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30 Rock
2006 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Tina Fey
Liz Lemon, the head writer for a late-night TV variety show in New York, tries to juggle all the egos around her while chasing her own dream.
26 positive1 negative48 neutralfrom 75 commenters
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81 comments on Hacker News
- Exercise, exercise, exercise! I am quite willing to bet that a lot of people with sleep issues don't really exercise properly. Exhaust yourself here.
I do at least an hour of cardio a day just for that. I'm in great shape but still have terrible sleep lol
- Magnesium and melatonin while trying to get the sleep habit started.
I've been thinking about trying melatonin. I'm always afraid of becoming dependent on anything related to sleep. I should really give it a go, though.
- Audiobooks. Not podcasts. An actual story, like someone is reading you to sleep when you were young (if you sleep next to someone, you might need particular band headphones, or lower the volume and put a slim tablet under your pillow).
I do exactly the tablet-under-the-pillow trick but for sitcom reruns, e.g., Frasier, 30 Rock, Cheers, Parks and Rec, etc. I'll give audio books another try. I found they can be distracting instead of relaxing.
Most broadcast TV shows, with the commercials removed, are about 21-22 minutes long. Those are usually my go-to for lunch. I tend to re-watch series as well, so I don’t have to pay too close attention.
I’m currently re-watching Schitt’s Creek, but others I’ve enjoyed are Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, King of the Hill, The League, Scrubs, Workaholics.
Side note. It is sort of the unwritten rule in TV and Film. Don't highlight technology unless absolutely necessary. it can age it considerably.
A few weeks back I had '30 Rock' on, it was funny seeing everyone with flip phones, it wasn't highlighted but it just makes you realise the age of it all.
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
30 Rock is one of the funniest and smartest TV shows of all time.
Oh there are certainly some excellent American comedy shows..
Seinfeld, Curb, Arrested Development, Modern Family, The Office (US), South Park, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Frasier, Fresh Prince, Friends, How I Met Your Month, Futurama, Simpsons (OG) and then there's not a lot more on the bench unless you include the lesser remakes of British shows.
A lot of them aren't funny or aren't satire.. just look at the Shameless remake - they turned that into a character drama when it was a sitcom.
America has more of a stand-up culture I feel.
I wonder if it's because the news in America is pretty much fiction that they basically don't have political satire as a genre outside of the topical news shows (Daily Show / John Oliver) which are honestly more like real news shows than comedy at this point.
Someone finally watched the 30 Rock episode The Ballad of Kenneth Parcell.
I agree with this entirely, and I think if you've watched some of his other shows you'll understand why. Some of the most consistently funny, well cast comedy on TV has had him behind it. Kids In The Hall, 30 Rock, A.P. Bio, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, Documentary Now!, Portlandia and so on and so on.
I'm sure he's quite a handful to deal with, but whatever that entails the end result of his presence on a project is that the project is often a good idea and well run. Don't get me wrong, he's had his money grabs and failed concepts, but the sheer number of hits he's involved with boggles the mind. He's willing to put money behind concepts few others even consider.
I can't but think this is the business practice of a dying technology, yet another example.
I won the fiber lottery where I live, and I will never go back to cable (I had a choice). Let's just call the rejected cable choice a "30 Rock episode".
And that same cable provider eventually was called out for advertising a "10G Plan!". Yeah.
Meanwhile my fiber provider advertises options based on symmetric upload/download speeds. And I think this is the key in these days when we send a lot of outbound data with video call and offline backups.
Put in place a rule that only the lowest speed can be advertised by providers.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
There's a 30 Rock episode from 2011 where NBC executives decide to boost viewership and quarterly earnings by broadcasting skin flicks but using a black bar to censor, and showing ads inside of that real estate.
The satire-to-reality clock is almost at midnight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBDtmAX_vNs
I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy).
This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but something that is very recognizably an old school beeper. They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.
My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line person for dealing with them and project managing emergency situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)
I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth it to them. The physical hardware for these things is outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade, they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision, but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.
This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just thought it was a neat additional data point about the considerations that go in to the thought process about provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient is about to die".
Was this the premise of the pilot episode of 30 Rock? The trivection oven?
She signed up for it; I mean it's not like it was a secret what he's like.
