PARKS and RECREATION aka "Everything's coming up Amy"

agree that the shipper aspects are too prominent esp for one of the relatively weaker aspects of the show

They completely nailed it with April and Andy to be fair. Leslie and Ben is a good TV couple as well but there were other things driving that storyline other than will-they-won't-they.

If you pair up every character you lose the potential for secondary characters. Would be perfectly happy to see Ann introduce a succession of loser boyfriends this year.

And thats why all of these shows end up so cartoony.

Have you seen other sitcoms? Like, from any point since the form was invented?

OR maybe Ann could just stay single for a while and her character could do other things besides be pathetic in dating situations.

would love for the show to figure out what to do with Donna

I think part of the reason we don't know much about Donna is that her role in the show kind of takes on her work role, in that she doesn't want all these bozos she works with involved in her personal life in any way.

Donna is hilarious as she is, they don't need to do anything with her character.

Donna is sorely underused

I dunno, part of the reason she's so funny is that she's sparingly used. I'm fine with her being there for one-liners and occasional brief glimpses at what her life is actually like without having to involve her further as a character.

her reaction shots are the BEST

I'd like to see her ruthless efficiency played up a little more; I have the impression that when she stops lurking in the background and reacting that she is the most effective person in the office and secretly the reason why the Parks Department works.

That makes sense, her and Jerry are probably the only two employees that actually do any meaningful work.

And thats why all of these shows end up so cartoony.

Have you seen other sitcoms? Like, from any point since the form was invented?

― Old Lunch, Monday, September 24, 2012 11:02 AM (8 minutes ago)

Point taken, damn...

I was speaking a bit too broadly. I just like when shows leave open the possibility that there is still something to learn about a character, even secondary ones.

the internet meme thing... i don't think these shows are trying that hard to get something .gif'd, it's just gonna happen regardless. it happens to shows from every age! (waits for Three's Company grabs)

True, but I can't help feeling like they see memes as free marketing and analytics to what the fans want where all you had was ratings to go by before internet and gifs and memes.

yeah i've definitely seen interviews with writers and creators who talk openly about looking at blogs and twitter after an episode airs to see what jokes/scenes caught on with people

like on WTF when Offerman was trying to tell Maron about Ron Swanson internet memes and he was all, "What are you talking about?"

i wonder if aziz ansari is aware. i wonder.

people are apt to keep their finger on the 'it's done' trigger maybe bc we're conditioned to treat all art like it has peaks, and no one thinks an *~artistic peak~* can last so many years all in one project, so it's natural to wonder when the magic will fade

on a more literal level, writing staffs change every year, shows face more and more scrutiny from networks like NBC as time goes by, longtime writers grow tired of working on the same project for so long or they go off to do their own projects (like daniels and schur leaving the office), or they simply lose track of what fans watched the show for. more likely to happen with single camera sitcoms than your roseannes or your cheerses imo, maybe cause it's easier for funny new writers to replicate those scripts, and they were successful enough to avoid network pressure until roseanne's millionaire dead dan fever dream or the episode where frasier is murdered (nb i've never watched cheers)

seinfeld obv played to this to some extent (back when the phrase was 'water cooler'), they were clearly aware and hoping that things like 'yada yada' would enter the culture. i don't think this was to the detriment of the show, can't recall any times they tried to make 'fetch' happen, but i do shudder to think of what seinfeld would've been like in a world w/ tumblr and facebook. or a show like friends, where fans definitely would've wrapped their identity in it but that kind of meme generation was not nearly as built in to the show.

Maybe it worked for Seinfeld because there wasn't really any element of romantic comedy cuteness, or more broadly a concern for character development.

i agree, the complete lack of character development - which is still more or less totally standard for sitcoms - does make it less open for nitpick examination

I guess my thing is that, as long as a show I like continues to be true to its basic premise and the people working on it still seem to enjoy doing what they do, I'm usually willing to overlook the inevitable decline that comes with being on the air forever. But the decline of many legitimately good shows (particularly when they don't wear out their welcome) is usually minor enough to be completely unworthy of note. P&R had a great fourth season which was completely in keeping with at least the two previous seasons and 95% of everything else currently on television is pure garbage, so the presence of this conversation in this particular thread continues to baffle me.

