What Did T.G.I.F Mean For You?

Remember your childhood? Every adult around you thought anything you did was cute. After you got home from school, where you played half the time, you came home and played some more with your neighborhood friends. I used to play outside with one neighboor firend until it would get dark, and our parents made us come in for dinner. There were no worries while you "played", no one to impress or tiptoe around. Usually, there was no organization in my play either, just running around or lying in the grass was considered play for me.

Watching television as a kid used to be one of my biggest past times. I could just sit down for hours at a time, doing nothing, and not worry about why I'm doing nothing. Now as adults we tend to always be thinking about what we need to do next because we can never be alone, doing nothing for longer than five minutes.

Television is my thing, I mean I'm getting a degree in it, so of course I watch TV now, but only my favorite shows. At some point when I'm not bogged down with both regular and grad school work, I'd like to return to just watching TV and doing nothing. Do you remember Thank God It's Friday, or T.G.I.F? I loved that two-hour block of sitcoms that were on Friday nights on ABC. There was no other night you ever saw a full two-hour block of sitcoms! It was probably the longest, sustained time I watched TV in one sitting, but I loved seeing my favorite shows like "Step By Step", "Family Matters" and "Boy Meets World".

The old cliche "stop and smell the roses", is really something that should be incorporated in every adult's life. But, the demands and the benefits of jobs, making money and adulthood far outweigh the simple pleasures of life we all take for granted. In these case, employers should create more room for an employee's imput as far as creative and imaginative ideas are concerned. There are too many jobs out there that rely on people doing the same thing over and over again without any creative spark. An adult on the job may never get to the point of lying on the ground and interpreting objects out of clouds in the sky or watching hours of television, but any creative imput might bring that adult a little closer to their own carefree childhood.

Television in the Present (Wednesday, December 21st, 2016)

Bare with me, this blog is different! We have now fast-fowarded eight years in the future. Don't let today's date fool you, the time change has still not caught up to us! It's really Wednesday, Decmeber, 21st, 2016! I probably wouldn't even be writing on this outdated machine and blog site, but it's all I can afford! The economy has gotten so much better, but it took years after 2008 to get the economy to where it is now! On the flip side, everything is so expensive. Electronics are still the biggest and most expensive ticket items. But, most of these are brand-new electronics that you wouldn't have even imagined in 2008! Retail stores are selling your year's digital televisions now for the price of VCRs back then. Digital televisions have became the norm, especially after the digital switch-over in 2009 (which I still think was a scam!) The digital televisions that have been introduced the last couple of years are much different than in 2008. There is no more need for Tivo, all digital televisions have Tivo built into the system. That means you can record, watch, and rewind your favorite shows without the need for an extra box. Remote-controls are also a thing of the past, all digital televisions are voice-activated. All you need to say is "On", then "Channel 44" or even just "Vh1"!

The television shows have gotten much clearer as well! Digital clarity was okay in 2009, for it's time, but just two years ago, there were more changes made to the the digital reception that made it even clearer! Now it really looks like you're looking through a window! It's a good thing they made the reception even clearer because now we can clearly (no pun intended) see the changes made during the Television Quality Act of 2014! The act was signed into policy by President Obama (yes, he's still president)that gave all crappy "reality" shows including cooking, dating, celebrity, and shows for your dog, walking papers. That means that shows like: "Celebrity Rehab", "The Hiltons" and "Date My Grandma" no longer exist on network or cable channels. The act required that each network relinquish all their reality shows and restructure their networks so they could bring back quality dramas and sitcoms. Sitcoms are no longer the forgotten, otudated dinosaur of a genre. They are now just as provocative as dramas television shows are, except of course, a lot funnier! This all means only one thing, television is finally back and worth watching again!

"The Office" Writers

It took me a while to start watching the NBC sitcom, "The Office". I saw the show a couple times during it's second season and just thought it was stupid, and not at all funny. Face it, it is not your traditional sitcom: it has no laugh track and it's not a multi-camera show. The zoom-in shots of the characters seemed off-putting to me, like it was some documentary show. Every character broke the fourth-wall by awkardly looking into the camera, and again it really wasn't that funny!

Fast-foward a year, and it became one of my favorite shows! The first couple of episodes I watched I really got involved in the diverse characters of the series and forgot about the strange camera movements and having no laugh track. Each character, especially Angela, Michael, Dwight and Jim have their own unique personality and work ethic. But, at the same time, each character makes up for the other one's faults. After I began to really understand the differences in each character and what they bring to "The Office", I saw the comedy that inherently exists in these characters when they're stuck together in one room for hours a day.

