From Mike Hale’s review of “Friends with Benefits”—not the movie everyone’s heard of, but the Friday-evening NBC sitcom that just premiered and has a shelf life of most leafy greens (my emphasis): Focusing on a five-member ensemble — three bumbling, grating men and the two attractive, relentlessly energetic, sexually pliable women, who mysteriously choose to [...]
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Fanboy time. Advance apologies. Did you watch? Look, if you aren’t watching Louie on FX every Thursday night then you’re a person who doesn’t like TV. That’s fine for you. Some of my best friends don’t like TV. The rest of us, however, get this show—which, as I’ve tiringly blogged before, is the most honest [...]
I’m able only to blog about two things: TV and things I don’t like. Which means I’m fully allowed to blog about what I blog about. You may recall that a while ago I quoted Friends‘ Chandler Bing as a way to define farce: It’s a staple of farce, best summed up by Chandler Bing [...]
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By “agony” here I’m talking about mental anguish than can often manifest itself physically. I experience two chief ones when watching comedies. And by comedies I mean sitcoms. Type One: Gervaisian It began in The Office and it went through to Extras and then (or before?) it became the basis for the U.S. Office. Maybe [...]
N & I have been ill-ish and have wanted these past few evenings to do nothing but lie on the sofa with chicken soup and the DVR, and so last night despite a backlog that built up while we were in N.C., and despite NBC’s Thursday night of premieres (shame on you, NBC, for holding [...]
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That laff-track, studio-audience sitcoms still exist in a post-30 Rock / -Office / -Scrubs / -Malcolm in the Middle era is as confounding to me as the length of hockey season. What’s the allure, exactly? Sitcoms have always been my favorite genre of TV—and I say this as a fan of Six Feet Under, Twin [...]