I also feel like people want to be able to say they were the first to "call" a show's decline. Not so much here, but in other places on the internet you see people trying to one-up each other on noting a show starting to lose steam.

imo "everything else is garbage" is always an annoying and useless thing to say about tv. 90% of everything sucks but tv is the only medium where people use that line, we should be holding good shows to higher standards than "better than big bang theory i guess"

90% of everything sucks but tv is the only medium where people use that line

this is patently and provably untrue; trawl through any random general music/book/theater discussion on this board and you will see this posted as a truism at some point

"man, this steak is dangerously undercooked and unseasoned but at least i'm not eating a literal donkey dick so i won't complain"

xxxpost

Yeah, I absolutely think that repugnant "first!"-er impulse is what lies behind that tendency most of the time.

this is patently and provably untrue; trawl through any random general music/book/theater discussion on this board and you will see this posted as a truism at some point

ok, i can see where you could get this from music though i mostly only hear that sort of stuff from old people discovering wilco and thinking about how much better everything was in the 70s, and i don't really follow book/theater discussions

but it's still not the same as it is w/tv or used to the same extent, like literally saying anything negative about any show that anyone anywhere regards highly will eventually result in someone saying "it's still better than 90% blah blah blah", and it just reinforces the idea that we should all beg for the scraps of decent art on television because nothing will ever get better. and then people start to think that breaking bad and mad men represent the peak of what television can attain when that shit can be so much more.

"man, this steak is dangerously undercooked and unseasoned but at least i'm not eating a literal donkey dick so i won't complain"

― zachylon (zachlyon), Monday, September 24, 2012 1:22 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

#ronswansonlol

imo "everything else is garbage" is always an annoying and useless thing to say about tv. 90% of everything sucks but tv is the only medium where people use that line, we should be holding good shows to higher standards than "better than big bang theory i guess"

FTR, I totally hold TV to a high standard, and I think the medium is great. And some of that 5% of legitimately good TV includes some of the best shows that have aired in my lifetime. But the worst of the bad stuff is the most soul-crushingly awful sludge being churned out within any popular medium.

You're talking to some picky old people if Wilco is the modern band they choose to rag on in that context.

oh no i mean old people saying that wilco and similar bands = the only current music that compares to the stuff they listened to as teenagers

Oh!

"well it's a lot better than the backstreet boys" says a dad somewhere in 2012

honestly i think tv IS the only medium where it is fair to say that the overwhelming majority of it is garbage, but that's mainly because there's so much terrible filler 'conent' filling the bulk of every channel's broadcast day. if you narrow the scope to scripted primetime programming, the hit rate's a little closer to other things, though that's still not high or anything. i think people should focus more on whether an individual show succeeds at what it's going for, although when i try to do that people usually get on my case for supposedly preferring the stuff that i think succeeds within modest goals. last night i was talking about how tiresome Ricky Gervais is on award shows and my brother hit me with a bunch of "Big Bang Theory sucks!" talk like he was striking a dagger into my heart, it was weird.

Big Bang Theory is very, very good at what it does and gives me more consistent laughs than any other CBS sitcom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law

i agree that tv is overwhelmingly garbage, i just don't think that that's a big point in the favor of tv that isn't garbage

being better than crap should never deemed an accomplishment

i agree that tv is overwhelmingly garbage, i just don't think that that's a big point in the favor of tv that isn't garbage

My initial point wasn't "hey, at least P&R isn't as bad as all this other stuff!" in a comparative sense but rather "hey, why waste time nitpicking about a show you presumably like when most of what's on TV is horrid?".

cause i have a vested interest in the state of television as a medium and i enjoy analyzing and discussing what works and what doesn't work about the shows i watch

still, you gotta admit that criticizing P&R for being too cartoony - when the show's creators have quite openly admitted that it tries to be a live action Simpsons - seems a bit nitpicky, maybe?

or point-missing, if you prefer

xp this also seems to be an attitude exclusive to tv, especially on ilx, i rarely see ppl being accused of nitpicking when criticizing music or film or books. even if morbs for example gets annoying, that's never the nature of the gripe against him

well, come on... morbs is another class of troll

my argument itt was actually in favor of the cartoonishness (chris, andy, tom, etc) before this argument broke out. just against turning ron into more and more of a caricature of an internet meme, which is on a different level. people still complained (maybe rightfully so) when the writers kept upping the flanders-ness of flanders, when the character was working much better before. i think that's basically what everyone is worried about wrt ron. (isn't the process called flanderization or something on tv tropes?)

there was a point when Flanders was a good character?

ron was already a cartoonish libertarian/secret sax player, the problem is in pushing him more and more in that direction until his character loses the respectable qualities that made him central to the show, esp with his relationship to leslie

xp

i see, that's an understandable concern. i don't think playing up his meat-lovin'/wacky qualities hurts the show, necessarily, though. i loved that episode where he brainwashes the girl into being a libertarian, since they had someone react realistically to his craziness