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TV
6

The Evolution of Comedy

by | March 27th, 2012

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 70s Show.

Adams blames the amnesiac syndication outlets for audiences who think that “the four decades of TV that was produced before the heyday of TGIF begins to look (shudder) dated.” But this ignores a particularly important fact: classic television, like any other classic art, is dated. TV, like any other medium, is constantly evolving, and moments that were shocking and revolutionary at one time look commonplace after twenty years, and clichéd after forty. Film purists will jump all over me for this one, but it's hard to appreciate the unorthodoxy of Citizen Kane's flashback-driven narrative in 2012, when everything from Highlander to Lost takes advantage of the form.

This conundrum is especially prevalent for comedy. Adams' piece may be about television in general, but almost all of his examples are sitcoms; in addition to the shows mentioned above, we get The Andy Griffith Show, Get Smart, Cheers and Taxi, and that's far from an exhaustive list. For many years, comedies, not dramas, ruled the TV landscape, and comedy is all about pushing boundaries: of subject matter, of taste, of narrative. READ MORE

Mashups
1

Why Arrested Development and Game of Thrones Are Perfect Together

by | March 6th, 2012

My sophomore year of college, my roommate and I started a tradition that we called “Arrested Development Quote of the Day,” which, per the self-explanatory title, consisted of one of us writing a different Arrested quote on our whiteboard every morning. We kept it up for eight months (give or take) without running out of quotes, and along the way we realized something: Arrested's one-liners are often quite funny out of context, but they're even better when you know the story behind them. For every out-of-context gem like “If you weren't all the way on the other side of the room, I'd slap your face,” there are ten quotes, like “And that's why you always leave a note,” that are only hilarious with the appropriate background information.

That may seem like a fairly self-explanatory statement, but it's the key to the appeal of another one of my pop-culture obsessions, the endlessly entertaining Arrested Westeros. For those of you who haven't stumbled upon this slice of awesome, Arrested Westeros is a tumblr that combines quotes from Arrested with screengrabs from Game of Thrones. It's not the only GoT mash-up: A Song of Ice and Wire combines HBO's epic fantasy series with HBO's critically acclaimed police drama, and A Song of ISIS and Fire puts Sterling Archer's words in Ned Stark's mouth. Arrested Westeros, however, is funnier than its counterparts because, while the Archer- and Wire-based versions play off the surface similarities between the shows, Arrested Westeros goes deeper, and in the process shows just how fucked up the Bluth family is. READ MORE

Unpopular Opinions
15

Why Bridesmaids Deserved Its Best Picture Snub

by | February 21st, 2012

Unpopular Opinions is a new weekly column in which a writer takes a stand against popular opinion, whether it's asserting the true merit of a supposedly guilty pleasure or dissenting against the universally lauded.

The inescapable hum of buzz that has surrounded Bridesmaids since the film's release peaked at the end of January, just in time for its exclusion from the Best Picture race to generate outrage in critical circles. The Atlantic decried the snub as evidence that the Academy hates broad, raunchy comedies, while director Paul Feig was quoted in the Huffington Post saying that the film was too “relatable,” a dig at the kind of artsy fare that normally garners Oscar acclaim.

The one thing that none of the film's defenders actually did, however, was take a critical look at Bridesmaids. If they had, they might have spotted the fatal flaw lurking at its core. For a movie written by women, with a cast made up of some of the funniest females on the planet, its core female characters are offensively reductive stereotypes: a rich bitch, a reactive adolescent, and the world's most passive bride. READ MORE

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