Word: sitcoms
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...harsh to call them the over-the-hill gang. But TV's newest batch of prime-time detectives are, let us say, not the sleuths you'd feel most comfortable hiring to follow an armed robber down a dark alley. Cosby, now 56 and with a No. 1-rated sitcom under his (expanding) belt, not only resurfaced in I Spy Returns on CBS but also played a police crime consultant in The Cosby Mysteries, the first of a planned series of NBC movies. Dick Van Dyke, now an avuncular 68, portrays a crime-solving physician in the CBS series Diagnosis...
...idea that a 1970s sitcom could seem like paradise lost to a bunch of recent college grads looking (and not looking) for entry-level jobs while trying to find entry-level understanding of adulthood is a measure of something. The downsizing of American possibilities, maybe. Or the murkiness of American reality as it's refracted in sound-bite TV and a trashy commercial culture...
Brooks' colleagues on MTM, Taxi, The Associates, The Tracey Ullman Show and the ever glorious Simpsons speak in awe of his knack for sitcom storymaking. "He'll jump out of his chair," says Reiss, "and start spilling out a story as if he's recounting something he's already seen. But he's making it up on the spot. He'll pitch the whole story, the turns it takes; the jokes are there, and it'll have a sweet ending. Once we started to tell him a Simpsons story line: Homer has to work at the Kwik-E Mart...
...commentator on TV and want to demonstrate what a dreadful sitcom Cafe Americain is, or how sappy Barbara Walters' interviews are, or the creepiness of Michael Jackson's music videos. Could I turn on the VCR, pluck out some telling snippets, then use those clips as video "quotes" to illustrate my criticisms? No, I could not, as I discovered firsthand, again and again, in the course of producing three specials for two different networks between 1990 and 1992. Although fair use theoretically applies to television just as it does to magazines and newspapers, as a practical matter it exists intermittently...
...when the story has been neatly unravelled and the characters all smile with great relief, one can't help but see the simple beauty in Gilbert's formulaic creations. Like a nineteenth-century sitcom, H.M.S. Pinafore provides us with a comfortable, cozy story, slickly done and sheathed in a fine sugar coating...