Word: sitcomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nickelodeon signs off. The channel offers mostly old reruns, from The Donna Reed Show to Saturday Night Live, but the retreads are given a self-parodying spin with tongue-in-cheek promos (a "How to Be Donna Reed" home-study course) and special events like a "Do-It-Yourself Sitcom" contest. In that one, viewers were asked why their life ought to be a comedy series. Three families were then chosen to act out their own mini-sitcoms, with the help of guest stars like Eve Plumb of The Brady Bunch...
...course of true love takes some strange turns in Roseanne, ABC's new hit sitcom starring comedian Roseanne Barr. This blunt-spoken family may not win any awards for Wonder-bread wholesomeness, but not since The Cosby Show has a TV clan achieved such instant rapport with the American public. Since its debut in mid-October, the show has consistently finished in the Nielsen Top Ten, one week even landing in the heady No. 2 spot, behind only the indestructible...
...though hardly unprecedented. Its forebears range from The Honeymooners and All in the Family to, more recently, the Fox network's raunchy satire Married . . . with Children. Still, the show's grungy ambience and gleeful puncturing of TV ideals of happy domesticity have made it the most daring new sitcom of the fall...
...team responsible for The Cosby Show, Roseanne presents the flip side of the impossibly perfect Huxtables. Yet the two shows have some key similarities: both were inspired by the monologues of a stand-up comic, and both depend on loosely structured, slice-of-life episodes rather than sitcom contrivances. A typical Roseanne segment might revolve around something as prosaic as a visit to a restaurant or a discussion of how to pay the bills. (Roseanne's strategy: "You pay the ones marked final notice, and you throw the rest away.") Best of all, behind the put-downs and childish taunting...
...easily supplied by any reporter with a tough question, and it should be, every day. Few things this year upset me more than when newspapers gave their campaign coverage to TV or entertainment critics, who reviewed the performances of presidential nominees a paragraph above those of ABC sitcom actors. The saddest thing of all is that these entertainment reviews were more insightful than the political commentary...