Yaccarino was apparently at NBC for 12 years. This leads me to suspect that 30 Rock was a documentary.
NBC’s Thursday lineup around 2010 basically.
New episodes of Community, 30 Rock, The Office, and Parks and Recreation.
And things associated with it all, like The Good Place.
30 Rock had a blackface episode too
It sounds like he enjoys what he does. Do people still hang around film sets to get picked for screentime, or has that sort of thing been outsourced to technology?
According to IMDB, Radio Man / Craig Costaldo had a part on 30 Rock. I'm pretty it was a speaking role, with him shouting "Give me your fingernails!"
A couple of episodes of 30 Rock as well.
It’s funny, I’m more sympathetic than ever to pirates, given how frequently creative works are disappeared or moved these days - pulled from streaming for political/social norms reasons (1984 style), “purchased” items removed from libraries for licensing reasons or because a platform outright closes, and then the garden variety shuffling of content between platforms in what seems like a hypermodern version of IP musical chairs (“who has 30 rock this week”).
But at the same time I engage in piracy less than ever before. For me it seems like the hard part used to be obtaining the content — “why can’t I buy or rent the new Sopranos online” — but now the hard part is choosing something worth my time in the oceans of available titles.
This past week I watched a Norwegian miniseries about people stuck in an airport at Christmas (Netflix). Prior week I watched videos from a London Clojure conference (YouTube premium). Prior to that I rewatched an old Jim Jarmusch movie (Criterion). A couple months ago I was on a Hulu binge (The Bear, Only Murderers) before cancelling. I bought a comedy special from Louis CK’s own website. I only used a couple months of a free year of Apple TV, to watch Ted Lasso.
My default is to watch old Anthony Bourdain, either streaming (back when I had Hulu, or when I had HBO Now for Curb Your Enthusiasm) or buy a copy on Apple’s store.
But just as often I look around and give up. Most nights there’s nothing I want to watch. If I can, I make myself read a book or do some coding or maybe a podcast. I subscribe to streaming platforms then cancel. It’s so easy to sign up and then leave.
My point is, if I can find something I want watch it’s only a few clicks to watch it legally for a decent price (helps that I am not in my 20s, income wise). But it’s hard to find anything I want to watch. Piracy is almost a non sequitir these days, most of the time. But sure, if you find something you love, make sure to torrent a copy, because it will disappear eventually for one reason or another.
There are no movies from the 2010s that made it into imdb.com/list/ls000551766/ top 100 all time comedies.
I noticed this pattern when watching deadpool; or various ryan reynolds. Hilarious and modern. Yet, bucking a trend. I expect if Ryan operated in the 1990s he'd be an ultra super star. He understands the role of a jester. So he gets to continue operating.
> A new age of sanctimony: feminisation and Trump
This comedy drought has nothing to do with trump. trump is a symptom just as the death of comedy is a symptom.
It's quite obvious the inflection point is 2009. Obama killed comedy, though not literally himself. He represents what killed comedy. "first black president" seems to have socially broken the USA. The relationship of race, politics, and comedy is well understood. It's crazy how many of the top comedians are black. Hence, comedy = dead.
>Maybe I’m just an old man and wow what a coincidence comedy died after I graduated from university when I had loads of time to enjoy movies. Gee whizz, my nostalgic youth just happens to coincide with the Golden Age in everything. Am I just an old man yelling at clouds?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charts-americas-political-divide-1994-2017/
Put your finger on 'median republican' in 1994. The big divide started around 2009. The death of comedy is political. Which is well understood, comedians vs political correctness has been around since forever.
>And now this. Drooling, limp regime propaganda:
Yes Colbert peaked you guess it, around 2009 as well. He clearly took the money and became a good jester obeying the regime.
The important thing to note is that we haven't changed. What exactly is Colbert? He's a court jester. In 2009 the court jesters were shutdown.
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls052391452/
Kevin hart is another obvious trend bucker. If he and ryan got together it'd be like none else. Whereas a brilliant dude like martin lawrence died with comedy, but still trying.
Dave Chappelle is the lightning rod. His ability to make jokes about the situation and not get cancelled in addition to racial unrest is what is going to help heal this wound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_United_States_racial_unrest
>Tina Fey seemed to have birthed a new era of female-led comedies with her excellent 30 Rock (2006 – 2013). The show belongs to the Before Times. Not only temporally (began pre-Obama, ended in 2013), but culturally: it could not be made today.
