Word: sitcomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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COMING OF AGE (CBS, Mondays, 8:30 p.m. EST). Despite low ratings last spring, this smart sitcom is getting a well-deserved second chance. Paul Dooley stars as a sour former airline pilot facing the funny -- and grim -- facts of retirement...
...sweet it is to have just one such moment in life. How bitter to have it early, and then be forced to rerun it ad nauseam, until the triumph turns into sitcom. Bitter for Gavin, for the luminous Babs, for their bookworm nephew Donnie (Timothy Hutton) and their lumbering pal Lawrence (John Goodman). The story meanders through 25 years of the changing South -- civil rights, women's rights, the capricious kingdom of celebrity -- and ends in 1981, but its moral should catch in many a yuppie throat. The price of pursuing eternal youth is catching it, like a cold...
...Good Mother, Nimoy takes a giant step away from the sitcom humor of his last baby movie (Three Men and a Baby). This one is an intense emotional film that establishes Nimoy as a director capable of causing visceral reactions in his audience...
...Sitcoms, too, are playing it safe this fall; the ambitious "dramedies" of the past few seasons have mostly been supplanted by old-fashioned gag comedies. That isn't necessarily bad. The season's funniest new show, NBC's Dear John, hardly advances the art of the sitcom, but it surely restocks it with human-scale humor. Judd Hirsch stars as a divorced schoolteacher gingerly exploring the single life. On his first visit to a singles group, he meets a sly assemblage of oddballs, including a group leader fixated on sex and a hilariously sleazy skirt chaser (Jere Burns doing...
...comedian Roseanne Barr plays a working-class mom grappling with a dull factory job, three hyperactive kids and her lazy but lovable porker of a husband (John Goodman). Barr's sullen sarcasm -- a cross between Erma Bombeck and Alice Kramden -- is a cry of revolt against years of cheery sitcom parents. Says Mom after the kids run out the door: "Quick, they're gone. Change the locks...