Everybody Doesn’t Love Raymond: appears to be a show about mentally retarded people; who yell at eachother, whilst an annying laugh track plays incessantly. The main character is a high-level retarded man who appears to have no job; retarded in-laws constantly visit, along with retarded neighbors.
I thoult it was a group home for mentally challeneged adults.
I can’t believe that so many dopers hate Seinfeld.
How is that possible? That show was great!
It was funny, smart and the situations the characters put themselves in resembled real life in many episodes.
Kramer, George, Elaine and even Jerry, were truly great characters.
By the way 24 rules. It may be repetitive, but DAMN its good.
Raymond,24,Lost (lost on me), desperate House Bitches, 2.5 men, Scrubs. can all dissappear. I like first couple weeks of Idol then they take themselve too seriously. No fun then. Most black sit coms are about creative insults ad name calling ,not funny. CNN is unwatchable now.
I used to hate *Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Bones * – my family puts a gun to my head and makes me watch, and I’ve even posted mini-rants here on each of these.
But each of these has started to grow on me (like a tumor); DH least of all, but this season it has its moments.
So I’ve got nothing to add; at the moment, I like everything I watch, and don’t watch anything I hate.
Any sort of “reality TV”…I loathe all of them with a passion and still don’t understand the fascination after all this time.
I hate Raymond because I came this close to marrying that guy, down to the incredibly infuriatingly domineering bitch of a mother (who in RL actually called the wedding off…and he WENT ALONG WITH HER…in retrospect, thank Og!). It’s not funny. It’s like the hell my life would have turned into.
I too hate Friends. Everyone on that show is so unlikeable.
I wouldn’t say every show with a laugh track sucks, I’ve been watching reruns of News Radio and they’re as great as ever, except for the jarring laugh track (I assume it’s a track.)
Add Nacy Grace to my list too, and Rosie O’Donnell.
Hear hear. The only one I can stand is “Dancing With the Stars” if that counts as RTV. Because it lacks the gamesmanship of the other RTV shows. What I hate is all the backstabbing, maneuvering, etc. It’s like everything I hate about office politics has been distilled into a vile, concentrated syrup of humanity’s worst.
Sex & the City. I know it’s “girl” TV so me saying that I (as a male) don’t care for it isn’t saying much. But I actively dislike the show. Mainly because I am unsympathetic to Sarah Jessica Parker in any role she plays and so I spend the show waiting for her to get hit by a bus.
I felt the same about her character in the film The Family Stone. Even at the point where we see what a real, fragile, human being she is, I still prayed for her to walk blindly into an open manhole.
oh heavens to Betsy, I nearly forgot about Malcolm in the Middle… the combo of shrieky hag mother and idiotic plots made me cringe.
I liked the Family Guy parody a lot better, where Shrieky Hag gets suddenly gets killed in a freak accident and the father and boys dance off into the sunset, holding hands and yelling “we’re free! we’re finally free!”
Asgardking, Alton Brown’s my favorite too
Another laugh-track hater here.
They’re a useless vestige of a time when sitcoms were actually filmed in front of a live studio audience, and they’ve bothered me for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure why.
Maybe it’s because I know they’re fake, and I can’t get the picture out of my head of some guy in the studio turning a dial up or down depending on what he thinks is funny.
Maybe because the laughter ruins my suspension of belief and distances me from the story. Whether the laughter is genuine or not, it’s a constant, subconcious reminder that the events on screen are being obvserved by millions, rather than actually happening (yes, I know TV is fake :rolleyes: , I just don’t like to be reminded all the time).
As a natural born contrarian, the laugh track actually inhibits my laughter. I resent laughing along with the audience because it feels like I’m partaking in herd mentality. I resent the idea that some studio execs may include a laugh track based on the “logic” that it will cause more people to find the show funny. As if people need to told when to laugh. Why not just flash the word “LAUGH” in bright red after every joke?
A lot of good humor is based on subtlety, and when every joke is underlined with an audio cue, it becomes very difficult to make any joke subtle. You can no longer take pleasure in the fact that you got a joke that not everybody else would have noticed, because the laughter continually reminds you that you’re not alone.
When all the older TV shows first started coming out on DVD, I hoped that some of them would include an alternate audio track without laughter. Obviously this is not happening. I know I probably would have enjoyed Frasier a lot more had they canned the canned laughter.
In conclusion, laugh tracks should be banned forever.
There is one show where you can watch it with a laugh track, and without, to compare: The Ali G show. I find the laugh-track version unwatchable.
