Splitsider

Danza! In the immortal words of Ladies Love Cool James, "Don't call it a comeback, Danza's been here for years, but now he's going to be more here because he's set to star in a new, Vince Vaughn produced television show that is soon to be picked up by ABC " (More like Ladies Love Cool Albeit Overly Verbose James, amirite? Noiamnot). The multi-camera sitcom, currently operating under the working title The Guys, is about three old friends (old as in their age and length of time they've been friends) who decide to move in together into a bachelor pad near their respective families. In addition, it was [...]

Laughter ringers are people with infectious laughs that live-audience sitcoms plant in the audience to get the rest of the crowd going, and this article by Joel Warner investigates what it takes to join their ranks. It's definitely a good idea to try laughing as loudly as you can right now, immediately, wherever you are. Otherwise you'll never know.

Yesterday, not long after Splitsider published an article by Samer Kalaf about the long-term health of network sitcoms with long-term arcs, Hallie Cantor followed up with a post, via The Hollywood Reporter, on how viewers and networks are giving up on shows if they’re not immediately great sooner than ever. That’s a terrifying thought, because unless your show has a pilot as strong as Cheers’ or Freaks and Geeks’, both of which Bradford and I covered in our list of the Ten Best Comedy Pilots in TV History, it means that you have less time than ever to make a strong impression on your audience, before [...]

In addition to appearing in roughly a billion movies in the next 12 months, The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi sold CBS a new series in which he plays a "divorced marriage counselor," doling out relationship advice while trying to pull his own life together. Or, as it would be if I controlled network programming, Aasif Mandvi plays a divorced Commander Zhao from The Last Airbender as he pursues a second career in marriage counseling. One day, my friends! One day.

First of all, let me just said that I am very pleased that the Whitney pilot reflected little of the “WOMEN ARE THE WORLD’S CURSE” pitch that has appeared on the sides of every bus for the last few months. I thought I was going to have to get laser eye removal after watching a show that could be accurately depicted by those ads, but as I suspected, no show could be that putrid and Whitney certainly was not. Well, maybe not certainly. Either way I’m 99% sure someone lost their job over that campaign, and I sleep like a chubby baby with that thought in mind.

Instead, [...]

In the aftermath of the improbable, yet somehow completely predictable, Oscar victory of a black-and-white silent film, The AV Club's Erik Adams wrote a piece asking whether television is “a medium without a past.” It's difficult for the average TV viewer — or even the obsessive one — to watch many classic shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners and All In the Family, even in the era of the DVD boxed set. Syndication space is occupied by Seinfeld and The Simpsons; Nick at Nite, where I soaked up TV history and learned all the lyrics to the Gilligan's Island theme song, is now running Friends and That [...]