I have recently discovered that the episodes are actually funniest when one of the actors on the show also writes an episode. I had no idea how involved the characters of Ryan (played by B.J. Novak) and Kelly (played by Mindy Kaling) are on the show beyond being part of the cast. They both have written several episodes of the series. Mindy Kaling, for example, doesn't appear in every episode, but when she does, her character appears pretty ditzy and pretty annoying. That must be a facade because she is a brillant writer! I remember one episode she wrote that offended her own character's nationality. The episode put Michael in charge of conducting a "Diversity Meeting". The funniest scene was towards the end where the office played a game that used index cards stuck on people's foreheads that only revealed a certain nationality to another person. The other person had to act out stereotypes so the first person could guess it correctly. Watch the "Diversity Day" episode here!

The other main cast members are also much more involved in the series than just being the actors. Both Steve Carell and Paul Lieberstein (Toby) are also producers and rotating writers for the show. All the cast members of "The Office" are very close-knit, and this obviously makes for a show where you can actually believe the situations their characters get themselves into!

1950s and 2000s Television Connection?

Believe it or not, product placement is still alive and well in television shows today. Product placement not only exists in drama but, reality and even some dramedy shows like “Survivor” and “Desperate Housewives” . If you really think about it, most product placements seem way too obvious today. Shows that include product placement like to think that they’re not shamelessly showcasing a product, but it’s a little hard to follow a story when they’re “causally” explaining the features of a latest cell phone or a brand-new Kia! In recent episodes of “Survivor” and “Desperate Housewives”, these exact things occurred. The “Survivor” episode showed, in full screen, a recording of a message from each of the contestant’s family members on a new Samsung phone. The “Desperate Housewives” episode showed a brand-new Lexus and Kia slowly driving down the street. Also, not surprisingly, the new “Knight Rider” series premise is a walking (or driving) product placement. The premise revolves around a talking Ford Mustang! Wonder who their sponsor is?
The modern product placement phenomenon is also reminiscent, in some ways, to the in-your-face sponsorship of the 1950s. Most shows at that time were sponsored by cigarettes companies, like Phillip Morris. Commercial blocks for shows like “I Love Lucy” featured talking heads explaining the features of a new product. This type of commercial is hilariously parodied in “I Love Lucy” through the “Vitameatagamin” episode. This type of sponsorship reflected the idea that television was a new medium in the 1950s. Network executives had to make some sort of profit out of the industry in order to stay on the air and sponsorship from big companies provided the cash flow they needed. I think that a decline of money and resources in the television industry is the same reason we’re seeing this resurgence of in-your-face product placement today. Viewers are currently engaged in a kind of capricious give-and-take between the online and television worlds. The economy is tanking and more and more people are getting their news and entertainment from the Internet. This change is something that the television world must find a way to weather and still stay in business, hence product placement. Product placement is annoying, especially “in-your-face product placement, but if it’s necessary for networks to stay afloat, then it’s something we’ll all have to endure.

What Sitcoms Should Include More Of

Have you ever watched a recent sitcom and asked yourself that you could have wrote something better and funnier? Well, for some current shows, I have asked myself the same thing! I am going through college right now and want to become a sitcom writer. Sitcoms flat out fascinate me! Life would be a whole hell of a lot easier if every sticky situation we get ourselves are happily resolved in a half an hour. But, unfortunately, life doesn’t work so cyclical. However, I think, sitcoms are one of the best genres out there to tackle the big “elephant in the room” issues. Be it social, political or economical, sitcoms have always been inherently set up to discuss some of the big current issues of our time through the clever disguise of comedy. Sitcoms are able to take worldly issues and spin them in a way that sends our favorite characters through confrontations and dilemmas. Comedy helps people to better understand issues usually in a non-threatening and non-offensive way. We have seen this over numerous TV sitcoms, especially classic sitcoms. Remember the contentious rhetoric between Mike and Archie on All in the Family or the episode where someone attempts to attack Edith? Some more recent examples are from one of my favorite sitcoms, Roseanne. One particular episode dealt with the issue of domestic abuse with Jackie. It was a provocative example that really helped to put a face to the issue and make it relatable to what real people might be going through. These examples are what good television, especially sitcoms, should be made of and when done right, they leave their mark on television history.
Bringing you back to my point, many of today’s sitcoms are underrated, others are those provocative examples I discussed and the rest are just plan bad! But, I think, all sitcoms have the inner-workings or the machine to make it edgy and envelope-pushing. What this means is that some sitcoms premises are just built to avoid big issues. They have the right mix of characters, just not the right plots. A lot of the major changes to these shows would have to be in the character’s lively hood, or adding more diverse characters (any kind of diversity).
Long story short, I want to be one of those writers that become known for changing the course of sitcoms today. I want to bring back shows like Roseanne and All in the Family. Some of my favorite sitcoms right now are Two and a Half Men, The Office and Scrubs. Some underrated sitcoms that I also enjoy are: ’Til Death, How I Met Your Mother and Worst Week.

Little Privacy in Present-Day Sitcoms?

