Splitsider

This post is brought to you by Milk. Who needs imitations when you can have the real thing? Check out gotmilk.com. Workplace-centric sitcoms have been a TV fixture since the days of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, when it was discovered that basing a show around a group of oddballs who are forced to work together can be a successful formula for scoring laughs. As with most shows and movies, entertainment is the top priority, not realism, and that’s very much the case with the workplace comedy, where accurately depicting a job environment takes a backseat to amusing audiences.

With that [...]

2 Broke Girls has already been renewed, since it's the biggest new comedy of the year and all, and Whitney seems very likely to get renewed but that isn't enough for Whitney Cummings. This morning, E! announced that it will be adding Love You, Mean It With Whitney Cummings to its schedule. I'm going to go out on a limb and say she doesn't in fact "mean it." It's going to be paired with The Soup on Wednesday nights and will feature Whitney and sidekick Julian McCullough making fun of pop culture. Considering that both of her other shows also feature a lot of that sort of [...]

So apparently at a recent Television Critics Association panel, critics asked 2 Broke Girls showrunner Michael Patrick King about the show's offensively one-dimensional supporting characters and he – slowly, gradually – flipped the fuck out. Keep in mind, even CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler says this show needs to "dimensionalize" its supporting characters. But it looks like King really didn't want to face that criticism, instead turning defensive.

Things took a particularly uncomfortable turn when the reporter who had initially asked about Tassler's comments again tried to get King to clarify his remarks, reading the exact quote from the transcript of Tassler's executive session.

King asked the reporter [...]

Every year in the fall, and then again in the middle of winter, we get our hopes up for some of the new network sitcoms that are set to premiere on the Big Four (ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC), and The CW, kind of, and we immediately write off others. Take 2011, for instance: we all knew Whitney and Last Man Standing were going to stink, but hey, Free Agents (before it got cancelled…) and New Girl are actually kind of good! But how does this season so far (which isn’t full completely, and won’t be until Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 and Napoleon Dynamite, among others, [...]

Not to be all like, "CBS's schedule – woof," but CBS's schedule – woof.  The "big news" is they moved Two And A Half Men to Thursday nights at 8:30 so you better start figuring out if you're going to watch it or Up All Night. Oh, you're just going to DVR 2.5 Men? And then you're going to light your DVR on fire? Well played. 2 Broke Girls moves to 9, making it harder to accidently watch after How I Met Your Mother. Partners, the show about a straight guy and a gay guy who are pals, is the only new comedy. Check out the schedule below and [...]

After getting solid numbers for a couple weeks after their hiatus, Community has seemed to level off, coming in with an 1.4 18-49 rating, same as 30 Rock. The first new Office in a month came in at a 2.1, 0.3 points lower than their last original episode, which isn't what you want to see when trying to pitch a major reboot. Still, a new episode of The Office offered some lead-in bump to the season finale of Up All Night, which was up 0.3 to a 1.5 rating. For fun, or more like not fun, let’s compare those numbers (8:00-1.4, 8:30-1.4, 9:00-2.1, 9:30-1.5) to CBS's (8:00-2.8, [...]

Let’s get the eye rolling out of the way. We all know hipsters are the worst because they’ve been defined as such since the turn of the millennium when the term was reintroduced. They are all smug and unkempt and sheep-like and neighborhood-ruiners and privileged (if not over-privileged) and jerks and smelly-heads and dum-dums and HIPSTERS. They deserve to be made fun of as much as—if not more than—anybody else. But just because they’re an easy target it doesn’t mean their mocking must be effortless. Over the last four years or so, what was once a rich terrain for satire has been mired by laziness and a singular dependence [...]

Hooray! Jennifer Coolidge is coming out of the luxurious, crushed-velvet-carpeted and satin-draped cave in which I imagine her constantly reclining to join the cast of 2 Broke Girls. I might have to watch 2 Broke Girls now.

"Held next to Girls, 2 Broke Girls is a garish, loud Kabuki performance, something so discordant and ugly and dreadfully unfunny that, in its Brooklyn youth-y context, it seems like some kind of Bushwick anti-art performance piece. 'It's supposed to be hideous,' I can almost hear some character on Girls saying while nodding his head and watching the 2 Broke Girls cast flail around some Bushwick warehouse. 'It's like Brecht or something,' says his friend." — Richard Lawson watched the hour-long (oof) season finale of 2 Broke Girls so you don't have to.

Say what you will about CBS’s sitcom 2 Broke Girls, a lot of people out there love and adore the thing. It just won the People’s Choice Award for Best New TV Comedy, which, say what you will about that too, is better than getting cancelled mid-season.

I admit that after watching the pilot I convinced myself this was yet another out of touch TV-land version of what real life as a struggling waitress is like, but I still set a series recording and have watched every episode since. The ADD-era laugh track had my thumb hovering over the delete key more than a few times, and the [...]

Emily Nussbaum's New Yorker review of Whitney and 2 Broke Girls is pretty spot-on. She goes beyond the usual Sarah Silverman-Chelsea Handler comparisons and notes that the Whitney of Whitney has a lot in common with Lucille Ball:

Cummings has none of Ball’s shining charisma or her buzz of anarchy. Yet she does share Lucy’s rictus grin, her toddler-like foot-stamping tantrums, and especially her Hobbesian view of heterosexual relationships as a combat zone of pranks, bets, and manipulation from below. “This is war,” Whitney announces, before declaring yet another crazy scheme to undercut her boyfriend, and it might as well be the series’ catchphrase.

The article also considers [...]