You may not agree but I always loved the work they did on Overhaulin’. They spent a lot of time showing the work. The end product was quality. The emotional aspects were normal and not overwrought.
The problems I had with Overhaulin’ were padding. More car work, less (not really all that) hot chick explaining things. Foose seems to know his stuff. Just like his mentor Boyd Coddington, who had a good show for a while until it degraded into the staff playing grab-ass all the time. Plus Foose didn’t “slam” every vehicle, from car to pickup to milk truck, like Joe Martin insists on doing in Iron Resurrection.
It seems even technical expertise shows like these all have to eventually degrade into the same LCD of sob stories and “personalities”. Didn’t Orange County Choppers end up with the old man and the son fighting all the time? (I never watched that show).
First season that was not the only premise. Sometimes bad bosses learned their employees hated them, sometimes good bosses found out how much cheating and goofing off occurred. I liked those.
Then the producers found that the average idiot viewer liked the sob story ones the best. I hate those.
Barney Miller had a pretty good run. 
There is a fine line between ironic bad and bad. IMHO Kaufman was just bad. Many disagree, I know.
This made me snort and chuckle. Thanks.
Peyote tastes terrible, fyi.
I don’t think it was supposed to be a light comedy about a washed up sitcom actor. I think it was supposed to be a very dark tragicomedy about addiction, ego, generational and personal dysfunction, depression and loss. It just took a little while to build up to the really devastating stuff.
I think it was more emotional than emotionally manipulative, if you get my distinction. I mean all shows manipulate emotions but I consider emotionally manipulative shows do it purely for ratings, whereas I think Bojack Horseman did it to make searing points about shared humanity.
Which is capitalist propaganda, honestly. Notice the boss’ response is never to make sure all his employees have a living wage, just to give some great prize to the one guy that is probably among countless struggling at his company. The closest I’ve ever seen to real change is a hotel mogul who set up some scholarship opportunities for his employees.
Yeah that was always the core problem with the show, has ANYTHING improved company wide as a result of the show, or did the single mother with 8 kids with autism get a $10,000 gift card to Chili’s and that’s apparently the reward for everyone?
In a couple of the early shows the Boss realized that the whole location was FUBARed and fixed it.
I stopped watching Undercover Boss after the first couple of seasons, when it became obvious that every episode would be the same; sob stories from the rank-and file and boss (in ridiculous wig and makeup to hide their identity) learns that the low-level jobs are not easy to do.
What was emotionally manipulative about Mad Men? (Not including the final episode because all TV shows get a pass for their final episodes.)
I didn’t say it was supposed to be light comedy, I said it was supposed to be a comedy from the average viewer’s perspective. I totally agree with you about it being about addiction, ego, dysfunction, depression, and loss but there was a massive disconnect between the “ha ha, stupid alkie horse can’t get his shit together” comedy and “Wow, this character is truly, deeply broken; possibly beyond saving. What does this say for any of us? Is it possible to walk too far into the darkness to return whole?” deep and meaningful drama stuff.
Perhaps unfairly back in the day I coined it Really Hardcore Douches Posing Hard in Offices, and along with the fact that, sure, the last episode was what I was mainly thinking of, I just found that in the parts of the three of four episodes that I gallantly attempted that it was kinda soapy behaviour with folks taking themselves somewhat too seriously.
YMMV.
Saturday Night Live had a brilliant takedown of Undercover Boss with a little help from Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren
Adam-12, Dragnet, and to a certain extent, Law and Order (Mothership, Criminal Intent and UK) would disagree with you. For Mothership, McCoy and Stone made plea bargains probably half the time. One time, McCoy got an innocent man to plead guilty. (Schiff: “maybe this job is getting too easy for you.”)
Adam-12 and Dragnet didn’t have shoot outs every week but they have interesting cases every day of their career. The plea bargains on L&O were overly dramatic just like the overly dramatic court room scenes. And of course they condense months or years of court process down to a couple of weeks and show about 20 minutes of that. It’s hard to find anything more boring than the actual practice of law
Holy shit yes. You can’t get on the show without having a good sob story. Great concept for a show but they could fit two games in that hour. We don’t need the contestants to go into a two minute explanation for what slot they’re putting the ball in, they don’t need 10 minutes at the end to reveal if the person in the room signed the contract or tore it up. This show was built for recording and fast forward.
I meant in the sense of a show being about the actual cop experience… which isn’t all crimes and investigations and stuff like that. Nobody wants to see a serious cop show about Officer Smith sitting by the side of the road waiting for speeders, or responding to teenager noise complaints, or pulling over a soccer mom in a minivan for not fully stopping at a four-way stop, or whatever.
That’s why so many center around detectives; their job IS to investigate. But your average beat cop? I doubt their lives are that exciting. I mean, they COULD try and dramatize it, by playing up the stress and perceived danger aspects of the normal police officer’s job, but even then, some of that (mostly the danger) is fictional.
The same is true for any job; they make the computer stuff look cool on TV by essentially fabricating it all out of whole cloth. That stuff that Abby, Kasie and McGee do on NCIS? Total fiction for the most part. Same for just about every other show, save maybe the IT Crowd or Silicon Valley, but even there things are often very exaggerated for effect, and the technology is not quite right.
It’s like the porno experience, but about occupations. Watching the real thing wouldn’t usually be very hot, so they tweak it so that it is. But it’s almost completely unrealistic in a lot of ways by that point.
Adam-12. You just described 75% of the episodes. And it ran for seven seasons.
Maybe it was the times. Today’s audience of darkness, grit, sex, “reality” might not go for it.
Yeah, Adam-12 went off the air when I was 3. I think I might have seen a few episodes in syndication, but I do recall liking “Emergency!” when I was a little boy.
MeTv, every day at 4:00. 
Emergency! still holds up, but I can imagine what it would be like today. Everyone would be beautiful, shirtless as much as possible, and they’d spend too much time having sex with each other and having angst filled relationship drama, but spend precious little time hanging off cranes or tall smokestacks and rescuing people from plane crashes in trees or trapped in strange predicaments like rock piles and ice blocks. I love Emergency! (I just can’t see why anyone would have thought Randy Mantooth was a heartthrob.)