Word: sitcoms
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...reminiscing, they will have little left to pine for once they're actually old. The 1994 movie Reality Bites noted Gen X's penchant for instant nostalgia with its recent college grads singing Schoolhouse Rock ditties. This premature sentimentality might explain why That '70s Show, Fox's sweetly frothy sitcom about small-town teens, is a hit among viewers who, in the Carter era, were wearing pj's with footies. (Its median audience age is 31; its characters would be in their early 40s now.) That in turn explains why, last summer, Fox asked the '70s creative team...
...build a comedy out of shoulder pads alone. '70s also began life as a gimmick looking for a sitcom; what kept it fresh were its characters, especially Topher Grace's naive, deadpan Eric Forman and his tough love, frequently laid-off dad Red (Kurtwood Smith). '80s is full of unlikable stereotypes who were already well-parodied cliches two decades ago. There's Roger, the materialistic go-getter (Eddie Shin); there's Tuesday, a snarly punk with a spiked hairdo (Chyler Leigh) who delivers lines--"So I'm punk. Deal with it"--that an actual punk would sooner safety...
...challenge of creating a second successful character while the public is still holding on to the last one, not to mention seeing her or him nightly on syndicated reruns. Louis-Dreyfus and Alexander made fun of exactly that situation on recent episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom made by and starring Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. In one scene, Louis-Dreyfus and David, playing themselves, pitch a show called I'm Not Evelyn, about an actress who can't get work because she's pigeonholed as the character she used to play. Louis-Dreyfus, however, has never pursued...
Originally the show was called 22 Minutes with Eleanor Riggs--the running time of a sitcom without commercials--but that turned out to be inaccurate, since the networks now run more than eight minutes of commercials in their expensive prime-time slots. "The network didn't want to point that out," Hall says. Unlike Fox's real-time thriller 24, whose pace is quickened by several intersecting stories (and which neither Hall nor Louis-Dreyfus has seen yet), Ellie feels a little slow, and the dearth of standard sitcom jokes makes it seem less funny than you might expect. Much...
...eccentricities of Milo Addica and Will Rokos' plot make the film seem like a bizarre sitcom pilot (racist guy with a black lady friend saddles his racist dad with a black roommate). But the cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story...