TV Made me Stupid... and then Sell Out.

So I kind of love Community.  I've not really wanted to admit that I could possibly enjoy an American sitcom as much as I enjoy Community, but there it is.

There's something that just doesn't work with the American sitcom style of airing 76 episodes a season.  There's no way a steady level of quality can be maintained and, unless it is a rare case (Seinfeld), ends up falling back on repeating jokes & catch phrases to the point of saturation (Big Band [Typo I'm keeping] Theory) or is just the same damn episode over and over and over again (Two and a Half Men [Which could break that cycle if they would start filming yesterday and create one of the most bizarre & innovative TV shows the world has even known.])

But Community seems to work by virtue of embracing the notion of an ensemble cast (Unlike, say, Friends, who would focus on two characters in an A plot, two characters in a B plot and Joey and Phoebe as afterthoughts.), genuinely good writing that eschews beating you over the head with the same dumb catchphrase.  Bazoonga!

 [Aside 1: I wonder how different Seinfeld would have been if it aired today in the age of viral videos and video memes.  One of the odd things is how ahead of its time it appears in terms of coining catch phrases in an age before DVD box sets and YouTube.]

[Aside 2: Am I the only one who now finds Seinfeld uncomfortable to watch in light of the tremendous amount of less than subtle racism that emanates from it, its cast and its legacy?]

Community is the American re-make of Spaced without realizing it.  It's got the same themes (Friendship, an obsessive love of pop culture, a meta-awareness that it's a TV show.) and in spite of what may go on in each episode, a tremendous amount of heart, in which the characters deal realistically with whatever zany adventure that might have.

The characters are also real.  One of the characters has Asperger's and I would compare how the actor plays it verses how another Emmy Award winning actor plays his interpretation and let the difference speak for itself.  Not just in how it's acted but in his interaction with the audience and show as well.

There's an intelligence and an understatement behind the show that American sitcoms lack, avoiding the obvious jokes (Then mocking them when they go there) and a heart that grounds it in reality.  At the end of the day, if you said to your friends and family a third of what characters say to each other on other TV shows, you would be disowned as a social leper.  Community deals with this in a realistic way and as such, makes the antics of the characters a community you actually want to join.  God, how corny is that.

TV Made me Stupid

Oh my God, I love Survivor.  It's been an on again / off again affair (Mainly off) but I have once again fallen in love with it's unique brand of lowest common denominator entertainment.

I was an avid fan of its first few seasons.  I think that a warning flag went up for Elisabeth early in our relationship when I'd insist spending Friday evening at my mom's place watching a recording of Wednesday's episode of Survivor because the TV I had didn't get the channel that it aired on.

Then England happened and Survivor and I drifted apart and I had a passionate but ultimately unrewarding dalliance with Big Brother.  We didn't reconnect until recently, now that I have a lot more time in the evenings and weekends thanks to Henry's presence and online TV.

So a few weeks ago I sank into the morass of Survivor 21: Heroes vs. Villains and re-discovered a lost love.  In the first episode a toe was broken, a shoulder dislocated and a bikini top maliciously ripped off a piece of anorexic eye candy.  It was my grade eleven prom all over again.

There has been a dynamic shift in the mechanics of the game with the contestants hyper-awareness of the history of the game, strategies which have worked, failed, worked then failed, failed then worked and a meta-meta reality/ entertainment/ manipulation through editing and/or competitions and fucks deliciously with the contestants heads and viewers expectations.

Season 22 is gearing up to be a good one.  It feels like the first two episodes were the best first two ever, due to the selection of at least three sociopaths, two personality disorders, one full on nut-nut and and an evangelical Christian who is already food for the lions.

If reality TV is supposed to hold a mirror to ourselves and/or our society (Really, who believes this other than studio execs and the producers of this exploitive dreck.), Survivor continues to outdo itself by putting on display the kind of greedy, capitalistic paranoid over-thinkers with no sense of self awareness or shame that will do anything for money.  These are the people who own businesses, buy up property and run corporations.  For me, it's endless hours of entertainment watching them scheme, screw each other over, be manipulated and, ultimately eat each other alive (Figuratively - though we all know what being 'voted off' really means.) for the sake of an anti-human ideology.