This fall’s sitcom line-up may have officially entered a new level of gross-out humor. Many have begun resorting to this type of humor as their only means of attracting an audience and not surprisingly, they are also becoming the first television genre to get the axe by networks. This fall, already, FOX was the first to cancel its brand-new sitcom Do Not Disturb, of which only three episodes aired. I watched Do Not Disturb and was not surprised it was cancelled. My attention to the series was first focused on the set, and then found the characters to be quite linear and not very funny. The set was supposed to be a hotel, but I became very confused as the set was constructed of metal and there were no distinct rooms that made it obvious they were in a hotel. The humor mostly consisted of gross-out humor, a trend in new sitcoms this fall.
CBS may be the most successful so far with this form of comedy. Its new sitcom, Worst Week, is based on getting laughs from gross-out humor. The sitcom, which is now one of my favorites, is basically like the Ben Stiller movie Meet the Parents except in a half-hour format every week. Like Meet the Parents, Worst Week’s comedy is rooted in physical and situational comedy in which the main character is victim to progressively worse and worse misunderstandings that keep him from his one goal. Worst Week manages to feature situations of vomit, urine, nudity and diaper-wearing all in the very first episode. This type of gross-out humor is only beginning to become more popular within live-action sitcoms as a way to grasp more ratings for the slowly-slipping genre. Sitcoms are increasingly leaving no social taboo unturned. Nothing is left private, everything under the sun is game for comedy. This can be looked at as either bad or good, and I have arguments for both, but as the article “Sitcoms’ Burden: To Few Taboos” states, “Comedians try to stretch the limits of humor by turning to even lewder and more offensive about gender, race, infirmity and sexuality. But when sensitivities harden and taboos are so easily tumbled, it tougher and tougher and find fresh forms of adult-only material. Comedy reverts to childlike mix of silliness and bathroom crudity - the humor of bodily dysfunctions.”
This gross-out humor form cannot really have sustaining power in television and is instead just a device to keep an audience watching network television. People have many more options than ever before for how and where they get their entertainment. The internet is beginning to offer seemingly well-produced TV shows and is starting to build a fan base. The article “Sitcoms’ Burden: To Few Taboos” comments on this: “Every new season brings more reality shows and drama, while the traditional half-hour comedies dwindle, an endangered species. There are lots of reasons, including competition from comedy channels on cable and the Internet, but a fundamental one is that network sitcoms are still seeking broad appeal at a time when writers can no longer rely on common values or widely shared forms of inhibition.” The taboos that are consistently broken by these shows will eventually leave it so that nothing can be surprising or funny anymore. However, I think that there will be a time when network sitcoms are able to balance themselves out with competing audiences of the internet and other alternative media. EVERY medium now is trying to find their niche within the new technological media world, and they will all eventually find that happy medium place.

'80s Sitcom Star Has Something To Say!

Quintessential 1980s sitcom star, Justine Bateman from Family Ties, took her stance on the issue of net neutrality before the Senate Commerce Committee in April of 2008. Net neutrality, as defined by Wikipedia, concerns the equal use of broadband networks and “a neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that might be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.” Wikipedia’s definition is a long way of saying that net neutrality is good because it doesn’t allow the big broadband networks to overshadow the smaller ones. It also doesn’t restrict any content or access to anything on the internet. However, this is increasingly the effect in the television industry because of fewer corporations owning the television networks, thereby creating a rise in television regulation.
Actress Justine Bateman, along with our “read-write” internet advocator Professor Lawrence, Lessig spoke in front of the Senate Commerce Committee to support net neutrality. Bateman spoke out against the idea of media consolidation in entertainment and offered a sign of hope through the internet where creative control is at the hands of the content producer. Interestingly, the article titled “Justine Bateman, Net Neutrality & Celebrity Witnesses” features Bateman’s statement to the Senate amidst the author’s obvious disdain for celebrities speaking out and net neutrality (you can read this article for arguments against net neutrality). In this article, Bateman says that:

In entertainment, I believe we are on the verge of a creative renaissance and the Internet is the new grid upon which this renaissance can rest…and the idea of your site succeeding of failing based upon whether or not you paid the telecom companies enough to carry your material or allow quick access is appalling.

Her solution to what she calls “TV’s inevitable move to the internet” is to offer her own website that promotes free-of-interference and well-produced shows brought directly to the internet user. This new website is called FM78.TV and emphasizes the idea that there is a new “creative revolution” coming to the internet. It officially throws out the notion of being forced to distribute a final product through the television and film media in order to obtain an audience. The website says that for the first time the television networks are losing their grip on distribution, leaving a large space on the internet where the “content creator is in control of their own work.” FM78.TV’s first internet TV project is currently in production and is called Candy Inc., a comedy, that stars Bateman and Judd Nelson.
Justine Bateman is probably one of the first celebrities to realize the inevitable shift from shows on television to the internet, and has capitalized on a future phenomenon. This raises the issue for a much bigger need for net neutrality on the internet once this shift manifests. The internet is fairly fair-content orientated now and needs to stay that way once the television networks find their own niche for shows that are produced and distributed for internet-direct.