Word: sitcoms
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...reality into art with a sort of Irish efficiency: when an Irish Republican Army terrorist-hero blows up a British army truck in midafternoon, the deed will probably be a song in the pubs that night. Such ready glorification is one reason that no peaceful settlement has been found. Sitcom writers have developed similar reflexes. Topicality, however, ages a script rapidly. It strands an episode in time, and makes reruns seem alienated, quaint...
Early 40s: "She's a sitcom star...
...rebuttal to Quayle will not end there. An upcoming episode of Hearts Afire, a new sitcom set in Washington, features a scene in which a dull-witted conservative Senator (George Gaynes) sees Murphy Brown on TV for the first time. What has Dan Quayle got against that "good-looking woman?" he asks his chief aide (John Ritter). "Well, Senator, she had a baby out of wedlock," the aide says. "But she's not real, is she?" replies the Senator, echoing the snide chorus of derision that greeted Quayle's attack on "a fictional character...
Love and War seems even more artificial when compared with Mad About You, the season's best new sitcom. Paul and Jamie (Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt) are Manhattan newlyweds with no cute eccentricities, no clashing political views, no comical disparities in social background. Their problems are the little ones that occur when even compatible people are tossed into the same house together for the first time. Just getting out of the apartment in the morning is a Feydeau farce: she rushes back to open the window (the dog needs air), he rushes back to close it (a burglar might...
...Reiser, a former stand-up comic, has knife-edge timing and a full repertoire of nervous tics, and Hunt manages to be both charming and exasperating at the same time. One sign of a sitcom that cares more about its characters than its gag lines: when Paul and Jamie start to fight, they ask their dinner guests to leave the room -- carrying their potential wisecracks with them. Privacy is one concept that becomes more precious with...