Tag: Sitcoms

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Humor, Intimacy, and Master of None

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

Big Thoughts

Situation Comedy, Redux

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