This isn't a 'women arent funny' thing. Instead it needs to be measured relative to the politics. Relative to 'intersectionality' or 'social justice'. Women were briefly the only jesters who were still allowed to joke. That got shut down.
This reminded me of a 30 Rock episode in which Jack Donaghy applies insights from negotiating with his nanny to negotiations with the cable company acquiring NBC.[1] Basically, if you're vital for the acquisition to succeed, you have (some) leverage.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7-eoiY4bOo
No, it's not ridiculous at all.
US programming is highly censored.
30 Rock had to pull episodes because of a gag where a 'completely insensitive dupish character' wore black makeup, to sing as a black person. It wasn't a problem in 2010 but all of a sudden it is in 2020. NBC will not be releasing the original.
A ton of jokes and gags are self censored for a variety of reasons. Eddie Murphy's early specials would absolutely not be aired today for example and I suggest they may face some shelving at some point.
Cultural standards differ.
Now - obviously, there are political elements of censorship, and being in possession of 'banned materials' may be punishable etc. - and that form of censorship is 'not comparable'. But the cultural standards issue is.
Now-a-days, I agree, grain is more of an aesthetic choice and for modern films. And, in fact, I generally don't enable de-noise when it's fairly clear that's what's happening.
However, for a lot of film shot pre-2010, grain is an artifact that's not there by choice or artistically. Other than perhaps the film 300.
It just so happens that most of my personal media fits in that box of being pre-2010 which is why I generally denoise.
Something like 30 rock, or The Office, for example, don't have film grain because of some artistic choice.
Interestingly, though, "That 70s' show" does in a few cases even though it's somewhat noisy be default. That's a more tough call.
Being 'cancelled' in academia and entertainment is a very real thing that happens to artists, but more notably, as I mentioned, suppresses tons of content across the board that won't even get pitched otherwise.
While some people do overstate it, it's definitely real.
Those who diminish it are the fascists of our generation.
Sean Penn (far left activist) and Conan O'Brien (staunch centre left advocate, public supporter of Hillary Clinton etc.) publicly decried the problem as 'Stalinist' - strong words. In their experience, in private conversation in Hollywood people are freaked out about the oppression, while a few virtue signal here and there publicly while towing the party line, everyone is thinks it's nuts.
Stephen Pinker (staunch centre-left, respected academic) has spoken out about this, and faced a 'cancellation' of his own for merely suggesting publicly that the issue with policing in America is more a general problem as opposed to specifically a racial problem. The 'mob' came for him and tried to have his participation on various boards 'cancelled'.
A long list of thinkers, including the likes of Chomsky himself, had to come out and publicly admonish the 'cancellers' (mostly on the far left) for the systematic problem.
It's without modern precedent.
There's a 'civil war' between generations at the NYT (Editorial) about what constitutes 'fair'.
The 'outrage mob' has a measurable effect on academia and especially creative culture.
Producers just don't want to risk a project being annulled, and so they go out of their way to 'sanitize' efforts left and right.
The Wachowski sisters (then brothers) were 'condemned' for 'Cloud Atlas' where they dared to have people of different classes, genders and races, play various characters - frankly in attempt to display the common humanity within all of us (not some arbitrary bit of ugly humour) - though the outrage wasn't enough to hurt them, it's become a 'no go zone' for content in 2022.
Actors playing characters of different source origin i.e. someone 'non Japanese' playing a character from Anime, actors playing historical figures, actors playing arbitrary fictional characters of questionable origin etc. etc. - it's all a minefield, scaring producers away from anything.
30 Rock, made by your typically socially progressive groups, had several episodes pulled.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Go ahead and re-watch 'Superbad' - it could not be made today, it wouldn't even get pitched. Every scene is 'off message' - arbitrary bits about crude porn, jokes involving trans people, 'period' gags. It was always a bit 'outrageous' but that kind of humour will risk too much ire and so it's out. Even the actors just wouldn't want to risk being on the wrong side - look at Seth Rogen's most recent work, it's like a 180 degree shift.
