Word: hbo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Starting Oct. 4, the cast of Seinfeld reunites for five episodes on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom from Seinfeld co-creator Larry David that a couple million people watch on Sunday night on a good week. Which sums up what's happened in the sitcom world since Seinfeld left. There have been sitcoms in the decade since - even great ones, like Curb and Arrested Development - but no monster hits. As the great comedy explosion of the '90s faded, networks made fewer and fewer new sitcoms, and those that got on the air were eclipsed by dramas and reality shows...
...show about something. Showtime's Nurse Jackie (starring The Sopranos' Edie Falco), which aired over the summer, is a sort of civilian M*A*S*H, focusing on a pill-popping, overworked nurse, devoted to her work but cheating on her husband. Likewise, while it has polarized critics, HBO's Hung (about a high school coach turned gigolo in suburban Detroit) is at its best a darkly comic story about surviving after an economic bubble pops. These shows (like Showtime's multiple-personality comedy United States of Tara) handle deeper, more mature themes than many network cop shows. What...
This year's Starz sitcom Party Down (gearing up for a second season next year), about aspiring showbiz types working for a catering company in L.A., perfectly captures the Apatow vibe of improv-like, conversational comedy. Likewise, HBO's Bored to Death, a literary slacker-com about a writer (Jason Schwartzman) posing as a detective, has a voice and offbeat style that recall indie-film comedies - the kind, like Rushmore, that star Jason Schwartzman...
...reunion is a distinctly HBO version of Seinfeld - very show-biz-insidery, and much more R-rated than the original ever could have been on NBC. Which shows that, while Seinfeld's glory days may never come back, funny is still funny, and successors like Curb have found ways to become more uncompromising and uncensored. And there's not, to paraphrase the masters, anything wrong with that...
...HBO film's allegations, however, became central to Polanski's late 2008 appeal. In February 2009, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza, citing Polanski's fugitive status and refusal to appear in court in person, ruled against his request, but also indicated that he was open to arguments that misconduct had occurred. Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who was at the hearing, says Espinoza "was open to the argument that Polanski should not have to do any more jail time and that the court had been wrong to renege on the prior...