Eliza Coupe: We had a laugh attack that was honestly … I don’t know. We had another one —
Damon Wayans Jr.: We have one like every —
Eliza Coupe: Well, during the scene with the workout stuff where Pally and I decided to make each other smell certain things.
Damon Wayans Jr.: Oh man! That was crazy! Don’t tell them that!
Eliza Coupe: I’m not even going there with that one. It was one of the grossest things in the world. But funny.
Damon Wayans Jr.: Basically we just laugh a lot together.
Eliza Coupe: All the time.
In the taxonomy of sitcoms there are many species. There are workplace comedies and relationship comedies, romantic comedies and anarchic comedies. Showtime even harbors a particularly rare and delicate genus, the unfunny comedy. But in the same way the Sham-Wow guy and Shamu are both mammals, all sitcoms are really one thing: family comedies. It’s a secret sauce as basic and unchanging as what McDonald's slaps on your Big Mac: Successful sitcoms are about clashing personalities forming lifelong bonds. The characters bicker, but really they love, just like families or particularly liberal cults. If the people onscreen don’t enjoy spending time together, then the audience won’t enjoy it either. The accumulated quirks, Segways, and unseen wives should serve to accentuate the chemistry, not distract from it. In other words, it should always be about the guys and the girls. Never the pizza place.
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. The Office
One of the biggest challenges of running a television show is the constant need to make decisions both for the short and long term. Plotting out a full season's worth of episodes, replete with serialized storylines and naturally paced character development, while still in thrall to the Ritalin-requiring grind of daily production, is the sort of time-management nightmare that could turn Kang the Conqueror into Cathy. So it’s got to be galling for the smart people tasked with administering The Office to read the reactionary jeremiads written by certain critics. Especially because TV isn’t like movies, in which the final product is the final product. (Unless, of course, your name is George Lucas.) Rather, it’s constantly changing and course-correcting. So it’s very likely that the brain trust behind The Office, led by showrunner Paul Lieberstein, was keenly aware of the failings of the first half of the season. By the time desk chair commandos like yours truly were crying cancellation, he and his writers were already weeks ahead, attempting to set things straight. (It’s a risky, difficult repair job that my podcast pal Chris Ryan and I likened to a mechanic tinkering with a NASCAR engine in midlap.)
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. Parks and Recreation
To be warm, fresh yet familiar and never stale -- this is the impossible challenge of every successful sitcom. (Also of every loaf of bread, but despite recent evidence to the contrary, Grantland is not a food blog.) Last night, Parks and Recreation pulled off this tricky feat as it has for much of its campaign-centered fourth season. “Operation Ann” was as cozy as a throw pillow with Joseph Stalin’s face on it, deftly playing with the audience’s expectations and well-earned trust in ways that left me as giddy as Ron Swanson on a scavenger hunt.
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. 30 Rock
As this column has trudged ever onward, from autumn’s gentle promise to the harsh realities of winter, it has, at times, seemed less like a weekly recap and more of a colloquium on the fate of graying sitcoms. Aging gracefully is no longer the title of a future Helen Mirren memoir, it’s a real concern for network comedies in the Netflix era. These days, it’s no longer possible for showrunners to toss their increasingly comfortable casts into the same old sits and expect to reap an equal amount of com. Contemporary audiences demand momentum — no doubt the result of binging on entire seasons in a single weekend — and when they’re displeased they, like waistcoated duellers, demand satisfaction. While The Office has stumbled this season, its creaky knees and sensibilities too arthritic for fourth-quarter changes, Parks and Recreation has barreled ever onward, evolving on the fly like a Darwinian tweaker. Last night, 30 Rock presented us with another option for staying vital in a short-attention-span plagued world: Go nuts.
Transitions of power are rarely smooth — just ask Egypt — so no one expected The Office to weather the loss of Steve Carell unscathed. But few could have predicted how quickly the long-running sitcom would devolve from “Must-See” to barely watchable.
Now toplined by an awkward alliance of the eager-to-please Ed Helms and the phoning-it-in James Spader, the show has struggled mightily to redefine itself in its eighth season. But it’s not the new internal power structure that’s solely to blame. The departure of Michael Scott — and Carell’s goofy, glue-like charisma along with him — has exposed foundational rot of the sort not usually seen outside of Schrute Farms. As the show returns with new episodes this week, it’s high time to leave the safe, reflective comforts of our hair rooms and examine just what went wrong — and determine whether there’s any hope of turning things around.
Over a five-year period beginning in 1998, HBO premiered Sex and the City (1998), The Sopranos (1999), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), and The Wire (2002). That’s a DiMaggio-esque streak of hits, unparalleled in the unpredictable, ego- and money-fueled world of television. Which makes sense considering that at the time the network didn’t consider itself in the television business at all: It was in the HBO business. Unlike ossified, regular old TV, HBO was an exciting new world where breasts could be bared, F-bombs could be dropped, and Brian Benben was considered a leading man. The premium channel was blessed with an executive team committed to empowering cranky creators — can you imagine giving notes to David Chase, David Simon, or Larry David? — and an operating ethos that wasn’t tied to antiquated notions like “advertising” or “ratings.” Part of what HBO was selling was prestige: These were shows unavailable anywhere else, serialized conversation starters that dominated water coolers and Internet message boards. If you didn’t want to be left behind, you’d pay for the privilege of watching them. Sure, the shows were brilliant, but it isn’t hard to game the system when you’re playing by different rules.
So HBO’s mid-decade hiccup — that creative trench that brought us Unscripted (an improvised show about George Clooney’s girlfriend’s acting class) and Tell Me You Love Me (an overly ambitious gamble on America’s appetite for televised hate-fucking) — wasn’t just a result of visionary executive Chris Albrecht being forced to resign in disgrace. It was representative of a larger shift in the small-screen landscape as even the most obscure cable channels began to realize that investing in narrative series could instantly put them on the map, or at least liberate them from the lower 400s on Time Warner’s ever-expanding grid. The more attention-getting and risk-taking their offerings, the better. HBO was still HBO. But TV? That was quickly becoming HBO, too.
Only 7.3 percent of all television shows make it to a second season.
I actually have no idea if that’s true, because I don’t know anything about successful television shows. The only shows I’ve worked on have been canceled.
Under the cover of a weekend famous for blowing stuff up, NBC did exactly that with one of its least-promising new sitcoms: Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, the TV adaptation of Chelsea Handler’s mystifyingly popular book in which the comedienne reveals her boyfriend once got a blowjob from a dog. Once scheduled for midseason, the show now appears as shaky as Handler on Rick Ross’s go-cart. The reason? The holiday axing of three core cast members: jerky comedian Jo Koy, former ER nurse Angel Laketa Moore, and — gasp! — the wonderful Natalie Morales. (Series star Laura Prepon remains.)