Institutional entities that have been around for some time, notably 'make money' and notably have their own production ability - South Park and Family Guy, basically get a free pass.
But most people in entertainment and academia do not have power like 'Dave Chapelle' or institutional protection like 'South Park' or respect of 'Stephen Pinker' - so they 'stay on message' and 'away from controversy' or else the script does not get approved. And FYI even the people turning it away aren't ideological about it 'it's just business' and an accommodation of the outrage mob, fickle advertisers etc..
The 'outraged' a fairly small group, with a sizeable group of allies particularly among Gen Z, which can be noted in the continuous public furor over ostensibly 'terrible person', JK Rowling. The way they go on about here is medieval.
While I don't think our campuses are overtly hostile, the issue does linger.
> And the most unusual thing about all this is: None of this is unusual. At least not within the national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town.
It also isn't unusual in the cities. Humans are wonderful and terrible everywhere. It reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where Jack and Liz go to Georgia to find a new comedian in touch with the "real America" and Liz keeps insisting that all Americans are real Americans and there is no "real America."
The acts of people after 9/11 in NYC remind us of the good in humans just as this small town inspires us.
As Mr Rogers said, "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
I have had 4 different shows have content cut from them that I noticed this year, for a variety of woke factors.
- Peep Show (Jeremy & Nancy "taboo" breaking episode)
- 30 Rock (Jenna & Tracy "role reversal" episode)
- Community (Chang D&D)
- Always Sunny
In these instances, the character that is doing the "deplorable" act is the villian or idiot. It's not like these shows are promoting those views, they're actually doing the opposite.
It's so bizarre.
> What recent (non-animated) funny movie or show have you seen that is not "feel good" or filled with sexual jokes?
I don't really watch comedy films but I watch a reasonable amount of comedy shows:
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Avenue 5, Fleabag, The Good Place, Silicon Valley, Resident Alien, Barry, Home (UK), Mythic Quest, AP Bio, Tacoma FD, Ted Lasso, Russian Doll, Veep, You're the Worst, Better Things·
I'm not sure what your qualifier for "recent" is so feel free to ignore some of those.
Sure a lot of these aren't farces like Airplane or Scary Movie but it's not all feel good or dick jokes. There is plenty of comedy out there for all types of tastes.
Specifically regarding Netflix, they show me several recommendation lists, based on stuff I've watched before, e.g. because I watched 30 Rock, they recommend I watch Schitts Creek. They also have "Trending Now," "New Releases," and "Popular on Netflix," but I'm not sure how personalized those recommendations are. There's also a "Watch Something" feature, where they show you things they think you might want to watch, but just start playing the episode and make you reject the selection if you don't want to watch it.
But, like I said, almost as often as I end up picking from any of those, I end up picking from stuff I've previously watched, which I'm not sure actually is anything more than a database query and ~100 LoC.
Given the state of Netflix's catalog, I think these recommendations are okay. If I want better recommendations, I can always go through and "like" some more things that I enjoy. I do wish they had better discoverability beyond these preconstructed lists. They definitely don't make it easy to search.
But, here's another question back: why do they need a great recommendation engine? All they really want is for me to not cancel my subscription. And, all they have to do to accomplish that is show me that there are things I might want to watch that I probably haven't seen yet, which I think they accomplish fairly well.
I fucking love 30 Rock so much, I stopped watching it after Season 1 finale. I was addicted to the first season so I didn't want to trust myself spending more time on the show otherwise I could see myself watching the entire 7 seasons 3 times in a row and waste this fall.
> Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event
NBC (and other networks around the world) pay incredible amounts of money for those rights. And the arrangement makes sense for both parties: NBC can use it to boost viewing figures of their own shows in a way the Olympics couldn't/wouldn't. And they have surfaces to advertise coverage that the Olympics doesn't, or would have to go to considerable lengths to get. So it's a value multiplier for the Olympics to sell it rather than handle it themselves.
In the words of the (NBC) TV Show 30 Rock: "You can't fight synergy, Lemon. It's bigger than all of us"
If anything, their point is somewhat made because someone made the decision to remove IASIP episodes from legal streaming options.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/hgbrs8/hulu_has_removed_five_episodes_of_iasip/
And if you are familiar with the show, they are not prejudiced at all. But whoever chose to remove them is doing the "cover your ass" move, so I can certainly see some merit in what ryandrake is saying.
