R.I.P. 30 ROCK R.I.P COMMUNITY R.I.P. PARKS & REC

is the baby ur friend on up all night

Up All Night has the same general feel as Modern Family to me, except there are fewer characters to follow and it's (thank goodness) not shot documentary style.

I do not watch Modern Family regularly, though, so I don't have the same sort of attachment to any of its characters as I do Up All Night.

hooray for everyone!

max otm

Up All Night has the same general feel as Baby Blues comic strips to me

lovin this tv analysis

some dude, have you watched Up All Night at all since, say, December?

Really glad Parks & Rec got the full pickup. It's the least niche-y of the ones I watch, and I feel like it could really catch on with more people if, like, more people would watch the fuckin' thing. Plus this last season was so good. So yay. Also yay to Happy Endings, which I only really caught on to shortly before the season ended, so I have some catching up to do.

probably, but not much -- i made some effort to give it time to improve, but obv once it starts to feel like a conscious effort to 'keep up' it becomes kind of a lost cause to do so (xpost)

so community is on for a fourth season reduced?

yessssss, so glad parks and rec got the full 22!

yeah Community is confirmed for 13 eps (although the possibility appears to still exist of more episodes being added or it suriviving past next season, not a firm "13 and that's it" thing as previously speculated).

the onion article speculates it's essentially coming back as a "new" show, competing with the other new sitcoms for the back 9. oh yeah, and Dan Harmon might be stepping down as showrunner.

very happy about P&R. figured Happy Endings had a good shot at renewal

wtf gr80

dan tweeted that if he stepped down as showrunner, it wouldn't be just because chevy is dick. like that article reported. then again he didn't flat out say "no i'm not stepping down" so PANIC

ughhhhh fuckin Up All Night

― some dude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpYhGdrknlA

lolololol

i tell markers what banks told me, go head switch ya style up

Amazing fact about NBC: Harry's Law, which they've just cancelled, was their most watched scripted show.

Wow. Yeah, that just about sums them up, all right.

i didn't even know that show existed until just now

That show was part of why they brought Spader in on The Office.

Was it Harry the judge from Night Court?

n, Kathy Bates.

It was a pretty stupid decision, calling a Kathy Bates Harry's Law. I mean, "that show with Kathy Bates" and "that Harry's Law show that I don't know what it is but which I assume is a courtroom drama about some dude named Harry" were two distinctly different entities in my head for most of the show's run. But I guess I'm not really the target demographic, so whatevs. Still, I feel like the networks aren't really thinking some of these show names through (wondering if GCB has really caught the public's imagination...bad sign when your brand new show's title is an acronym that's basically undecipherable out of context).

For all I know, Bjork and Tim Burton will be taught in schools 20 years from now

like, yeah, there are alienating elements to these shows that make them less likely to achieve Wings-like ratings, but if these shows age like SCTV...I'm fine with that.

You don't think a joke that a DVD of s1 of Lost is a metaphor for lack of payoff will resonate less with people who didn't actually watch six seasons of Lost from the beginning?

Tbf, the Bjork and Tim Burton references probably fail to resonate with a lot of people now (see note about my parents).

I think Community is off-putting for new viewers, (Seinfeld probably was too--taking several episodes for viewers to figure out who you were supposed to be rooting for: no one) but it's not really any more of a serial comedy than most other sitcoms--certainly not like Parks and Rec with its season-long story arcs. What do you really need to know about the Community mythos to enjoy that Law & Order parody? These characters are wacky?

How about e.g. "Virtual Systems Analysis" (the dreamatorium episode)? That said, HIMYM is pretty serialized and seems to do OK.

I was just trying to think of reasons why this show lacks the mass appeal of Seinfeld. I think we're actually in agreement there though.

I was just trying to think of reasons why this show lacks the mass appeal of Seinfeld. I think we're actually in agreement there though.

Ha, damn cut and paste! This was supposed to go right under the sentence about Bjork and Tim Burton.

Heh, on two recent occasions, I've tried/struggled to explain the Mackenzie Brothers to people in their early 20s (from the Prairies no less!).

But yeah, no, I never doubted that these shows would age as well as SCTV.

(Admittedly, I never got the Mackenzie Brothers until I moved to Saskatchewan.)

I was just trying to think of reasons why this show lacks the mass appeal of Seinfeld. I think we're actually in agreement there though.

not too sound like a jerk bc i really like community but maybe one reason is that Seinfeld was just a better show in almost every way, and a more groundbreaking show when it aired. community is wonderful imho, but there's just no comparison.

Apples and oranges, really, but we've had that extensive discussion before. For reasons that continue to baffle me, as their similarities seem to begin and end with their shared status as NBC sitcoms.

No, I don't think the two shows are similar at all. I was only comparing them in terms of popular appeal and only because someone mentioned Seinfeld earlier.

