Word: seinfeldisms
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Once upon a time, kids, there was a TV show called Seinfeld. It was a "sitcom." This was a term for a popular genre - watched by tens of millions of viewers - in which amusing things were said and done not by politicians trying to dance or amateurs trying to sing but by professional actors pretending to be real people, for 22 minutes at a time. When Seinfeld aired its finale in 1998, about 76 million people tuned...
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...
...funny thing - literally - is happening in prime time. Sitcoms don't have the ratings or reach Seinfeld did, and probably no single one will again. But collectively, TV sitcoms are better and more diverse than they have been in years. Any roundup of the best new TV shows of 2009 would be mostly, if not entirely, comedies. And they're expanding the definition of what sitcoms can be: musical, complex, more than a half-hour long and sometimes even dead serious...
...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...