30 rock episodes were removed too:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/entertainment/30-rock-episodes-blackface-trnd/index.html
30 Rock was ahead of the curve on this one!
Some of the episode Operation Righteous Cowboy Lightning[1] has the central characters singing an argument to each other to the tune of 'Uptown Girl' by Billy Joel, to stop a reality tv show that's following them from being able to air the footage, due to the copyright burden it would cause on them.
Of course reality is far more tragic.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lightning
The Sunny in Philadelphia thing makes no sense at all. Supposedly, Tina Fey pre-emptively asked to remove some of her own 30 rock episodes and that caused others to need to look like they’re doing something lest they be caught up in a PR storm. Makes zero sense in the context of comedies using it as the butt of jokes though.
We did, but it makes more sense when you have "channels." Once the channels are gone, aside from sports, it's not so clear because there aren't necessarily sane content bundles, and no one wants to pay $3 for an episode of 30 Rock (or $1 for Two and a Half Men). It's interesting to compare it to music streaming because music has more replay value, so selling tracks could work there, but it's a huge barrier for discovery. It'd be an even bigger barrier for 20-60 minutes of TV.
Your local community library is also full of extremism. You will find copies of The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kamph, The Turner Diaries, The Anarchist Cookbook, Platos Republic, In Defense of Selfishness and The Koran.
It has “problematic” works like Huckleberry Finn, Satanic Diaries and To Kill a Mockingbird.
It has works written by known racists such as HP Lovecraft, TS Elliot, Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss and Kingsley Amis.
It has hard copies of dangerous films that have been memoyholed by Prime and Netflix like Gone With The Wind and The Jazz Singer. It may also have DVDs that have been produced, directed and acted in by vile, cancelled individuals like Kevin Spacey, Louise CK, Harvey Weinstein, or Mel Gibson.
Good God, it might even have a copy of the Jenna in blackface episode from the third season of 30 Rock. I am clutching my pearls and getting the vapors just thinking about it.
I have a personal theory where the character from 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan as played by Tracy Morgan, is an example of reverse Flanderization. In the first episode, his character has a breakdown and is wandering the Brooklyn Bridge in diapers swinging a fake lightsaber screaming “I’m a Jedi.” It’s hard to get crazier than that. Tracy stays crazy, but the novel stuff because his normality. In the mid-seasons, they have arcs where he hates partying and has never cheated on his wife - despite the image he has created that imply those things.
He never becomes normal, but he starts out over-the-top. When a character starts there, sometimes showing normal behavior is more surprising than trying to be even more over-the-top.
You, uh, known 30 Rock isn't a documentary right? :P Great show, though.
But now, from beyond the grave, Gawker is revealing another reality in this era of media consolidation: that the chief executive of one of the biggest companies in the world, who testifies before Congress and negotiates with China, also decides what television shows get made.
I'm having a little trouble with the premise of this story, that it's somehow novel for an executive to have a hand in killing a show. This is like 40% of the premise of 30 Rock. But that was about the Sheinhardt Wigs hegemony over NBC (and tri-vection microwaves), not Tim Cook's influence over a tiny portfolio of streaming shows nobody watches.
As long as he doesn't fuck with Ted Lasso, I honestly don't give a shit. I'm sure I'll buy another Apple product in 2021, which will re-up my Apple TV+ subscription somehow.
This is a really subtle and correct point that's I think really difficult to grasp for High School students studying Orwell.
I think this frankly is hard to understand until you're somewhere past 30.
It's hard to understand, when you're young, that basically everyone in the press is lying to you in little ways, even though they're 'mostly telling the truth' - that there is a huge game behind it.
I'm reminded of when E. Germany had to be re-integrated into the West, the problem was that the vocabulary relating to politics and democracy had been erased in the East. Several generations of people grew up without even thinking about various aspects of politics. There literally was no language for the W. Germans to use to re-introduce E. Germans to political dialogue.
You can erase democracy by suppressing language, and therefore by suppressing thought. It doesn't exist if nobody is thinking about it.
The idea is to enforce the rules through the daily rituals, language, constructs that people use - there's no need for facts or ideology then.
