Word: sitcomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...episode of HBO's new sitcom 1st & Ten opens with a shot of two comely lasses soaping themselves in a locker-room shower. Their endowments are on full display and duly noted by two football jocks ogling them from the doorway. The casual nudity may be startling to some viewers, especially since it has nothing to do with anything that follows. But for veteran watchers of cable TV series, such obligatory "skin scenes" are old hat. Their purpose is not so much titillation as information. The message: This is cable, folks, not network...
More and more, that is the only way to tell. As cable fights for viewers in the competitive TV marketplace, it is turning increasingly to sitcoms and other network-style series. 1st & Ten, which debuted in August, follows the fortunes of a struggling pro football team owned by a sexy divorcee. Showtime's newest entry is Washingtoon, a sitcom about a naive freshman Senator. The Disney Channel last season scored with Still the Beaver, an update of the old network comedy Leave It to Beaver, and this month introduced Danger Bay, an adventure series about a family that saves animals...
...telecasts reruns of such defunct network series as United States and Breaking Away. Nickelodeon, the children's channel, is trying to attract older viewers at night with reruns of chestnuts like The Donna Reed Show and Route 66. Even MTV now interrupts its playlist of rock videos with a sitcom on Sunday nights, an import from Britain called The Young Ones...
...language and subject matter. Usually that simply means a gratuitous glimpse of skin here, an expletive undeleted there. Brothers' treatment of homosexuality, for example, is a touch more explicit than ABC or CBS might allow. Yet in most ways the show is indistinguishable from a typical Norman Lear sitcom of the mid-1970s...
...newest cable sitcoms are even less adventurous. Washingtoon, which stars Tom Callaway as the dippy legislator, promises a biting look at the ways of Washington, but its political satire is toothless and its performers charmless. In 1st & Ten, the curvaceous team owner (Delta Burke) talks football as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically, and the gridiron goons who surround her (a womanizing quarterback, a dumb lineman named Bubba, an oily general manager in cahoots with the Mob) are well past sitcom retirement age. The bottom drawer in comedy's bargain basement, however, belongs to the new sitcoms showing...