Word: sitcoms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once upon a time, kids, there was a TV show called Seinfeld. It was a "sitcom." This was a term for a popular genre - watched by tens of millions of viewers - in which amusing things were said and done not by politicians trying to dance or amateurs trying to sing but by professional actors pretending to be real people, for 22 minutes at a time. When Seinfeld aired its finale in 1998, about 76 million people tuned...
Starting Oct. 4, the cast of Seinfeld reunites for five episodes on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom from Seinfeld co-creator Larry David that a couple million people watch on Sunday night on a good week. Which sums up what's happened in the sitcom world since Seinfeld left. There have been sitcoms in the decade since - even great ones, like Curb and Arrested Development - but no monster hits. As the great comedy explosion of the '90s faded, networks made fewer and fewer new sitcoms, and those that got on the air were eclipsed by dramas and reality shows...
Today's best sitcoms have adapted by relearning their art from the genres that superseded them. The Office borrows its mockumentary format and the device of interviewing characters in "confessionals" from reality TV. This is a perfect fit for a show that's about the mundane routine of work life, but the filming technique - in which the handheld camera reacts almost like another character - also lends itself to sitcom wackiness. The opening of its post-Super Bowl episode (a fire drill goes wrong, leading to chaos that includes a cat being thrown through a ceiling panel) was probably the funniest...
...married women fare no better than the minorities. These are retro, sitcom-style wives, bland and humorless. Ronnie frets about kitchen tiles. Lucy lusts after the Fabio-type yoga instructor (Carlos Ponce, ripping off Hank Azaria's shtick). Cynthia lives to please her controlling husband. At least two of them seem to have shackles to throw off, but in the movie, the only things they free themselves from are their clothes, so we can see how they each measure up to those most demanding of standards of director Peter Billingsley: the ability to rock a bra and panties...
...think a lot of people probably don't realize you were part of a sitcom called A Year at the Top. The sitcom looked good. It was produced by Don Kirshner, who was a very hot rock 'n' roll producer, and Norman Lear, who was at the top of his game producing about 12 major sitcoms at once, including All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, One Day at a Time. We were a show about guys who had sold their souls to the devil to become rock stars. It was a hell of an experience, though: being...