The beginning of this I think happens more or less out in the open with certain subjects now in 2020, when we see language and culture shifting - but it shifts slow enough that it's not noticed.
Go ahead and look at episodes of '30 Rock' - a brilliant, first rate, amazing production from literally just 10 years ago --> it's couldn't be made today, or rather, it would have to be 'heavily censored' today because so many of those jokes are just a little to un PC (jokes about women's pay, harassment in the workplace). But today, it wouldn't be 'network censorship' - it would be a kind of 'thought and behaviour censorship' right from the writers room and producers edict. When I look at '30 Rock' from a 2020 communications perspective I'm actually very, very concerned - the level of suppression that has slowly been sinking in is alarming.
I'm well aware of the nuance of 'COPS' but those issues don't remotely rise to the need for cancellation. There is quite a lot of 'reality' that comes through even the producers lens, and that's worth something. It's the original 'reality TV'.
And as for 30 Rock: they were obviously not doing 'Blackface' - they were using the notion of Blackface as a comedic device.
'Blackface' is a vaudevillian concept of dressing up as Black people in order to mock them. In 30 Rock, the device was used only by idiotic characters doing stupid and embarrassing things. If anything, they were embellishing the obvious social principle that 'Blackface is bad'.
That people misconstrue 'doing Blackface' with 'mocking Blackface' is quite literally at the heart of the problem of the 'mob mentality' - and that's not even getting into the more complicated issue of whether 'dressing up as someone of possibly another race' is even wrong or immoral in the first place.
And of course, sometimes jokes are a little off - that's comedy and it's ok. In what world do we start banning gags for this reason?
Blackface was obviously wrong 10 years ago and nothing has changed. It's still wrong.
What has changed is the fascism and power of the Twitter mob's ability to deny any kind of context.
Edit: I should add that 'Banning 30 Rock' is not 'catching up with popular interest' - this is misconstruing the opinion of the mob (or your opinion) with the opinion of 'most people'.
Nobody cares about 30 Rocks antics but a few people on the fringes with outsized voices. Network and Ad execs are fearful of said voices - and that's mostly it.
We all live in 'thought bubbles', it's worth walking down the street and looking around, because it's immediately clear that 'most people' are not 'like us'.
If you were to show 100 random episodes of comedy, with a few 30 Rocks sprinkled in, to a 100 Americans, I don't believe a single person would initiate an objection to any of it, let alone 30 Rock.
I'll go further: not even those people who even noticed the cheekiness of the comedy thought to themselves that they ought not to publish it. Not even most of the press writing about it - they're just following the themes and narratives of the hour because that's what they do. It's being pulled because some people (a very small group) are looking for reasons to be outraged and in a hyper-sensitive moment, nobody, but nobody wants to 'disagree' with said outraged person.
Feels like you either missed the point of some of those specific recent examples, or you're oversimplifying them.
With the show, Cops (Live PD as well), the overriding concern was that the film crew and the process had turned law enforcement work into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue), and possibly even influenced the officers being filmed to engage in their duties differently than they might have otherwise.
Left out, also, is that 30 Rock's "censored" episodes featured blackface, which at this point, the issues with the practice have been covered exhaustively, and large corporations are only now deciding to care as they see public opinion shift, but it wasn't a great idea when they produced those episodes at the time, either.
They used to censor language and 'ideas'. You could not attack Christianity, or present civil figures (ie the President, the Flag) in a bad light. Hollywood up to 1970's was very much about projecting morality in the classical sense. (Edit: Cohen Brother's 'Hail Caesar' depicts this hilariously with 1950's Hollywood execs in a funny meeting with various Priests and Rabbis trying to get approval for a big '10 Commandments'-like epic. Hilarity ensues as the various sects begin to argue about God ...)
1970 - 2010 it was mostly just language i.e. this or that word.
We are now back to censoring 'ideas' but it's the other side of the fence. NYT called for banning 'Paw Patrol' (kids cartoon) for its 'normalisation' of the social roles of police, 'COPS' was dropped because of its ostensible 'glorification of police'. Which I can possibly understand in an intellectual sense, but pragmatically it's completely ridiculous. 30 Rock, one of the smartest and best comedies every madd - and it's not even 10 years old - is already getting episodes banned.
