Sitcoms

[Rosalinas Spare Wand]

You're wrong about the Big Bang Theory, IMO. Penny is not a one dimensional character and I'm sure many fans of BBT would agree with me on that. People care about the characters and if you don't believe it, go to the BBT message board at imdb sometime. I'm certainly no critic, but to me, the show is well written and has been from the beginning. Where else can you see a group of nerds bidding on the time machine from the movie "The time Machine", winning it and fighting over who gets to keep it?  Another thing that separates this show from 2 1/2 Men is there's actually character development on BBT.

Such a deep and meticulously well crafted work.
As someone who leaves Fox LA on the background while he studies, I've had to sit through countless Big Bang Theory reruns and there is not a single shred of character development in this god forsaken show. What she's talking about is the shift from LOL NERDS ARE VIRGINS to LOL NERDS CANNOT INTO RELATIONSHIPS. I'd say its the same kind of poorly written relationships they forced in all of Friends run, but at least Fiends cast was believable and their relationship wasn't just another way to slap another SUCH A NERD XD joke into the show.

Fuck I despise this show so much.

[Kiddington]

This one's for you, Kidd!

Agree with every word.

...and speaking of BBT, here's another insightful read into all of the things wrong with it.

[Foggle]

This one's for you, Kidd!

I would say that "Dharma & Greg" kind of ruins your argument here. Not only was it a multidimensional sitcom, but it's female characters were very well fleshed out, very layered and more than one-note. Kitty, Abby, Dharma and Jane all had flaws, were likeable but also human.

It was a funny series with layers to it, it covered serious topics when needed and still kept the light flavor it needed.


The Big Bang Theory is also very good, it has a lot of layers to it

[Foggle]

...and speaking of BBT, here's another insightful read into all of the things wrong with it.

The Big Bang Theory has one of the most intrusive and obnoxious laugh tracks on TV right now. Any actual enjoyment that you could get out of the show is suffocated underneath it. And even more bizarre, it's actually generated by a live studio audience

[Kiddington]

People actually remember Dharma and Greg?

What a world.

[Spark Of Spirit]

CW

Fall 2012

Mondays
8:00PM 90210
9:00PM Gossip Girl / The Carrie Diaries (mid-season, NEW!)

Tuesdays
8:00PM Hart of Dixie
9:00PM Emily Owens, M.D. (NEW!)

Wednesdays
8:00PM Arrow (NEW!)
9:00PM Supernatural

Thursdays
8:00PM The Vampire Diaries
9:00PM Beauty and the Beast (NEW!)

Fridays
8:00PM America's Next Top Model
9:00PM Nikita

Mid-Season 2013:

New Series: The Carrie Diaries (drama), Cult (drama)

Read more: http://blog.sitcomsonline.com/2012/05/cw-upfront-2012-13-fall-2012-schedule.html#ixzz1v9fO4Xqo

It looks like they're still going after that pointless niche!

[Foggle]

Are any of those even sitcoms?

[Spark Of Spirit]

Are any of those even sitcoms?

Nope, the streak is alive. Ever since they merged, they haven't produced one sitcom.

I'm also not sure why Arrow isn't called Green Arrow.

[Avaitor]

Arrow will probably do okay. Even though the CW has been considered to be the "woman's" station, their biggest hits are shows that appeal to the male demographic- Smallville, Supernatural, WWE before they took it off...

[Angus]

Hmm, I would think Supernatural appeals to both. Still need to get back to marathoning those eppies.

[Avaitor]

It really of does, if the Winchester shippers mean anything. But compared to just about everything else on the network, Supernatural seems like the only thing that would appeal to a straight male.

