Word: seinfeldisms
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...buzz wagon. Ellie has a pay-cable veneer--an edgy narrative style (each story unfolds in real time), a cinematic look and no laugh track--but the safe heart of a network show. As a lounge singer of a certain age sleeping with her band's married guitarist, Seinfeld alumna Julia Louis-Dreyfus, above, has a bittersweet charm (and, yes, she can sing), but it's lost amid wacky-neighbor jokes and slapstick. Faith, from Sex and the City scribe Jenny Bicks, wears its cable pedigree too obviously. Faith (Sarah Paulson, in red) dumps her fiance--a man so clearly...
...American sitcoms to draw an audience eager to see people on TV who looked like them, the big networks went even whiter. White folks watch Friends, and black folks watch Steve Harvey, so held the new wisdom, and never their channel surfing shall meet. (In 1996 the melanin-poor Seinfeld ranked No. 2 among white viewers and No. 89 among blacks...
...second successful character while the public is still holding on to the last one, not to mention seeing her or him nightly on syndicated reruns. Louis-Dreyfus and Alexander made fun of exactly that situation on recent episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom made by and starring Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. In one scene, Louis-Dreyfus and David, playing themselves, pitch a show called I'm Not Evelyn, about an actress who can't get work because she's pigeonholed as the character she used to play. Louis-Dreyfus, however, has never pursued that sitcom idea...
There aren't many times when network execs are so open to out-of-the-box ideas, and so Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has spent the past four years raising her kids and living on fat Seinfeld royalties, is jumping in with hers. "It's not like I was dying to leap back into this," she says. "I was just excited by this idea." Her new sitcom, Watching Ellie, which debuts on NBC at the end of next month, is innovation packed. In addition to nixing the laugh track, using a single camera that follows the characters around, inserting songs...
Zucker may be trying to overcome having given Emeril Lagasse a sitcom, but Louis-Dreyfus has to deal with the expectations that come from having been in the most successful show of the past decade. The expectations have led to articles about the Seinfeld Curse--which has been blamed for the quick demise of both The Michael Richards Show in the fall 2000 season and this season's Jason Alexander bomb, Bob Patterson. But 0 for 2 in the world of sitcoms is actually about right. The vast majority of shows don't make it past one season. Louis-Dreyfus...