Because a few sneak through, like How I Met Your Mother.
The New Adventures of Old Christine
If tweaked a little, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ could totally be continuing the role of Elaine Benes. Christine is vain, greedy, petty, and likes wine just a little too much. Never as daring as Seinfeld, it can be a dark little gem that often ends on a hilarious joke that leaves Christine in a worse place than she started. Great supporting cast that includes Clark Gregg as her ex husband who she is still close with. Hamlish Linklater as her brother and Wanda Sykes as her best friend and later, her wife. Oh, and the title? Her ex is dating a slightly younger woman that’s named Christine and everyone calls her New Christine.
Dreyfus deservedly won an Emmy for her work here. Give it a chance.
I’ve actually been plowing through How I Met Your Mother because it became available on Netflix Instant.
I HATE the traditional multi-camera laugh-track sitcom format. I hate it with every fiber of my being. And yet, HIMYM takes me back to the time when I used to watch Friends reruns in high school. I never really laugh all that much (though a lot of that is due to stupid mule-headedness), but it’s quite a pleasant show to have on. The recurring jokes/references are fun and I can kinda get into the ongoing continuity. I am sick of hearing the opening theme song and Bob Saget’s narration though. But similar to the way I hated Michael Scott in The Office, I do realize that the narration is a crucial part of the show. So I’ll deal.
The trio of woman on the show has long since surpassed the quarter of men as far as entertainment value goes, and Sheldon has veered dangerously into “Why would anyone put up with him?” territory, but I have to agree. If you stop looking at it as some kind of authoritative statement on geek culture, it’s just a goofy, funny sitcom.
Too many people use it as a way to validate their own geek-ness by looking down their noses at it and saying, “I’M not like that, it’s an affront to true geek culture!” As if it’s intended to be some kind of anthropological study. News flash: sitcoms deal in exaggeration for comedic effect. You think historians got all bent out of shape about Happy Days?
Man, if you’d told me when this was on that Mila Kunis would be the one with the film career and Laura Prepon would end up playing Chelsea Lately on some godawful sitcom, I would have thought you were out of your mind.
Definitely wish to echo the HIMYM sentiments. I want to brag/show how sad I am by saying I started the show at the beginning of this month and already finished the show up to the last episode. For absolutely hating laugh tracks, this show is really fantastic. Enough love as been espoused to NPH, but you will find very few ensembles on T.V. as HIMYM. Many props to Josh Radnor, who gets far better playing funny as the show goes on, which just makes sense.
My absolute favorite part of the show is the mention of the group’s co-dependence on each other and the reveal that it is actually an incredibly bad element to each of their lives from Future Ted. The world around them acknowledges just how ludicrous their attachment to each other is, challenging the very nature of not just this sitcom, but sitcoms in general. If you saw a group of people as mired in each others lives as the people you see in sitcoms, you would have the exact same reaction the HIMYM’ers are facing from their world. It’s really, really smart and the kind of deconstruction that you would expect on a single cam.
I still feel like if she ever gets depressed, and decides to violently fixate on someone to blame for her career’s path, Sam Raimi would be a prime place to start.
Yes, and yes. She was on Raimi’s (and at the time, well, everybody’s) shortlist for MJ for the longest. They went with the bigger name. I feel like her career, and those movies would’ve been very, very different had she been cast.
That 70’s Show was fun, although I never watched it consistently. Newsradio may be a bit older than you’re looking for, but it’s the bestest, so there.
Like Nooj, I absolutely loathe the three-camera, laugh-tracked sitcom format, and unlike him, I haven’t found enough in shows like HIMYM or Big Bang Theory to get past it and enjoy. I used to be able to choke down the format because that was just how TV comedy was done, but now that we’ve moved past it it seems like a pandering anachronism that shows just how condescending TV producers can be. I can’t even really watch old sitcoms anymore either, with the one exception of Seinfeld–and to me that one demonstrates exactly how laugh tracks get it wrong. (I’m using “laugh tracks” here to include live studio audience laughter as well.) Because Seinfeld is the only modern sitcom I can think of that doesn’t pander to the laugh track, and is willing to do the occasional throwaway joke or subtle bit of business, yet the laughs always feel earned (which is otherwise a huge problem with laugh tracks). With every other laugh-tracked show, there’s only one type of joke you can do, which is the big, broad one-liner (and occasionally the slapstick visual gag). Because if it’s not a “setup-punchline-drumbeat-LAUGHTER” kind of joke, it feels like a mistake amidst all the uproar. Which means that, for instance, half the jokes on Arrested Development and Community would never have happened if they were laugh-tracked. It’s a supremely limiting form of comedy, and the main reason it’s still around is because it’s clear audiences subconsciously think of shows as funnier if there’s a laugh track.
Ask yourself if one of the laugh-tracked sitcoms you enjoy would be hurt by being a cinematic one-camera show with no laugh track. Because I’m finding it hard to see how that could be.
As for big Bang Theory, I’m willing to have my opinion changed because I’ve only seen one or two episodes, but my problem with that show isn’t “they portrayed geek culture badly!” it’s that they seem to drop in geek culture as a punchline in and of itself, seemingly attempting to use it as a punchline for the 50-year-old watchers simply by existing, and a “hey, I get that reference!” moment a la Family Guy for the geeks. Yet there never seems to be any actual insight into what makes people’s obsession with these nerdy things funny. It’s just a string of pointless, superficial references. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that a show that attempts to portray a subculture provide some insight into that subculture.
Last time I said I liked The Big Bang Theory, I got piled on and practically accused of killing Community, even though I watched Community first and DVRed BBT. I still think Jim Parsons is a genius, but the edition of the girls really put new life into it.
I’ve watched quite a few That 70’s Show reruns recently because I clearly remember enjoying it when it first aired, but I must have been high or something because it is BEYOND bad. Like gratingly unfunny.