GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

why do we keep talking about Living Single as if it predated Seinfeld?

the idea that ppl stop hanging out with their friends after they get married is not weird.

and none of the characters on seinfeld are married -- this is weird how?

even the hangout shows that have come since that you can kinda trace back to seinfeld (or at least friends, which was seinfeld as dreamt up by suits) are basically 'yr friends are the family you choose!' cuddlestein mountain nonsense. you take the most contemptious relationship on friends or himym or new girl or maybe even happy endings (note which of these was not a hit) and it doesn't even really approach the casual contempt that jerry felt for george, his best friend.

god i would have such a deep respect for a show that would routinely write off characters w/ 'they got married and they were never seen again'.

yeah, himym is college friends (incl. dorm roommates and a pair of college sweethearts!), a weird dude who chose THEM, and the girl whose getting roped into the group is part of the show's origin story

i can't remember, are george and jerry supposed to have gone to the same high school?

^^Yeah, they went to the same high school (see the one about the library book).

it's not weird that the characters on seinfeld aren't married, but it's unusual to have a whole group of them without the ongoing stories about them being marriage-oriented. which is why susan, and puddy, and man-hands and regina and so on - to kind of internally shore up the idea that there are people who are just intrinsically/constitutionally not about those kinds of stories.

routinely write off characters w/ 'they got married and they were never seen again'.

A few sitcoms have ended this way (the British Office, The Odd Couple, Sex & the City... others?)

i feel like there is some affection between the characters on seinfeld but it's expressed in such a low-level, buried way, you have to sort of ferret it out. like jerry often expresses mild irritation with kramer constantly visiting him but he never kicks him out like a normal person would; he obviously enjoys the effect this friendly, eccentric nutjob has on his drab, lonely, misanthropic bachelor existence, but he'd never actually say that and the show would never have a scene where it was explicitly stated.

liked Alex Karpovsky in the crack party episode

"I'm not fucking JAP daycare"

also at the time (and to an extent still, you'll see some shows attempt this and you know they're thinking 'maybe we can approach seinfeld') plots along the lines of 'they wait for a table at a chinese restaurant', 'they try to remember where they parked', and 'they get stuck in traffic after a baseball game' were fairly radical.
― balls, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 8:42 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

honestly IDK much about seinfeld but some of these plots would not really have been that unusual in earlier sitcoms. stuff like dick van dyke would often have episodes centered around some trivial misunderstanding or mishap (like the one where MTM is stuck in the bathtub?).

the unlikeability (sp?) of the main characters, while not totally new of course, would have been reasonably novel though.

Kinda lol but mostly sad that when Morbius wants to talk about a TV show he enjoys for once everybody goes on a tangent about Seinfeld.

i think the point is that "waiting for a table at a restaurant" or looking for a parked car are suitably banal things to make a sitcom *about*--i dont think earlier sitcoms were ever so brazen in that regard. that's where the "show about nothing" came in--in that it was a show about the parts of life that before did not seem to be portrayed on television. even Seinfeld gets away from this towards something more neurotic and manic in the latter years though.

i mean unsuitably banal things. i can't really think of a comedic voice before Seinfeld that really focused on such things--though im sure there are precedents.

i think Seinfeld's "did ya ever notice" school of observational comedy was not wholly unique in standup, whether among his contemporaries or older guys like Carlin. but nobody really committed to stretching those kinds of jokes across a half hour of scripted television before.

After watching Curb Your Enthusiasm I came to the conclusion that Larry David was responsible for the general tone of Seinfeld (including the "show about nothing" focus on minutiae), with Seinfeld providing only bits here and there.

morning after or 20 years after, only way to discuss sitcoms

i mean unsuitably banal things. i can't really think of a comedic voice before Seinfeld that really focused on such things--though im sure there are precedents.

― ryan, Saturday, July 27, 2013 4:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah i really think there were plenty of dick van dyke or lucy or honeymooners episodes like this. but cosign that it was a style that really went out of fashion in the 80s, where things were much more explicitly about people and their relationships, etc.

you may be right but I still think Seinfeld takes on things that are more than typical, they're usually essentially boring things.

some particularly seinfeld-ish dick van dyke episode summaries

"With Jerry at a dentist's convention, Rob is forced to see another dentist after breaking his tooth on a chicken bone."

