Word: comicly
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...people standing on a fake-looking set barking jokes at each other. On Sports Night, the camera moves; people move. Like all sitcoms, it is shot before an audience, but with its sets and editing, it manages to stretch the genre's visual limitations. Forgoing the march-time comic pace of the typical sitcom, the show's dialogue includes a mix of throwaway lines, banter, long speeches and TV-techno talk, which provide a particular touch of ER-like authenticity...
...content, it is of course nothing new for a series to combine comic and serious elements. What makes Sports Night different is the kind of issues it takes up, which are more sinewy than the usual interpersonal mush (although the show has that too). Characters are confronted with challenges to their professional and personal integrity, as when Dana had to decide how the show should handle an interview with a star athlete who had committed an assault on one of its producers. (That episode ran without a laugh track, something the producers have wanted all along but the network agreed...
...last, a movie that truly captures the essence of Harvard intellect. If you've been watching Happy Gilmore on video every Friday night, now's your chance to absorb the latest of Adam Sandler's comic genius. The Waterboy, long awaited by the masses, arrives in a theater near you tonight. Check local listings for theaters and showtimes...
Though the lack of plot continuity adds comic flair to the most serious interchanges, the text of The Compleat Wrks really isn't much different than what you'd find on 10 randomly selected pages of the Riverside Edition. With men playing women, pathetic melodrama, the overuse of gaudy props (i.e. silly string which makes several repeat appearances as a vomit substitute) one begins to wonder if this isn't Shakespeare as it was meant to be. A frequent object of ridicule throughout the show are Shakespeare companies that fret about making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. The show suggests...
Green and Howells are well picked challengers whose different comic sensibilities play well off one another in a multiplicity of dramatic situations. Amblad's strength is in the physical dimension of his caricature while Green's is more verbal and prop-oriented. Howells plays a great straight man whose misguided traditionalism is artfully thwarted by the other characters' antics. Though all of the parts they play are similarly ridiculous, the ability of the three actors to cover in one form or another the pantheon of Shakespearean roles without becoming excessively confused is no small feat. Amblad goes from flight attendant...