Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Path: news.cinenet.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!news.kei.com!news.texas.net!news-xfer.netaxs.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!199.172.62.14!world!ppp0a022.std.com!user From: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) Subject: Re: Some "special episodes"! (sarcastic) Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself) Message-ID: Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 17:28:29 GMT References: <5lgn06$fvq$1@nnrp01.primenet.com> <5lh2hg$s7i$1@nnrp01.primenet.com> Nntp-Posting-Host: ppp0a022.std.com Organization: Software Tool & Die, Brookline MA X-Newsreader: MT-NewsWatcher 2.3fc4 Lines: 56 Xref: news.cinenet.net alt.religion.kibology:29858 In article <5lh2hg$s7i$1@nnrp01.primenet.com>, nickb@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema) wrote: > As is the case with Friends, the > series will become insanely good due to the network sending its best > writers and staff to work on that show, but Degeneres won't let it > become hokey and trivial, in any aspect. She takes her orientation > too seriously to trivialize that, and she's too good a comedian to let > the show fall in the crapper. Prior to the current publicity circus over the show, "Ellen" struck me as amiable but not terribly funny-- the best moments were just excuses for DeGeneres to go into the nervous-digression schtick from her stand-up act, which we could have had without the sitcom part pasted around it. There *was* one thing I liked about the show, and, ironically, it was that the network's reluctance to let Ellen be lesbian kept them from having every episode be about Ellen's dating adventures, which was what every other sitcom had to be about. Now that she's come out, it's probably going to turn into "The Single Guy" with a different haircut. That's one of the reasons why, even though it's admittedly a better-than-average sitcom, "Friends" makes me nauseous. Those cuties seem to live in a pocket universe in which you have to do and think about very, very little besides sex, love, dating, and the vaunted mysteriousness of the opposite sex's motives; the characters are constantly citing alleged pearls of dating wisdom to each other, with which we're apparently supposed to empathize. I guess that if I had been a more energetic individual and spent the last fifteen years in a series of several hundred doomed mini-relationships, I might like it. > I also watched today's Seinfeld. George's slipping on the invitations > reminded me of when his fiancee died last year, and I realized that > unlike Ellen, Seinfeld is COMPLETELY incapable of dealing with a serious > issue. "Seinfeld" takes place in a more highly stylized version of reality than most of the other good sitcoms. The best way to think about it is that the characters have a relationship to society similar to Wile E. Coyote's relationship to the physical world. They can suffer events that would destroy the psyches of ordinary mortals, and come back no more damaged than Wile E. Coyote after being flattened by the Acme Magnetic Road-Runner Squash-O-Matic Anvil. Wile E. lives in a world of repeated, sudden death and pain, he apparently hasn't had a meal in his life, and somehow it doesn't faze him in the long run; the characters on "Seinfeld" are essentially the same. (Actually, I haven't seen much prime-time TV at all in the past several months. People seem to be arguing over whether "Seinfeld" has changed for better or worse, but I haven't watched it this season, so I don't know.) -- Font-o-Meter! Proportional Monospaced ^ http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/