Word: sitcoms
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...thought the world was flat, Shepherd responded, "I don't know ... I've never thought about it." That flub and the ensuing media hysteria inspired her to write Permission Slips: Every Woman's Guide to Giving Herself a Break. The comedian, who also stars in the new Lifetime sitcom Sherri, dished to TIME about how the incident played out, why women are too hard on themselves and the difficulties of being a working single mother...
...same technique to politics, with Amy Poehler playing an overzealous Indiana bureaucrat seeking to build a park on an abandoned development site occupied by a giant pit. (Throwing stimulus money into a literal hole in the ground left behind by the real estate bust: it's the official sitcom of the Great Recession.) And Modern Family, a hilarious new mock-doc on ABC, adapts the style to domestic comedy. When one half of a gay couple blames his weight gain on a nesting instinct spurred by their adoption of a baby, the scene cuts to night-vision-camera footage...
...school sitcom would have told this joke as a zinger ("Yeah, well, tell your nesting instinct it left a Ding-Dong wrapper on the kitchen counter!" [Canned laughter]). This screwball-vérité style, by adding a layer of visual irony, allows Modern Family to pack its jokes tighter (the straight line and the contradiction are simultaneous) and connects the audience more intimately. You're not just a fan; you're a voyeur...
...only dark cable comedies that have borrowed tricks from dramas. (The Office and Parks are also willing to take their characters into dramatic territory.) CBS's How I Met Your Mother is like a sitcom version of Lost: it's built around a central mystery - how the protagonist meets his eventual wife - and likes to play with nonlinear narratives, story lines that jump around in time. It's a light show, but it expects its viewers to pay much closer attention than did the sitcoms of a generation ago (as does Emmy-winning 30 Rock, which is shot through with...
This year's Starz sitcom Party Down (gearing up for a second season next year), about aspiring showbiz types working for a catering company in L.A., perfectly captures the Apatow vibe of improv-like, conversational comedy. Likewise, HBO's Bored to Death, a literary slacker-com about a writer (Jason Schwartzman) posing as a detective, has a voice and offbeat style that recall indie-film comedies - the kind, like Rushmore, that star Jason Schwartzman...