In the currently active thread about far-fetched sitcom plots, Little Nemo offers up:
Now that’s the kind of plot that I’ve encountered way too often, where I don’t crack a smile let alone laugh, and where I’m cringing and wincing and trying to think of an excuse for leaving my friends/companions and getting out of the room so I don’t have to watch any more of it.
Or even where Character A says something to close friend Character B who very obviously misinterprets it as something nicer or more glorious and Character A doesn’t correct the misinterpretation and spends the rest of the episode simultaneously trying to do things to keep Character B from finding out that it Just Ain’t So while looking for the Perfect Opportunity to explain that it Just Ain’t So.
I think most of it is centered around emotionally STUPID deceptions of one’s friends — this part of these plots seems to comprise the “drama”, the serious tension and the deeply meaningful moral of the plot that it’s not nice to deceive one’s friends, and no shit Sherlock? — but another big part of it is not finding it funny to watch anyone (other than perhaps a hateworthy asshole who humiliated other people) going about the business of bringing humiliation down upon themselves. To me, this stuff is no funnier than just picking a victim and having someone walk up and throw feces at them while the audience points and laughs at them — and yet it seems like this is what’s supposed to appeal to us as funny.
Now, is that everyone’s reaction and it’s just that sitcom screenwriters are horribly warped people who haven’t noticed that no one finds these things funny? Or am I frumpy and peculiarly humorless in failing to see the amusing side of such things?
Saved by the Bell (which deserves for so many reasons its own rung of sit-com Hell) made me cringe and wince with it’s depictions of nerds. Had they stereotyped ethnic characters the way they did the “uncool” students, Lark Voorhies’s character would have worn an Aunt Jemima cap and shuffled while saying “Yas’m” whilst Mario Lopez’s character would have said “I deedn’t know dat” [there’s an old reference] and been a coke dealer. While I realize SBTB was never supposed to be more than a dippy teen show, it had a huge audience among Jr. High & High schoolers and unconscionably marginalized kids who weren’t attractive or popular; if Screech had gone into Bayside carrying an Uzi I don’t think anybody would have really blamed him.
(When the show went off the air Mark Paul Goselaar took a role as a date-rapist frat-boy in a TV movie because he said he wanted to distance himself as far as possible from Zach; to me it didn’t work at all because I had no problem imagining Zach as a date raping frat-boy.)
A clichè I can’t stand that makes me cringe is the sexually precocious granny. While I realize that senior citizens still have sexual urges, I find it patronizing when writers feel that anytime a man or woman over 60 makes a sexually explicit statement (The Golden Girls, Mona from Who’s the Boss, etc.) it’s automatically a riot. (The TV series Northern Exposure was unique in the way it handled senior-sexuality believably, tastefully and without crudity.)
Any show about angst ridden kids played by thin actresses with implants and actors with receding hairlines make me cringe.
Any show which seems to think “Fags are this year’s black dress” makes me cringe; gay men ARE NOT ASEXUAL FASHION ACCESSORIES!. Plus, portraying gay men as sophisticated intelligent scathingly witty impeccable dressers sensitive to the needs of women, while seemingly a favorable impression, is no less a stereotype than portraying all Jewish characters as wealthy and clannish or all Asians as unctiously polite overachievers who speak broken English.
(Queer as Folk is little more than a softcore porn soap opera, but I LOVE the fact that the characters not only have sex [unlike celibate Will, the gorgeous lawyer who can’t find a date in Manhattan, or Jack the slut who’s never seen making out with another guy] but don’t define themselves by their straight acquaintances.)
This is what bugs me about Queer Eye (although it’s not a sitcom). The show doesn’t spend most of it’s time focusing on the fact that these are five intelligent guys who help these people on the show better themselves, it focuses on the fact that these are five guys (or at least one guy, Carson is the worst offender) WHO ARE AROUSED BY ERECT PENISES. It will have a few minutes of content, and then bring in Carson for a cheap gay joke to remind you that HE IS AROUSED BY ERECT PENISES.
Most sit-com plots revolve around misunderstandings or outright lies. It goes back at least as far as the Honeymooners when they thought Gleason’s wife was pregnant because they overheard her saying something. I don’t generally watch all that many sit-coms these days. Actually I haven’t watched all that many sit-coms since Full House first aired and I realized how bad these shows were.
I dislike it when people do something stupid. This is why I detest Seinfield – they were all idiots and I was constantly thinking, “Why the hell are they doing that?”
I think I understand what you mean, but the thing I’ve heard so many people say about that show is that its depiction of school was totally unrealistic because these attractive cool kids were seen hanging out with nerds in the first place. Ah well.
Everything that goes for old people’s sex lives being comedy also goes for fat people and other non-models.
“How can I get rid of my undesirable opposite-sex suitor without hurting their feelings? Hmmm…I know! I’ll pretend to be gay!” (It’s almost always a man doing the gay-act, with Ally McBeal being the only exception I can think of.)
