Monsters of Television

I’m not a fan of the mockumentary sitcom. It’s become a barrier of entry for me with shows like Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Indeed, I think it’s a crutch that sitcoms are starting to rely on, much to their detriment. I was going to let my dislike of the format speak through my silence on the shows.

But then Matthew Gilbert over at the Boston Globe had to go and poke the bear. Gilbert extolls the format for providing the “still-needed alternative for the sitcom genre as a whole” and for shows that use the format as the “essential weapons in the battle against sitcom predictability.” And he pays the shows that use the format the ultimate compliment by declaring them “anti-sitcoms.”

At this point, I feel it’s best to crank the laugh track dial up to 11. Read more »

The show sells out during an episode where the company is trying to be bought.

The short answer to why I still watch The Office: habit, investment, and I hate myself.

Really, last week, with the clip show, should’ve been the last straw. There is nothing more self-indulgent and uninspired as a retrospective of what you’ve done in the past masquerading as “new” content. When a show like Lost does it, it’s because serialized drama has a learning curve (and it doesn’t get steeper than Lost’s). There’s no real learning curve for The Office, nothing that can’t be explained in a thirty second recap. “Jim and Pam are recently married. Andy likes the receptionist. Michael is inept and needy but has a heart of gold. They work at a paper supply company that’s going under.” Done and done. The major continuing storylines in a neat little package. So a clip show is nothing more than a look-back at yesteryear and, I would defend, at better times.

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The sheer volume of crying montages on American Idol has desensitized me to sadness.

Noel talks about formulas within shows and I don’t think there are many that are more formulaic than Idol, despite the reality guise. Hopefuls go in, audition, get judged. Some hopefuls have a sad backstory (usually about children or disease or both); some just want to be celebrities. The segues are usually rough, involve some history or setting establishment for the city they’re in, and, at some point, one of them will be a montage of people crying because they didn’t get in. These poor wretches, caught on camera for all their friends to see, bawling their little eyes out because Simon called them terrible or because they weren’t bestowed with a yellow piece of paper (by the way, “Golden Tickets” are supposed to be rare, not given out thirty at a time). Hopes and dreams crushed under a music industry juggernaut, the excess that squishes from underfoot beamed to an audience of 10.4 rating.

This show is exhausting. Each featured contestant is an emotional vignette, hastily constructed. The featured contestants are milked for their story that is condensed to a minute or two, just enough time to hit their low-point (which might be in the present) and how the Golden Ticket will give them the vindication/satisfaction/external validation they need. The intent of the producers is to draw you into these people and root for them. But with a featured contestant during every segment (and with American Idol broken up into as many segments as possible to allow tons of time for advertisers), the ups and downs throughout the program are terribly exhausting. And then this show is on twice a week for weeks on end. They grow from exhausting to tiresome. If a contestant had cancer as a child, an autistic kid, or a sick grandmother, we know that judges aren’t going to dash her dreams (paint Simon as “evil” but never sinister) and, almost as a self-preservation emotionally, the draw is limited by recognizing the formula. In fact, the only draw left is in watching the crazy, over/underdressed personalities take the stage. Those can go either way. “Skiibowski, of course.”

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We here at Monsters of Television have no love for Jay Leno’s comedy. The only thing staler than the stand-up’s jokes are jokes about the size of his chin, his denim fetish, and the unintelligible squealing people do when they do “impressions” of him. So news that NBC might be cancelling (or scaling back) Leno’s 10pm comedy wasteland, The Jay Leno Show, driven by the network ordering a number of new pilots of scripted programming (none produced by John Wells, to be sure), brought us considerable pleasure.

And then TMZ had to go ruin it: Leno was returning, significantly less than victorious (but having performed up to NBC’s incredibly low expectations and killing news affiliates’ ratings) to his old time slot, leaving Conan out in the cold (we remain convinced that Conan never really wanted the gig anyway, but nervous schoolboy Jimmy Fallon was already promised Conan’s desk).

And then the New York Times had to go and (more or less) confirm it. Read more »