ve tried watching My Name is Earl and The Office ; I don’t find them all that impressive.
I grew up on sit-coms–All in the Family , Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and later classics like Cheers, Night Court, Newhart, Newsradio – extremely funny, well-written, well acted efforts. Real laugh-out-loud stuff! Characters you actually cared about! Now, it seems that they are divided into two categories: hack (about 90% of the last five years’ output) or “too-hip-for-the-room”–hack stuff that’s supposed to be edgy and cool but just seems lame to me. I mean, when Boston Legal is funnier than any true sit-com, the format is in trouble, dontcha think?
Oh, and another thing: where are the “straight men”(in the comedy sense)? IMO, for comedy to really work, you need the “straight man” and the “buffoon”. Today, it seems that all the characters are morons–some are just less moronic than others.
Just MHO, you understand, but I’m curious–does anyone else feel this way? Is this just a temporary lull, or is the sit-com truly dead?
I feel that way about getting a good range of sit-coms for regular viewing. What I mean is, I really enjoy The Office and Earl (for their fresh content and because they have no recorded laughter) but that’s basically it. For now, it’s all dramas because the style of the laugh track/studio audience writing and delivery grates on me so badly. Five Seconds of manic spewing <laugh> rinse and repeat for 22 minutes. I blame Will & Grace for delivery in such things as The Class. I’d rather watch reruns of the classics from the 80s and 90s than current stuff, with a few exceptions.
They thought the sitcom was dead in the early 80s. Then, a failed comedian tried one more time. The Cosby Show was a smash and sitcoms were back.
Currently, the best sitcoms are one-camera ones – Earl, The Office, Scrubs, though 2 1/2 Men seems to be decent in the 3-camera variety. But sooner or later, someone will come up with a well-written, humorous show and it’ll revitalize everything.
There’s only so many primetime hours and the networks chase recent successes. And the recent successes have been hour long dramas. At some point a sitcom will be a breakout hit and the genre will revive and drive out the dramas.
The format is too familiar to stay dead, permanently. The sitcom will probably never again be as big as it was years ago, even when Seinfeld was on top - reality shows are easier and cheaper to make, by far - but I don’t think they’ll go away either. There are some big hits even now.
That’s the only one I watch, as well. I catch up with Scrubs on DVD, but I was thinking recently how much I miss the sitcom as a whole. My dad has always been a big fan of the genre, and most of the “quality time” he and I spent together when I was a kid was watching that kind of stuff, because at the time, we had absolutely nothing else in common.
Like Marley said, it’s just way too familiar to stay gone forever. In a few years, somebody will have a huge sitcom hit, and everybody else will rush to copy it. It goes in cycles. We’re still stuck in the Investigative Drama rut, with a touch of Interesting Lawyer stories making a comeback. Give it another couple years.
Yeah, no one with an IQ over room temperature enjoys the genre. :rolleyes:
Plus – wouldn’t the preferred target audience from the advertiser’s POV (and all of TV is driven by the desire of advertisers to find their target audience) be slightly more intelligent – and thus more apt to have disposable income?
There’s a show on the CW/WB/UPN…like Saturday nights or something, called “Everybody Hates Chris.” It’s written and narrated by Chris Rock and so far it’s quite good (into it’s second season).
Just your normal family-centric sitcom. Sort of like Cosby meets Rosanne. A black family living in Brooklyn in 1984, three kids, dad’s got 2 jobs, mom’s proud of dad having 2 jobs. Very funny characters and decent situations.
I never hear anything about it, but I’ve been watching it faithfully since it came out. Other than “Earl” it’s the only sitcom I watch.
I started to get outraged, until I saw who posted this.
I think part of the difference is that somewhere, deep inside, twicks, intelligent reality viewers know that they’re watching beneath them … and we just can’t help it. Personally, I think that’s part of what entertainment is all about. I don’t always want to have to think about everything I watch. Sometimes I just want to veg and watch 12 “average Americans” try to catch fish with a piece of string and an old scab.
I agree about the dearth of good sit-coms (where’s Frazier when we need him?). But I was so impressed about one show that I discovered that I opened a thread about it.
