Considering its usually men who are stupid and obnoxious in sitcoms… I’m guessing its 2014 and thankful that the old trend may be over ;).
Though, considering Selfie is based on Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, the female lead would have to be intially that way…
Aside from the fact that every aspect of the plotline was utterly ridiculous, they fail to demonstrate what is supposed to be the main point of the show. They want us to believe that the main characters are some kind of savants, unable to understand the world they live in.
Yet they all seem rather well adjusted, and except for the fact that they all like to say “they way my mind works…”, they don’t seem to need any help at all.
I want to like Gotham, but I’m not sure I’m going to. In the first episode we meet like 5 villains already, and instead of taking some time to show how they develop into villains, they seem to already be fully formed characters. The Penguin already looks and acts like a penguin, and they call him penguin. Cat woman (or cat girl at this point) dresses in black, moves like a cat, is normally on a roof, wears goggles on top of her head like cat ears. Oh, and her name is Cat.
No subtlety whatsoever.
I wasn’t impressed by Selfie. Two good lead actors but the jokes were too thin on the ground. And the writers seem divided on the lead character - they want her to be unlikeable but they also want us to like her. And the social media gimmick doesn’t work.
Okay, but admit it - it would have made all those Dirty Harry movies more interesting if his Captain had been his ex-husband.
For 1, you can go back farther than 1976; wasn’t The Addams Family pretty much pitched as competition to The Munsters? And it was around 1976 when ABC, NBC, and CBS all announced sitcoms set in college fraternities, based on the success of Animal House (in fact, ABC’s was Animal House with John Belushi’s character “in the Army” - and if you don’t remember the CBS one, it was cancelled after the pilot aired).
For 2, define “formulatic.” Somebody said Brooklyn Nine-Nine; that seems to fit the “workplace comedy” formula. (“But it’s also a cop show!” Barney Miller.)
I was all set to say “vice versa,” but it turns out they debuted the same month, Sept. 1964.
Ooops… I put the following post in the “First TV show to be canceled” thread, when it probably should have gone here:
Lord almighty, I could not get through How to Get Away With Murder (just saw it). It doesn’t help that I went through law school and that was so utterly absurd and ridiculous that I couldn’t possibly suspend the disbelief far enough. Every part of the plot was just… no. Maybe if I was a doctor, I could deal with it… but its too much for this lawyer (and I enjoyed Ally McBeal and Boston Legal to indicate how bad the law was here). But it’s going to last at least through the season.
The 2nd episode of Black-ish was lame. I really liked the first one and thought maybe they’d explore race with humor. This was just a generic family comedy episode - about the sex talk. If it continues on this path, it may be gone before I thought.
A to Z - Cristin Milioti is so durn cute. If she dies in this one, violence will unleash.
I liked the hoverboard bit
Brian
I just watched Bad Judge. Definite potential there.
We just watched Bad Judge. Not sure about the potential. Definitely a difficult pilot to watch. It was a haphazard mess.
Apparently the pilot had to have many changes made, reshoots, etc. Even the show runner was fired. Enough back stage messiness to suggest it isn’t going to get any better and won’t last.
The bigamy case was ridiculous. From bail hearing to verdict issued in what, 2 days? Clearly not a plea deal situation.
Anyone else have a new show to chime on in?
The McCarthys with Laurie Metcalf debuted the other night as part of CBS’s Thursday post-football comedy lineup.
Ugggggh. Really horrible. I seriously wonder what the mental state of the network execs that let this mess get on the air.
Clearly an Everybody Loves Raymond clone. (And why that crap persisted so long is another wonder.)
Generic sitcom, generic premise, terrible writing. Some quite poor acting and in the case of Joey McIntyre: no acting ability displayed at all!
Only watched it due to the presence of Laurie Metcalf. She is a good actress, from Uncle Buck to guesting on The Big Bang Theory. But now she has this plus Getting On and several other craptastic sitcoms on her resume. The bad is outweighing the good.
So far, I’ve liked and am still watching:
Blackish- good family sitcom.
Forever- solid enough procedural with likable lead & supporting characters and actors
The Flash- fun superhero show
Jane the Virgin- my favorite new show of the year. It’s well written and well acted and very, very charming and often flat out hilarious. I love the characters. I love the narrator & the chyron guy . If you like TV soaps at all, you’ll like it. If you like single camera sitcoms, you should probably give it a try.
I would never have though that two of the shows I’d like best would be on the CW.
Debuting this week was Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce. Part of Bravo’s foray into scripted shows. (Like most of their crap is “unscripted”, right.)
Dear Bravo execs (and others of that ilk). Here is how you drive people away from your channel: Run non-stop, annoying crap all over the screen promo-ing your other shows. Guaranteed to reduce ratings. Good grief it was awful. That didn’t just use the bottom half, they kept putting a hashtag up in the right corner.
Anyway …
Starring Lisa Edelstein, Paul Adelstein, Janeane Garofalo and some lesser folk. I can just see the brainstorming on this: “Imagine it: Edelstein - Adelstein as exes? Get it? Neat eh? Plus they both played doctors on long running series.” (Although Adelstein’s single appearance on Scrubs is hardly notable.;))
The pilot had a brief appearance by Carrie Fisher for some strange reason.
Just a standard crappy mishmash of the usual expected stuff. An author of “My life and family is great.” series of books is in a failing marriage. That’s a stillborn premise right there. From time to time it was just started to get interesting but then it veered off into lesser nonsense again. Also had too much of the music video rapid cutting and such. Large parts of the dialogue were hard to understand due to rapid mumbling and topic changing. It was like listening to stream of consciousness stuff, without the consciousness.
Don’t bother watching it, it’s pretty bad.
I hate that shit. Several shows have gone on my “boycott list” due to that shit.