I also can say I hate watching Nancy Grace, but I don’t have cable anymore (I used to watch it when I was working at the hotel night-shift) so I don’t have to worry about it too much.
I can’t stand the Tyra show (Tyra Bank’s talk show) or America’s Next Top Model.
I only get two channels with my rabbit ears, CW and PBS. I just don’t like either show. I find the Top Model show to be ridiculous - at least the parts I’ve seen - where the judges don’t seem to really count for crap (I am thinking in particular when they told a girl she’d made huge improvements in the last few weeks, and that she had some of the best photos of the whole contest, but they were sending her home because they didn’t think she wanted it enough)
The Tyra Show just seems like it is only on because she does the top model show. It might be nice to some people, but I think it is amazingly annoying.
Brendon
Ahhhh, thank you for being the first to agree with me 
I can’t hate something I don’t have to engage with, but if locked in a room for a while with Friends on TV, or Lost, Everyone Loves Raymond, Two and a Half Men, I’d go quite crazy :mad:
On the BBC, Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps is idiotic and The Royale Family was something I never really got into.
Trust me… I know what I’m doing…
Part of the reason I liked Sledge was because he was so over the top and excessive in his responses to minor situations that it caused poor Capt. Trunk to blow a gasket at least once an episode, the average episode had Trunk screaming out HAMMMERRRRRR!!! and verbaly dressing him down at least two to three times
the fact that he was able to get away with what he did without being suspended every week was part of the absurdist humor
the most memorable part of the premiere episode?
there’s a sniper on top of an old abandoned office block, the sniper is cracking off shots at the cops (obviously, he’s a horrible shot, even with a scoped sniper rifle), Hammer drives up in his beat up car, talks with the Seargent on duty there, who tells him there’s a sniper on the roof
Sledge whips out his Stainless .44 Magnum revolver with the ivory handles with a sledgehammer scrimshaw on them, and says to it
“there’s a sniper on the roof, i got an idea”
<Sgt.> who are you talking to?
“oh, nobody, really” (holsters Magnum), Sledge goes to the trunk of his car, which has a prominently displayed “I (heart) Violence!” bumper sticker on the trunklid, opens the trunk, pulls out a TOW shoulder-mounted missile launcher, aims it at the building and fires
the missile hits, and the building collapses, as Sledge walks back to the car, he passes the Sgt. and says “i think i got him”
Sledge drives to the precinct, where Trunk will yell HAMMMEEEEERRRR!!! for the first of numerous times
other notable episodes;
“Witless”; Hammer has a price on his head and has to lay low in a Manynote community (Mennonite, obviously a parody of the movie “Witness”)
“Desperatly Seeking Dory”; Dory Doureau gets hit on the head during a bust gone bad, and loses her memory, she begins to start taking on Hammer’s mannerisims, attitudes, and (lack of) fashion sense, at the midpoint of this episode, we essentially have TWO Hammers…
“Hammeroid”; Robocop parody, Hammer is injured in combat with an android, and is on the verge of death, a local “mad scientist” doctor who created the errant 'Droid converts Hammer into a Cyborg, with a soda vending machine built in and AM/FM radio, also “Please note, now my Amigo (his Magnum) and I are now one” <fires gun> that was a glitch, but it was fun…
I love the BBC show “The Mighty Boosh”. The DVD of the series has the pilot with laugh track included and it really is rubbish, ruined completely by the simple addition of a laugh track.
It makes you wonder why they make those. Is it just some weird mistake from the studios side? Or do stupid people enjoy shows more if they have a laugh track?
American Idol
ER
The West Wing
Any of the Law and Order shows
I think laughing does activate some sort of social sense for some people.
If you’re in, say, a comedy club, and a guy has a mediocre act, but in one instance, the crowd is drunk/happy/laughing, and in one they’re pissed off and silent, I bet you’ll tend to react more favorably and laugh at the former.
I think laugh tracks try to artificially induce that positive atmosphere, even though it’s obviously fake, it must work on some level.
Of course, I figure… if a show needs to tell you when to laugh, it’s almost certainly not worth watching, with a few unfortunate exceptions. Or, if it needs to artificially activate some social reaction sense in your mind to seem remotely good or funny, same deal.
Yes, I goofed. I should have said that the character he plays is replulsive and makes the show unwatchable for me. But as a side effect, Laurie might now be type-cast in my mind and that’ll ruin any future characters he portrays.