Extra Criticum

Top 100 Sitcom Episodes update, or how TV is forcing me to write every day

I've never been disciplined enough to set aside some time for writing every day. It's too easy to decide that I've done enough other work, and that no one will even notice if I don't post anything on my blog for a day (or a week). But I think I've tricked myself into a daily writing habit, thanks to my reckless commencement of a project that requires at least 100 little essays.

Is there a backlash against single-camera sitcoms?

Salon's Kartina Richardson doesn't like this season's live-audience sitcoms (few critics do), but she's hoping for a rejuvenation of the format:

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time (a list in progress)

After months of bugging acquaintances for suggestions, I've finally started posting my list of the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time” at my personal blog. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here. 

I'll be posting the entire list at Extra Criticum, but please visit my blog if you're interested in the meantime. And I welcome comments from the insightful E.C. audience!

Here is the introductory post:

When I decided to make a “best sitcom episodes” list last year, I had two goals in mind. One was to make the case for the sitcom as an art form to people who were unfamiliar or dismissive of it. The second was to contribute to the making of a canon, or a consensus set of episodes that critics should be familiar with so that we have some shared points of reference.

Can stripping away government funding actually erode patron loyalty?

It's that time of the year. When end-of-year appeals from all the non-profits come crashing into our mailboxes and INBoxes. I opened one such letter from Channel Thirteen, our locate PBS affiliate and my reaction was surprising.

I was annoyed. And I didn't feel remotely like pulling out my checkbook. Why?

ONE LIFE TO LIVE Dead At Last #oltl #abc

April 14th, 2011 will always be Black Thursday for soap fans who turned on their computers to discover that ABC had canceled their favorite shows, ALL MY CHILDREN and ONE LIFE TO LIVE. Despite organized protests and letter-writing campaigns, the network, unfazed, announced their replacement shows and went merrily on about their business.

It seemed as though no one associated with running the entertainment industry was remotely interested in providing this kind of entertainment anymore - even if they had to shoot the genre dead in order for it to die. Despite what felt like network dictated edicts to kill off characters and fill the shows up with actors that couldn't act and guns and violence (whatever happened to "Love in the Afternoon"?), the fans stayed. Mostly. But the numbers did tumble. When you decide to tell the exact opposite story that the fans want, why would you expect them to stay? But then, when you want to kill a show, why would you do what the fans want?

The Deliciousness of Derailment

I saw a Russell Brand standup comedy show in a tiny LA theater (capacity: 150) last night. I'd seen him one other time in a similar scenario, so I knew what to expect: the scripted standup wouldn't be good, but I would just have to wait for Russell to get distracted and derailed, and then the real show would begin.

And true to form, Russell came out with a flipboard of newspaper headlines and notecards of factoids and statistics, none of which were terribly fascinating, revealing or funny. But they gave the guy - who I think is a charming, intelligent, and witty linguist - a springboard from which to launch into tangential diatribes and follies including rummaging through an audience member's purse and using another audience member's cell phone to call the psychics and sex workers who advertise in the back of the LA Weekly.

Good Bad, or the Pleasures of Pan Am

We all know what makes something good. We’re equally clear on what makes something bad (hint- it’s the opposite of what makes something good). But what about that mysterious quality that makes something Good Bad? You know what I’m talking about. That movie/book/TV show/song that you love even though you know its total crap. What quality does the Good Bad work of art have that Bad Bad work of art lacks? What separates Good Bad from Bad Bad?

I guess I have to come clean now. I’ll just say it quick. It’s like pulling off a Band-Aid...

As Cancellation Nears, ABC Soaps Get Good Again

I am a soap opera fan. Possibly more of an addict if you’d ask others. I can probably tell characters' names and the actors who portrayed 
them from oh, most of the past 40 years on both ALL MY CHILDREN, ONE LIFE TO LIVE and GENERAL HOSPITAL. I can definitely talk rabidly about what the soaps were like in the 70s, how they were great in the early 80s, how I missed a couple years in the late 80s because I was studying abroad (for AMC fans, these are the Nico and Cecily years – have no knowledge of this entire storyline), how I loved loved them in the 90s (will anything ever equal ONE LIFE TO LIVE under writer Michael Malone and his groundbreaking AIDS Quilt storyline?) and how ABC was clearly trying to kill them starting in about 2003/2004. Oh yes, it’s taken this long to kill them but ABC did it.

A Visit To The Cherry Orchard, Live, Sort Of

This week I visited a cherry orchard to experience something I’ve been avoiding.  I discovered that it’s actually pretty good.

Five years ago the Metropolitan Opera, led by its new and intrepid General Manager Peter Gelb, pioneered simulcasts of operas to cinemas around the country.  (The Met calls it a “cinemacast.”)  Gelb’s bravura move was accompanied, in classic opera tradition, by a chorus of skepticism and prophesies of doom.  Guess what?  It’s been a success.  Mind you, not on the scale of LinkedIn’s IPO or Facebook, but these days any success in the performing arts counts as a big success.

Rob Lowe wastes 9 hours a day in the makeup chair

This People magazine "didja know" item is insane. Rob Lowe is playing former TV news star Drew Peterson for a Lifetime reboot:

To play the 57-year-old former Illinois police sergeant — jailed since May 2009 on charges he drowned his third wife, Kathleen Savio — the chameleon-esque actor, 47, goes through a nine-hour transformation every day.

Gary Garrison & David Dower on the PBS NewsHour

Hey, Kids! Our very own member of the E.C. family, Gary Garrison, wearing his Dramatists Guild Executive Director hat, recently made an appearance on the PBS NewsHour.

Check it out:

Glee Gets Smashed

Check out the trailer for “Smash,” a new NBC television show premiering this fall.  The show looks like a hoot (of course that’s the job of trailers, but nevertheless . . .).  Recent Times coverage is here.

Live theatre, especially that of the musical variety, has received a big-time status boost in recent years from the television show “Glee.”  Particularly for all those impressionable adolescents out there, whose views about life and professions are still unformed, singing and acting on stage has migrated from dork darkness to the footlights of the cool.  Football players and cheerleaders, please stand aside while our performers make their way to the stage. 

Facing one's Creative Fears...continually

So I've mounted my fakish talk/variety show The Unknown Zone Talk Show on public access television (BCAT) and now YouTube...so what's the big deal ?  It's a comedy show, something I do well and am doing on a small scale where it may or may not 'go anywhere' other then where it is now.

Despite some really wonderful feedback: Program Director at BCAT: "Yvonne I liked your show and wish more shows on BCAT were this good.  In fact I wish we had the ability to have you teach a class in this regard."  I also have had some negative responses as well.  It's an edgy show for sure.  What I hate about myself is that I still get defensive over what I do/write and who I am as an artist.  I'm no 'spring chicken' and have had tons o' therapy so why still apologize for what comes naturally to me and to those that don't like my humor or get it?  So what ?  Who cares ?

Will public outcry over cancellation of various soaps lead to something new?

There's public outcry among soap fans over the recent cancellations of One Life to Live and All My Children. Some see these latest in a string of closures as a last gasp for a genre that had long been out of sync with the culture as a whole. But on the popular site, We Love Soaps, Kevin Mulcahy, Jr. makes a convincing argument that that premise is built on smoke and mirrors and that in fact this recent public outry is indicative of something else: a fundamental disconnect between the power suits in the halls of network television and the people who watch TV all across this country during the day.

Here's a quote from Mulcahy's piece, This is America. Why is our Television Trending Fascist: