Word: seinfeldisms
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...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...
...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...
...York City doctor finding quirky meaning in Alaska on Northern Exposure.) But this backlash isn't about just money. It's about a general cultural exhaustion, about moving from post-Vietnam mistrust of institutions (The X-Files) to respect for them (The West Wing), from surrogate families (Seinfeld) to flawed but richly explored ones (The Sopranos). Above all, it is about rediscovering community in a culture that lionized the individual. Even the dark drama Six Feet Under features a gay character finding solace in, of all uncool places, his church. Most conspicuous is the World War II mania, from Saving...
Like Smallville, director Barry Sonnenfeld's parody The Tick bets that old-fashioned superhero tales will not, so to speak, fly today. The dim-bulb hero (Patrick Warburton, Seinfeld's Puddy) is a font of cockeyed metaphors ("I will spread my buttery justice over your every nook and cranny!"), and in the pilot he fights a Soviet robot built in 1979 to kill Jimmy Carter, as if to admit that the very idea of the infallible superhero is decades outdated. Based on Ben Edlund's cult comic, this is exactly the kind of highly ironic, hero-puncturing entertainment that...