Sitcoms

Humor, Intimacy, and Master of None

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , ,

I’m jumping on a plane to Melbourne later today, so today’s post is short and sweet.If you’ve got netflix, then do this one thing.

Go Watch Master of None.

I’ll admit, I started off kinda eh on the show. The first episode was good, but it didn’t have that zing that made me want to sit and mainline the entire series in one go.

Disappointing, ‘cause Aziz Ansari is smart and funny, and I had some high hopes, but…yeah. No biggie. There’s no shortage of stuff on Netflix.

Except, at this point, I’ve mainlined so much stuff on Netflix that the stuff that the obvious choices have basically been winnowed down to a handful of options. So, a little over twenty-four hours later, I fired up the second episode and…

Yeah. There it was. The zing.

Except it quickly moved beyond that.

It moved into the terrain I refer to as Holy Fuck.

Screw the zing – this show is so damn good it doesn’t need it. Master of None quietly goes about making big points without making a big deal about it, quietly slipping in incredibly smart jokes when you’re not paying attention.

In fact, it does the thing that smart comedy absolutely needs: it trusts you to get it.

When it develops big, meta jokes, it absolutely trusts you to get them and completely fails to give a shit if you don’t.

This is incredibly rare, when it comes to sit-coms. The last time I saw something like it was the very early seasons of How I Met Your Mother, before the show got popular enough that they had to explain every damn joke they made.

Also, the music is incredible. I was smitten with the show after the fourth episode, but the moment they rolled out things like the X-Ray Spec’s Oh Bondage, Up Yours over the end titles, I was theirs forever.

The show also reminded me of an important writing lesson I picked up from Anna Campbell during the Gold Coast Writers festival a few years back: some of the most important parts of any romance is when two characters start to laugh together.

Humour bonds us in ways that other emotions do not. The things that we find funny, the other people do not, have the potential to create incredible intimacy.

Master of None gets this. Azaz Ansari and Noel Wells are fricken’ adorable as Dav and Rachel, primarily because the show uses their shared sense of humour to establish a deep and obvious connection that will carry their relationship through the ten-episode season in the space of twenty-seven minutes.

And when the show pulls off it’s penultimate episode, depicting a year of their relationship and the trials associated, the slow erosion of that shared sense of humour is absolutely heartbreaking to watch.

I fucking love this show. It’s everything that I wanted it to be, when I heard Netflix had given Ansari a sitcom.

Go watch it.

 

Situation Comedy, Redux

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts , , , , ,

To give you fair warning, this is a cranky post. It’s possible I’ll swear. Often. Loudly. You have been warned.

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One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under.

To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it.

I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it sucked because stupid choices were made, not because of some inherent fault of the  genre.

Take, for example, How I Met Your Mother. It’s not a show that’s without faults – I’d direct you to Cat Valente’s excellent take-down of the shows central premise – but for a considerable period of time it managed to be funny and geeky and not treat it’s audience like idiots. I can point you to precisely the moment it became a show I looked forward to, rather than this thing I happened to watch, which is right about the point in the second season where they closed an episode with Marshal slapping Barney well after the  Slap Bet episode where the joke was set-up. It was simple and beautifully done. Slap. “That’s two.” Done. No references to the Slap Bet to set things up, no flash-backs to the previous episode, just the show writers  trusting you to remember something that happened earlier in the seasons and get the joke.

Nothing appeals to me more than writers assuming I’m not an idiot. It’s the thing that, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie got wrong, because ever time they made that kind of reference the writer’s were sitting next to you, nudging you in the ribs, going “hey, we mentioned Phineas Fog, from Around the World in Eighty Days, get it? Get it? We’re being metatextual here.”

Metatext doesn’t work when you say you’re being metatextual. It just annoys the fuck out of people. In this respect, I can point to them moment when I realised How I Met Your Mother stopped being a show I really looked forward to, and became just another show I watch when it’s on. It’s called the second Slapsgiving episode (If they do a third Slapsgiving, the show will join the ranks of shows officially be dead to me, and I will be happy with the two enjoyable season, one okay season, and one sub-par season I’ve seen thus far).

There’s a sliding scale on all these things. I find Big Bang Theory‘s underlying narratives abhorrent, for example, but I’ll still watch it because it’s doing something mildly more interesting with the same core theme than, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men.

There are also different kinds of audiences – not everyone enjoys metatext as much as I do, nor do they sit there chanting interrogate your fucking theme, you fuckers when shows get particularly annoying. I have no problems with shows pitching to a particular audience, but I reserve the right to get annoyed when they start pandering to them.

There are no good sitcoms. Sitcoms are inherently limited by their format. These aren’t arguments, they’re an admission of defeat. They’re willing acknowledging that we expect so little from our entertainment that the only real response is to shrug and kill off a few more braincells in the hopes that one day we’ll see movies the same way whatever those mythical test-audiences who kill anything smart do.

I’d ask you to stop being part of the fucking problem and start engaging. Acknowledge the problems with individual narratives, individual shows, individual characters, instead of writing off entire genres. Find smart people who love the genre and ask their recommendations (this, coincidentally, is how I found romance writer Georgette Heyer, who is mindblowingly fucking awesome).

Quality is not mediated by genre, nor is the ability to create smart and interesting narrative. The *willingness* to pitch smart narrative, sure, but that’s the writer’s choice when faced with the audience, just as it’s mine to watch and say hey, man, this shit isn’t on, in the hopes that if enough people say it loudly enough, one day things will change.

To argue otherwise is to mire you in the kind of close-mindedness you’re trying to rail again when you condemn the genre as a whole.