(I'm just watching the most recent Community btw and, while it doesn't seem like their best, I don't see how someone could get this without having see the previous episode.)

"just watching... now btw and..."

not to reopen a whole other conversation but community + seinfeld are similar enough (american network sitcoms around the turn of the century) that any comparison seems fair to me.

Well, then, I guess I just disagree that Community is obviously a worse-crafted or less innovative show.

Also, I finished watching. There are references to about half of s2 in this episode! And even stuff like Chang's pre-teen army only makes sense if you saw the episode when it was introduced. I don't see how someone who just dropped in would get as much out of this as someone who follows the show.

well this was a fake clip show.

I think after the last hiatus community just sort of gave up on accessibility (and on a lengthy future).

Ignoring just the basic differences in plot and intentions, they're very different sitcoms. With the very loose exception of season 4, Seinfeld episodes largely stood on their own and could be comprehended by a casual viewer and made the transition to the syndicated shuffle play super easily, as opposed to Community's more insular, more long-form narrative niche. And saying that they're similar because they were both released around the turn of the century ignores the vast changes that have taken place in (network) television in the past twenty years. Networks could probably air nothing else but Mama's Famly reruns if they had a hit on par with Seinfeld in its prime.

well this was a fake clip show.

Remember how Seinfeld didn't do those?

certainly in terms of human history, compared to the differences between community and whatever its greek antecedent in form was, the differences between seinfeld and community are negligible. like yes, one is multi-camera and one is single-camera. one is more heavily serialized. but ultimately the level of serialized episodes in your sitcom in 2012 is indicative of a particular choice and direction that either succeeds in capturing a broad audience or fails to do so. to then claim that they're not being fairly compared bc those very differences put them in separate categories just indicates that you are so attached to that particular stylistic choice that you can't otherwise explain why one succeeds and the other fails.

tldr version: lol ur trying to lawyer me out of comparing two sitcoms to each other, that's silly

You can compare two sitcoms all the live-long day. It's fun to do! Your initial assertion, though, was that the respective levels of success attained by Seinfeld and Community are strongly tied to their level of quality (surely you can acknowledge that quality rarely has anything to do with the success of a television show?) or the extent to which they're breaking new ground. I'm not saying those aren't factors, but my argument is simply that accessibility (particularly wrt casual viewers) and the different eras in which the shows were produced has much more to do with their respective levels of success.

(surely you can acknowledge that quality rarely has anything to do with the success of a network television show?)

Fixed.

yeah if anyone wants to actually argue that community is actually much weirder in comparison to 30 rock than seinfeld was in comparison to friends or cheers feel free since that was the actual comparison. if someone wants to respond that the reason seinfeld was a massive hit (bigger than friends, not as big as cosby) was that it came up in a time when nbc could make a hit out of anything by putting it on thursday (and moving there was when seinfeld REALLY became the huge ratings monster) and that because it was so successful and had built that success on nurturing creative shows that it could allow seinfeld to find its voice and then its audience; seinfeld gestation born from enviroment of success, community gestation born from enviroment of failure. i love community, it's first season was fantastic, this current season is great and i can tell already is gonna be crazily underrated when ppl badmouth it all out of proportion in the future, but only that second season is holy shit hall of fame level greatness. if i was gonna list the sitcoms that led to a show like community even being able to exist on network tv seinfeld would be #2 and simpsons would be #1 and both of those shows had SEVERAL seasons of that holy shit hall of fame caliber, by their third seasons they were just getting warmed up.

jesus christ where is that 'words you clearly can't spell' thread. environment environment environment. fucking hell.

Jerry Seinfeld was also way popular as a stand up years before the sitcom.

i sort of feel like community and -meta is in this thing where it has to keep outdoing itself just like in comic books the superhero keeps getting more powerful and fighting more powerful villains and the whole thing gets more and more cosmic until eventually somebody needs to push a reset switch. All the things that make it interesting also make it unsustainable.

yeah if anyone wants to actually argue that community is actually much weirder in comparison to 30 rock than seinfeld was in comparison to friends or cheers feel free since that was the actual comparison.

Yeah, Community feels much more of a kind with 30 Rock than Seinfeld did with Friends or Cheers.

Realizing (especially after reading Bill Carter's books) I'd totally read a book analyzing the last 30 years of NBC's Thursday night line-up (cue 'lol tv biz nerd' mockery).

curious what would win a 'current actual hit network sitcoms' poll on ilx? himym out of inertia and memories? how sizeable is the contingent of ppl who'll admit that big bang can deliver an actual laugh (albeit clumsily and crassly) plus the cast is clearly talented enough to deserve better than chuck lorre? modern family (although talk about mystifying declines, a show like that should be able to run thru seven seasons before they show hints of running out of ideas)? would the brits put glee over the top? i've never seen glee but it's a sitcom right? or at least it's half an hour long? sweet jesus would new girl win?

Glee is an hour so really it's a musical/comedy.