I love sitcoms but I don't have a great sense of their history. These are my thoughts while I work through a few classic sitcoms from the '70s to the present.
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Roseanne and emotions
There's a lot that separates MTM-style comedies (like Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers) from Norman Lear-style comedies (like All in the Family and Roseanne), but one of the most interesting to me isn't their style of humour or how often they address social issues. It's how badly the shows allow their characters to feel. In MTM-style sitcoms, there are serious moments, for sure, but they're often rooted in positivity, as when one character helps another out of a jam to cement how great friends they are. For Lear-style shows, there's a tendency for dramatic moments to come out of a darker place, as in the Roseanne episode I just watched, "Guilt By Disassociation." Roseanne loses a job at the last minute and it leads to a harrowing scene of her fighting with Dan at her own surprise party. She breaks down completely by the end, and though it's obvious to the audience that she'll work through her problems, for a moment it seems as though she might not. Since I started this project with two shows from the MTM school of sitcoms, these scenes aren't something I'm used to seeing, and it's often quite shocking whenever they turn up. Norman Lear, and the shows more influenced by his approach to sitcoms, allowed his characters to get to very dark places, and let them work through them on their own. There's an undercurrent of love to both types of sitcom, but Lear makes the characters have to fight to find it. And it often makes relationships a little more realistic. I've said before that I love the way Roseanne and Dan interact, joking around like a real couple would, but it's the way they handle these dark moments that really cements how well their relationship is portrayed. It's absolutely my favourite thing about the show so far, but I'm happy to say that right now everything else is right there behind it.
Roseanne season 2
Roseanne's season 2 premiere, "Inherit the Wind," feels almost like a different show from the first season. The writing is sharp, the cast is game for anything, and the story is small and realistic. It turns a fart into a plot, then makes it work far better than it ever should. It feels like every aspect of the show has improved, and almost all my problems with the first season have disappeared. I'll have to see if this quality can be sustained from now on, but from the way the show has addressed all of its issues, I have high hopes. And my god was it funny. This one episode might have made me laugh more than the whole first season. Now I'm starting to see what all the fuss is about.
Friday, 17 February 2012
Roseanne and straw antagonists
The back half of season 1 has seen some improvements for Roseanne, but it’s still more hit or miss than I’d like it to be. My main problem with it at this point is dealing in a kind of sitcom trope that I’ll call straw antagonists. A straw antagonist is a frequent element in sitcoms, though maybe a little less so today. Basically, it consists of a character whose only purpose is to annoy the audience and then get defeated (or told off) by one of the show’s protagonists. It’s an easy way to create conflict in a typically low-stakes genre, and it also serves to increase the audience’s sympathy for the protagonists. At its worst, however, it can be seen as transparent wish-fulfillment for writers and viewers, and can throw off the audience’s suspension of disbelief.



As I said before, Roseanne is the first sitcom I’ve watched for this project that hasn’t gotten me on its side immediately. It’s slowly been shedding elements I haven’t enjoyed as the first season has gone on, but quite a few are still there, including this one. I’m really hoping the show made the right decisions in regard to its less enjoyable elements, because I really do want to love it. I have high hopes for season 2.
Monday, 13 February 2012
Introduction
Hi there! I'm Paul. I'm a big sitcom fan, but I haven't seen many of the classics. Last summer I decided to work through some of the most important sitcoms. I wrote a bit about my experience watching Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers, and Roseanne on my personal blog already, but I decided that in the interest of making this project more exciting, I should give it its own blog. Any posts before this one are copied exactly from my personal blog, so they sometimes lack a bit of context. I'm now almost done season 1 of Roseanne, and so far it's a show I'm not enjoying as much as MTM and Cheers, but I'm confident I'll come around to it soon.
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Roseanne and jokes
Tiny Roseanne update: though the show hasn't yet
figured out how to make standard sitcom setup-punchline jokes seem
natural, I'm really enjoying how it's getting laughs from scenes where
Dan and Roseanne are joking around with each other like a real couple
would. They pull impressions, sing songs, and make each other laugh, and
there are no stilted punchlines in sight. Hopefully more of the show
will be devoted to that sort of thing as it goes along!
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
Roseanne and "one big laugh"
So far in my big sitcom project, I've figured that if a
show can give me one big laugh, one that feels earned and true to its
characters, it's worth sticking with for a while. Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers both did it in their pilots, but Roseanne
took until the end of its fifth episode to really get to me. I've got a
few problems with the show at this stage (mostly regarding Roseanne's
acting abilities and the hooting-and-hollering audience), but I think
I'll be happy to stick with it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)