I feel so seen! For a very long time, I couldn't sleep without watching TV shows on my laptop, to the extent that I'd have insomnia if the Internet went out. In fact, even though I've weaned myself off it for the past several months, I'd probably still have trouble sleeping if I didn't at least know I could watch reruns of 30 Rock if I had trouble sleeping.
More to the point: just like the author, there's a very particular kind of TV I'd watch to sleep: nothing for the first time, and nothing tense. The West Wing and the US version of The Office were both great for me, since there's so much of it to get through. I've probably seen every episode of The West Wing at least 15 times by now.
Which, to me, sort of answers/challenges the concern the author has about binge watching. On a normal night, I'd barely make it through half an episode before I'd notice time slipping as I watched, my cue that I'm nodding off and should shut the laptop. I'm never watching first-run stuff like Mindhunter or Russian Doll, the stuff Netflix really wants me to be streaming, because it'd keep me alert.
Of course shows are just a byproduct of the writer's experiences, some famous TV shows even use that to an advantage. See 30 Rock. Or how The Office integrates the cameramen. Many popular writers are producers and sometimes actors as well, so we're definitely consuming a narrow viewpoint.
IMO Hotstar is not orders of magnitude better in terms of content.
Prime has big sitcoms like the office, 30 rock, seinfeld etc.
Their B&W and 60s/70s movie catalog is also much larger than any other services.
There was an episode of 30 Rock where Jack pitches essentially an Alexa-powered TV, and the joke was TV shows controlling the TV itself, never thought of Tina Fey as a SciFi writer but here we are.
I've been meaning to turn off voice detection on my phone because I'm tired of Google reacting to my conversations (and worried enough about Google as it is).
It took me a while to understand what's going on in these comments before I was reminded of the 30 Rock episode where a Canadian character has trouble understanding sarcasm because there aren't many Jews there.
But still, did you all miss the winking emoji right there following the text?
Even if you take out the racial view (which is totally valid), it just doesn't seem right that you can walk in somewhere in the US with US Dollars in your pocket but be turned down, and I say that as someone who very rarely makes purchases with paper money. As much as I hate "slippery slope" arguments, I do also worry that this is the first step in the direction of businesses dictating how you buy things. Starting with no cash may not seem that bad, but I don't wont to end up in a world where different stores require me to check out using their own e-wallet or a specific brand of credit card they've partnered with.
The whole thing reminds me a little bit of that 30 Rock episode where Liz Lemon gets stuck with a 50 dollar bill and gets into a shouting match with a convenience store clerk when he wont accept it, saying something along the lines of "this is legal tender, you have to accept it!" Not the same situation as what is being discussed here, Liz's sentiment still applies.
"We live in a consumerist culture increasingly dominated by those with a financial interest in keeping us ignorant of this fact, but that doesn't make it any less true."
One of the more subtle, but powerful cultural subplots in the TV series "30 Rock" was the salutation that Dennis Duffy[1] would greet Liz Lemon with whenever she involved him in her life:
"Hey dummy..."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_30_Rock_characters#Dennis_Duffy
And of course, 30 Rock demonstrates this in the episode where the characters brainstorm names for a pocket-sized microwave. Everyone agrees that "BiteNuker" is the perfect name... until somebody points out that it's vulgar in both French and Dutch.
For reference, neuker is Dutch for "fucker".
(and of course, this episode teaches us a valuable lesson for marketing people in real life too... just ask the people who named the Mitsubishi Pajero, Honda Fit, and Buick LaCrosse)
I find certain familiar TV shows playing at moderate volume can greatly help my own problems getting to sleep. For me it's Futurama, 30 Rock, Star Trek: TNG, and Good Eats. All things I can consistently enjoy watching over and over, with a minimal amount of high dynamic range (i.e. no shouting), and things that don't surprise or grab attention. Sleeping with a partner that has trouble getting to sleep at all with something on has made things a little more difficult.
That's step one, step two is getting to sleep at the same time every night, taking care to _not_ stay up into the early hours or sleep in, and general human maintenance. It's still not perfect, or sometimes even very good, and I'm afraid it'll always take care unless I make lifestyle choices that make me always tired.
This issue was a plot point in an episode of 30 Rock.
