Word: sitcomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...among the top ten shows. Moviegoers made a bimedia star of Family Ties' Michael J. Fox, whose Back to the Future and Teen Wolf were the biggest box-office winners of the past two weeks. Fox could be the first teen throb since John Travolta to commute between a sitcom and movie stardom. Just another lightning stroke of NBC luck...
...cacophony of today's voices, Kanfer, a senior editor of TIME, invents some delightful ones of his own: an aging sleight-of-hand artist called the Wizard, who sets up a fake country; an oil-rich emir who produces a TV sitcom to sell his political message with reworked Borscht Belt shtick; a splendidly confused interpreter who adores women's legs and finds his paradise among the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Serious evil--the garage sale of the title --lurks here too, and the hero, a TV newsman, finds, as so many innocent investigators do these days, that...
Unlike The Goonies, whose narrative is a rapid succession of hotfoots, Back to the Future has a long fuse that, halfway through, explodes into comic epiphany. Until then, the film is nicely propelled by the ingratiating Fox (from the NBC sitcom Family Ties) and some snappy then-and-now jokes (in 1985 the local theater is showing Orgy American Style, while in 1955 the attraction is a Ronald Reagan western). The choice of year is canny, for 1955 is close to the historical moment when television, rock 'n' roll and kids mounted their takeover of American culture...
...continuing segment on Gleason's one-hour variety show for CBS. Ralph and Alice lived in that dingy two-room apartment on Chauncey Street even then, and their best friends were already their upstairs neighbors, Ed and Trixie Norton (Art Carney and Joyce Randolph). Unlike most other sitcom couples of the '50s, the Honeymooners were not middle class, but the working poor. Ralph earned $62 a week driving a bus; Norton worked, as he liked to say, as an engineer of subterranean sanitation--in the sewer system. Though Alice's quick mind would have enabled her to run Ralph...
...Cosby Show's achievements have been rather wildly overstated. To be sure, at a time when most TV families inhabit a farcical never-never land, the series has much to recommend it. Its structure is unusually loose and laid- back for a sitcom, avoiding gimmicky plots and rapid-fire gag lines. Its subject matter is the recognizable trivia of family life: a son who won't clean up his room, a child who is afraid to sleep alone after seeing a scary movie, a visit from Grandpa...