Word: sitcomming
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...many ways, Sports Night is very conventional--a cable sports show could serve well as a setting for an updated Murphy Brown. But the show is more advanced than that. In the past two decades, sitcoms haven't changed much, whereas TV dramas have become far more sophisticated in both form and content. What the creators of Sports Night have done is take some of the techniques that are familiar in dramas and apply them to a comedy. The result, on account of its richer atmosphere, its rhythm, its more realistic style and its subject matter, is a show that...
...decades, sitcoms have consisted of a few people standing on a fake-looking set barking jokes at each other. On Sports Night, the camera moves; people move. Like all sitcoms, it is shot before an audience, but with its sets and editing, it manages to stretch the genre's visual limitations. Forgoing the march-time comic pace of the typical sitcom, the show's dialogue includes a mix of throwaway lines, banter, long speeches and TV-techno talk, which provide a particular touch of ER-like authenticity...
...strident accusers the bland and vapid ones are, of course, also questionable. This said, Ian McKellan may be given credit for giving the masterful performance one expects of him. Todd Renfro's acting (as the boy who discovers Dussander) is generally bland and flat, more appropriate to a sitcom, or an after-school special, than the thriller that is being attempted here. John T. Maier...
...landscape of Pleasantville, however artificial and hokey, is cute, and at times beautiful. There's a deep affection for the old golly-gee school of American television, even though the film sets out to make the point that reality, however ugly, is better than the monotonous trap of sitcom life. Freedom and color, we learn, are better than Pleasantville's forced cheeriness in various shades of gray...
...film suggests that we can indeed learn something from old TV shows. Pleasantville is not so much crying out against television media, as has become the fashion, but rather suggesting we affix a gentle warning label on the myths that it purveys. We can watch stiff sitcom characters in their make-believe worlds and gain the wisdom that it is better, all things considered, to have the element of the unexpected in our lives. Harvard students, take note: the possibility of things not going according to plan is, after all, what keeps us real...