[Spark Of Spirit]

"1997-98: the season that slaughtered the sitcom"

I was revisiting NewsRadio season 5, and on one of the commentaries, Paul Simms mentioned a season ?where NBC had 18 sitcoms. So you can thank them for killing the multi-camera sitcom.? I checked, and discovered the season he was referring to was 1997-8. Though the Wikipedia schedule doesn?t apply to the entire year (NewsRadio was moved from Tuesday to Wednesday at some point, and shows rotated in and out of the Thursday slots), NBC did in fact have 18 sitcom slots that year: Monday through Thursday all had four sitcoms followed by a drama at 10, and there were two other sitcoms on Sunday. Now that?s what I call overkill.

The sense of a sitcom glut was increased by the fact that nearly all these shows were identical: four-camera sitcoms about young, affluent white people living in New York City. This description applied to the good ones (NewsRadio, Seinfeld, Friends) and the bad ones (almost anything airing after Seinfeld or Friends) alike. NBC?s overdose of comedy, combined with the fact that most of the comedies were the same and that the new ones weren?t in the class of Seinfeld/Friends/Frasier, made the network a joke and made it clear that they didn?t have much in reserve to replace Seinfeld. And this was Seinfeld?s last season.

It was in a way the comedy equivalent of ABC?s decision, a few years later, to do Who Wants to Be A Millionaire every night. In drama, CBS is currently becoming a punchline for a similar reason, since they have the same type of drama on over and over. It?s taken longer for that strategy to become a problem (maybe because dramas are easier to schedule than comedies, which have to be paired off), but the failure of the Criminal Minds spinoff, Laurence Fishburne leaving CSI and the lower-than-expected numbers for Hawaii 5-0 suggest that the network might finally have passed the saturation point.

But back to comedy, 1997-8 also saw the collapse of the family comedy, also because of over-saturation, though of a more specialized type. ABC filled its TGIF lineup with clones of Sabrina, and CBS, which was trying to launch its own family comedy block, unveiled its own magical-person comedy, the legendarily terrible Meego. The CBS lineup never got off the ground; ABC?s TGIF brand was never able to fully recover from having three versions of the same show in one night.

The lesson is a simple and familiar one: TV networks can never resist copying their own successes. It works for a while ? after all, NBC reacted to the success of Seinfeld by rolling out Friends and Mad About You. But 18 versions of the same thing is probably too much.

He's right. Not only did that year feature the rise of boy bands and nu metal, but also the death of the sitcom. Man, was 1997 lousy!

[Spark Of Spirit]

Also, while perusing Sitcoms Online, I found this article about how Friends inadvertently destroyed the genre on network TV.

The worst part is that the article is 8 years old and still relevant.

[Kiddington]

Good article when it comes to the precedent that it would end up setting, but the author still gave Friends way too much credit.

There is no singular era of that show that I find enjoyable. Even the early seasons - you know, the ones that people swear by - are still not that funny to me. I don't really find any of these characters particularly humorous or enjoyable to watch (probably the "funniest" of the group is Joey or maybe Chandler, and I'd hardly consider them good enough to make it worth watching), and all that "comedy" he's referring to... I just don't see it.

Seinfeld basically did everything that Friends did, only 1000 times better (take the aforementioned sex jokes in that article, for example. Seinfeld knew how to handle that stuff in a clever, almost veiled manner; Friends was as crass and loud about it as possible, just for the sake of being crass and loud). I know that's a tired, dead beaten horse of an argument in this day and age, but I still stand by it.

One thing that article did really get right was the soap-opera atmosphere of Friends, though. That one I totally agree with. Especially in the later seasons, you never knew what you were getting from this show; a sitcom, or a soapy, mellow-dramatic love story. That's just one of the many problems I've had with this show over the years.

[Spark Of Spirit]

To be honest, I think How I Met Your Mother pretty much took the Friends formula and made it work.

But it's true that even today EVERY SINGLE multi-camera sitcom on network TV has to have the stink of Friends and its cliches on it. No one seems to get that it was a fluke that will never happen again.

And I haven't watched Nick @ nite since they put Friends on it. Every time I try to watch it, the show grates on my nerves. And it's taking over the whole "family" block. Friends is not a family show.