Word: sitcoms
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...campaign worked--so well that ABC picked it up as a sitcom for the fall. And the knee-jerk critical snarking began. Of course the show would be bad--it came from a commercial! What's next? scoffed the Philadelphia Daily News. A buddy sitcom for the Mac and PC guys...
...movies, so it needs to look down on something--even if that something is the advertising that allows much of TV to exist. But my skepticism about Cavemen is just the opposite: that the commercials may be too good--too elegant, dry and subtle--to be made into a sitcom...
...bills. The conversational humor of The Office--which Lawson cites as a model for the cavemen spots--owes a debt to the deadpan ads from FedEx, Monster.com and so on that target the same upscale demographic. The crossover hasn't always worked: Baby Bob, a talking-baby sitcom based on an ad, was insipid. But Max Headroom, a black-humored sci-fi series based on a Coca-Cola campaign itself based on a British TV show, was brilliantly subversive, set in a media-saturated dystopia in which it was illegal to turn...
...another by competing in a kind of verbal bowling tournament - is as old as the Friars Club, as familiar as The Man Show (actually a favorite of mine, in its early Comedy Central years), as intense and obscene as The Aristocrats. It's also the ribald companionship of the sitcom writing room, a basically male preserve where the scribes often engage in sexually explicit jokes about the show's cast, as an assistant copies it all down. (In 1999 one such assistant, Amaani Lyle of the Friends staff, brought a sexual discrimination suit against the writers for burning her ears...
...more serious work too. He won a Tony in 1962 (in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and a nomination for directing Julie Christie in a 1997 revival of The Gin Game, and he tutored Bette Midler, Peter Boyle and Lily Tomlin in acting. The openly gay sitcom regular (The Ghost & Mrs. Muir; Love, American Style) once joked that his near constant TV presence was his revenge on an NBC executive who told him that "they don't allow queers on television...