This ticks me off on many levels. First, for much the same reasons dishonesty plots in general bother the OP. Like a simple “Sorry, but I’m not interested. You’re a nice girl, but this isn’t the right time for me/we have nothing in common” would wound the person so much more than engaging in a massive deception about your very sexual orientation.
Second, it’s often an excuse to have the character act out homosexual stereotypes. Gay men go to the office in leather pants and cut-off shirts! And they talk funny! Har de har.
Third, I can’t remember ever seeing any acknowledgement that openly gay folk also have their problems. I’m not saying I want to see a sitcom character get gaybashed, but if the shows must use these kinds of plots it might be nice if they could insert a little of the sappy “now I realize that it’s important to be kind to minorities, because they often get a raw deal!” formula. So when our male hero is dressed in a cut-off shirt and leather pants and lip-syncing to Cher, maybe someone could sneer at him and say “You people make me sick!” and he could realize that being gay isn’t just a big joke for everyone. Or, if that’s too heavy for a sitcom, how about making a gay character attracted to the faux gay lead? And not in a comic “Ha ha, now he has TWO undesirable people after him! And one’s gay! Gay people are funny!” way, but “Uh oh, now a perfectly nice guy is interested in him because of his lies. Now he’ll have to come clean in order to avoid hurting his feelings.”
I call this the Sexual Misidentification or Three’s Company Plot Device. In every damn episode of that show the plot was driven by confusion or misunderstanding or deception about someone else’s sexual or romantic interests. The “my grandmother is coming” is a slight variation (and inevitably in those types of episodes, the switcheroo with the company’s president involves a mix-up with a suitor of the president or janitor, or both).
The moment when I stopped watching Seinfeld was when I saw three episodes in a row that used this plot device. At that point, the show was over for me.
(I must admit that I can’t understand why this plot device works in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but not on sitcoms, but I suppose that that Shakespeare fellow was a better writer than most sitcom hacks).
You know the ones I’m talking about. Arnold Drummond meets a pedophile, Alex Keaton has a friend die, Blossom loses her virginity, the staff of WKRP reacts to deaths at a rock concert.
All designed to preach at us for 22 minutes and leave us all choked up.
Even in the poorly constructed world of sitcoms, the actors are out of character, the dialog is a series of speeches, whatever point they’re trying to make is already obvious to a 6-year old, and they usually involve some character who wasn’t in any previous episode and will never be heard from again.
I’ll grant that there have been a few of these that have actually worked (when maude had an abortion, not only did all the characters react as you’d expect them too, but thee were actually a couple of laughs in the show) but that just makes those episodes the most special of the very special.
Give me a good “I dyed my hair green and now the boss is coming to dinner” laugh-track driven episode of Three’s Company any day.
Well, in fairness, WKRP, a show about a rock station in Cincinnatti, pretty much had to do a show about the **Who ** concert, and I thought they did about as well as could be done.
Seinfeld committed its share of these “sit-com sins” (if you will) but I can’t think of any episodes of Seinfeld that used this particular device? Can you be more specific?
Rivalry with a competing whatever-the-setting-of-the-sitcom episodes (The second I hear the words “Gary’s Old Towne Tavern” on Cheers, it’s time to change channels)
I know it’s easy to make fun of that episode, but that must have been pretty heavy when it aired. Even today, TV and movie depictions of pedophiles are usually wussed-out tales of an adult and a newly pubescent youth. I alway feel like my intelligence is being insulted when I’m expected muddle a pervert who seduces teens with an honest-to-God child molester, but Arnold was actually a kid. And they went even went through the effort to clear up that old common confusion:
Willis: Man, I had no idea that [that guy] was gay!
Authority Figure: Actually, Willis, being gay has nothing to do with it.
Most of the time that I see these types of episiodes, I try desperately to repress them, and it was years ago, but I remember something about George pretending to be a Marine Biologist to impress some woman and something about Elaine and some guy in the gym she was interested in (and, come to think of it, I think I recall at least one Jerry and a woman in the gym episode).
Guys and gals reverse usual gender roles: guy has to take care of the house and baby, woman has to cut the grass or tend to a car repair, both make a bungled mess and realize each has it harder than expected. (Particularly common in 50s and 60s sitcomes, but variants still occur today.) Just once it’d be cool to see one partner make a bungled mess while the other partner really can do the reverse job just as well.
A hasn’t seen his/her high school friend/rival in 30 years and in that time has put on a lot of weight which s/he must lose in time for the reunion. When the reunion comes, low and behold if old friend ain’t even fatter. (Actually, Absolutely Fabulous did a hilarious spin on this in which the old friend wasn’t fatter but was blind.)
The absolute cheesiest that has been used so damned many times (Alice, Gilligan’s Island, Night Court, etc.): Christmas episode, day is saved by a Santa impersonator who goes away after teaching charactes something about the real meaning of Christmas, it turns out person really was Santa.
Alternate Christmas cringe: the A Christmas Carol episode (Sanford & Son, WKRP, Dukes of Hazzard, etc.), though as with Ab Fab & the “old rival” episode the Britcom Blackadder did a hilarious spin on this.)
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