Saturday, November 22, 2008
Interesting Article About my Favorite Night of Television
Finally! Read this amazing piece of analysis of NBC's thursday night line-up by Alyssa Rosenberg called "My Job is Driving me Crazy!" It rightly notes what I've been thinking about the shift from the annoying 90's sitcoms that I fucking hated about stupid Manhattan yuppies like Seinfeld, Mad About You, Friends, Frasier (he's in Seattle, I know, but it's the bourgy part!) etc. to the awesomeness that is NBC's thursdays since 2006. Shows like My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, and my all-time favorite, The Office, that deal with the day-to-day of working people (or in Earl's case underemployed). Anyways, Rosenberg makes a great argument about how the aforementioned shows reflect American worker's dissatisfaction with their jobs and how work is central to the character's lives and the shows in general, as opposed to the affluent lives of the characters in the 90's sitcoms where work was in the background of the characters and they seemed fulfilled with their careers. Anyways, a great, interesting read that y'all should definitely check out.
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3 comments:
You know who's the forerunner of these working centered shows? King of Queens dude and we're watching that shiz when youre down here
And Roseanne before that.
You should check out this documentary if you haven't seen it before.
"Class Dismissed."
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=411
if i had more time i was actually going to address both shows...maybe i should in the future!
Jeff, that trailer looks awesome, maybe a little too ultra-left because it criticized Good Times haha, but it was Robin Kelly so it's cool!
I think King of Queens maybe even signified the shift. Galindo, I probably said it a lot better that night at Ralphs at like 2 am, but yea... making a sitcom about a UPS worker in New York, a year or so after the legendary Teamster Strike, where New York UPS drivers were at the vanguard... a statement in itself.
And I could go on all day about Roseanne. There needs to be like a radical TV watchers group. It's late and I can't sleep and I'm rambling.
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