"Rob goes on Ray Murdock's X-Ray where he inadvertently describes Laura as a nut."

"The Petries hire an Italian painter to paint their walls."

"Sally dates a comedian who never paid Rob and Buddy for writing his material. "

"Rob thinks he's just seen the suspects of a recent jewelry store holdup and wrestles with his conscience about informing the police."

"Rob goes to see a psychiatrist to find out if his back pains are psychosomatic."

"Rob and Laura are caught in the middle of a feud between their parents over cemetery plots."

"Sally's secret admirer is a deli owner."

'Rob catches a cold from golfing in damp weather just before a dinner party with Laura's relatives."

"Rob takes on a crooked pillow salesman in court."

"Laura accidentally reveals on television that Alan Brady is bald."

"The freckles on Rob's back appear to form the Liberty Bell, so Millie suggests that he submit it for a column that discusses strange things."

"Rob accuses his friends of stealing his new watch."

(not tryna throw down, just think that its interesting to dig 'em up)

haha i need to watch some of those, they sound good.

a lot of stuff that's "new" is just stuff that we forgot about

"Sally's secret admirer is a deli owner."

i watched this one a few weeks ago FWIW

it's funny, if anything you could combine 3-4 of those plots and come up with a pretty good Seinfeld script--though you'd have to find a way for them all the converge at the end.

I guess you'll get back to "Girls" when a new episode is actually on right this second. Fucking internet.

Contrived silly situations are not new in sitcoms, it was the style which differentiated Seinfeld. And that it was semi-openly Jewish.

'seinfeld' made a big impact on baby dunk due to its wholehearted embrace of promiscuity and rejection of the american adult's duty to marry and have kids (it's one of the queerest shows ever to me) and feels more like 'art' in the modernist novelist sort of way (ie; expressing one person's way of seeing the world) than pretty much any other sitcom i've seen. i still can't really separate my aspirations of big city living from what i imagined real-life Seinfeld characters would live. for a sheltered home-schooled christian adolescent it was a transmission from a bigger, funner, planet, and i'll be forever glad that it was on network tv. if i was 13 now and knew how to bittorrent 'girls' would serve the same purpose.

morbs -- yeah i was thinking the relationship between the dick van dyke show and seinfeld was really a certain strain of jewish humor. carl reiner was behind the former.

its not the contrivedness of the situations, its the mundanity, exacerbated by neurosis. flipped thru some honeymooners episode descriptions otoh and none woulda worked for an A seinfeld plot, but most coulda worked for a B plot with Kramer, which i guess was his joke.

Morbs I'll discuss 'Girls' with you—just finished watching both seasons for first time!

is this thread really going to be about Seinfeld for the entire off-season?

u_u

well you're one ahead of me, and I'm probably done for now. xp

Morbs do you come down more on the "time is a rubber band" or "everybody is a dumb whore" side of the argument?

that must be "season" 2

(sorry ppl, 10 episodes is only a season for wimps)

you must hate british tv then. only six!

He'd hate the first two series of The Thick Of It

HE HATES EVERYTHING THATS HIS THING

i enjoy him anyway. that's my thing

^^Sounds like something Hannah would say about Adam.

in general my fav sitcoms tend to have the fewest number of episodes (blackadder, fawlty, honeymooners).

I Hate My Teenage Daughter...

British is a diff thing. If MTM could crank out 22-26 episodes of Mary and Newhart a year...

i mostly like this show but absolutely no one needs 25 eps of this per season

just bend over and show us how those jeans fit, sweetums

http://ris.fashion.telegraph.co.uk/RichImageService.svc/imagecontent/1/TMG10244556/m/Gap_Fall13_Denim_A_2644558a.jpg

haha morbs I am loving how in love you are with Adam

I can't narrow it down to a dozen filthy things I would do to him

<3

1. "Send him home to mommy and daddy, covered in come"

it's spelled 'cum'