Word: seinfeldisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jerry Seinfeld once said, “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.” In an age of 140-character updates it appears, shockingly, that many Bostonians are still thinking in long form...
...Comedy of DramaNot coincidentally, none of these shows - with their filmlike editing and numerous outdoor and location scenes - look much like the sitcoms of a decade ago. One reason sitcoms guttered out after Seinfeld may have been their predictability: too many people sitting on couches, peeling off one-liners. Seinfeld was the apotheosis of this kind of comedy, but like Raymond Carver, it inspired numerous lesser imitators that made the same approach seem stale and empty. It takes real genius to pull off a show about nothing...
...guys-wisecracking-on-a-couch school, and this fall brings plenty of weak, high-concept sitcoms like Hank, which features Kelsey Grammer as a downsized CEO. Even some more-inventive sitcoms are familiar types: FX's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is like a raucous, lowlife Seinfeld, and ABC's Better Off Ted, a workplace satire with a weird but sincere heart. But one look at Seinfeld's old home, NBC's Thursday night - with The Office, Parks, 30 Rock and the bright new outcasts-in-junior-college comedy Community - and we can see how sitcoms have become...
...final evidence of this, actually, is Seinfeld, or the resurrected version of it on Curb. When Larry David (playing himself) pitches Jerry Seinfeld his reunion idea (with an ulterior motive), they have a very Seinfeldian exchange about why David has "shifted" on his previous belief that reunions are pathetic: "I haven't shifted." "No, you've shifted." "No, there's no shift." "You've shifted!" "No shift...
...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...