Word: sitcomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Readers in 1923 had never heard a movie actor talk, never imagined a television screen. Technology kept bringing new transformations: long-playing records, high-speed cameras, videotape equipment. Not only arts changed but audiences as well. Local orchestras, opera, ballet and theater companies proliferated. So did the electronic babel (sitcom disc-jockey disco-rock singing commercial) that now seems an inescapable fact of life. In the age of the mass audience, more people could watch a Shakespeare play on TV than had ever seen it in all previous performances; more still watch network fare like Three's Company...
...will never get him into the pages of Gentlemen's Quarterly, but it does get lower-case t a lecture from upper-case T, who explains, "You gotta be your own original." When you're 15 years old, 4 ft. 2 in. and the star of a sitcom in its sixth season, that kind of advice is about as useful as a Mandinka toupee...
Movies and pay cable may brandish their R-rated license, but none of the saltier four-letter words has yet passed the lips of a prime-time hero. No sitcom vixen has bared so much as a nipple. In the new shows one can detect a struggling within the mass-media straitjacket of language and sex. Prime time is like a twelve-year-old tentatively imitating his big bad brother: sneaking a cigarette, practicing a curse word, miming an open-mouthed kiss. Sex can only be suggested, of course, but it may also be suggestive; one smoldering glance can steam...
...five years ago, threw off the "disgusting curse of being a good girl" and had an affair with Alex. Sam (Tom Berenger), once a Movement rhetorician, went to Hollywood and became the macho private eye in a hit TV series, which one of his pals describes as "a sitcom with a machete." Karen (JoBeth Williams), who used to be a closet poet, is now the restless wife of an ad executive. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) made Alex famous by writing about him in the Michigan Daily; now he profiles 14-year-old blind baton twirlers for PEOPLE and tries vainly...
...pair of comedies dominate the late-summer box office. National Lampoon's Vacation is a lame, hard-to-sit-through farce starring Chevy Chase as a food-additives specialist who takes his '50s sitcom family on a calamitous cross-country car trip. The other hit, Paul Brickman's Risky Business, is yet another entry in the lamentable tits-and-zits genre of teen-age sex comedies: a young man finds love and success by becoming a pimp. Still, this film is deftly made, the humor nicely understated, the leading actors (Tom Cruise and Rebecca de Mornay) smart...