"Meanwhile, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) pushes Liz Lemon's (Tina Fey) buttons as usual by not showing up to rehearsals and leaving work to do something insane. However, Tracy's demeanor instantly changes when a camera crew starts to follow him around for his wife's new reality show. He starts to act responsible and respectful in front of the cameras, as not to ruin his chances of winning an Oscar. Liz has the idea to use Tracy's fake good behavior to get him to do things he blew off in the past, knowing that he can't refuse while taped. This works until Tracy finds a loophole. When Liz tries to get Tracy to do more things, he refuses and insults Liz to the melody of "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel. Since the song is copyrighted, any footage containing that song can't be used. Therefore, Tracy's irresponsibility wouldn't be aired on the show."[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Righteous_Cowboy_Lightning
30 Rock has a great scene making fun of this very scenario. It doesn't seem to be readily available online, although it's on the episode ¡Qué Sorpresa! for those interested. Then Forbes wrote an article explaining why this can never happen.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/01/12/hed-why-that-scene-with-the-voice-activated-tv-in-30-rock-will-never-happen/#6c7f1ecf22f6
Edit: It is worth mentioning that Alexa being outside the TV does make a difference, as it's unlikely to have a directional microphone as would likely be installed in the TV.
Modern Family, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Middle, Raising Hope, How I Met Your Mother, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt were all fairly recent examples of decent modern sitcoms (and wow that list is bigger than I thought it'd be), and for the most part, generally centered around middle class families/people. Some are a bit more outlandish and over-the-top at times, but that can also be their appeal.
By modern, I also mean they follow a continuing story arc episode-to-episode, so while you could watch any episode in isolation, you get a lot more if you know backstory and the characters. They're also all "single camera" shows (no laugh track) which IMHO is a much better style, and allows them to be more creative, have a continuing story, and frankly, be funnier than the (pause for laughter) lines in a show like Big Bang Theory.
The author blames the modern sitcom's remoteness from working and lower-middle class concerns with their creators' immunity from the recent recession. In place of everyday situations, we have shows set in "soundstages and writers’ rooms," the haunts of the out-of-touch in New York and LA. So you wind up with a show with this sort of genesis:
Our creator was once a prominent writer and performer on a comedy sketch show, which aired live every Saturday night from an NBC studio in New York. It ran for 90 minutes. After their time on the show came to an end, our creator decided to pitch a sitcom based on their experiences there. The lead character is the head writer on a comedy show, similarly produced in New York. They must balance their work in the writers' room and their personal life, though this turns out to be difficult. A pilot is made, and our creator plays the lead.
Modern viewers may recognize this as 30 Rock, but it is in fact The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is based not on SNL but on a direct ancestor, Your Show of Shows. Carl Reiner's performance in the pilot may have dissuaded executives from casting him in the commissioned series (hence Dick Van Dyke), while Tina Fey remained the lead in her own version. But otherwise the parallel rings a sight near perfect.
The author stumbles over himself insisting, however, that while The Dick Van Dyke Show did not give vent to working and lower-middle class concerns, it did at least feature characters who "had careers" and were definitely of a class. As if the same were not true of shows like 30 Rock (which is at times obsessed with class difference), or of Parks and Recreation and The Office. These do not depict realistic workspaces, but why place that demand on a sitcom? And why not place the same demand on, yes, The Honeymooners, Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and on and on. In all cases the demands of the form—and in almost all cases the demands of overly long tenures—stretched the premises and the rare attempts at realism very thin.
I think you can make an argument that the most popular comedies available right now—whether on TV or at the movie theaters—are unflinchingly escapist. (Though, as the article notes in its discussion of an episode each of Horace and Pete and Girls, this has not gone unnoticed or unremarked by all of the shows' writers. Still, these two are not the most popular things around by any stretch.) Similarly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were seen to traipse across exclusive resorts, high-class stages, ballroom floors, and Venice, in elaborate dresses and a "top hat, white tie, and tails"—all during the Great Depression. Sometimes hard circumstances produce a public clamoring for comment; sometimes the public just wants a reprieve.
And another: 30 Rock implies that Kenneth's father was D.B. Cooper. In one episode he's wearing a suit passed down from his late father. The inside pocket of the suit coat is inscribed "D.B. Cooper."
Weirdly, this happened in season 6 episode 10, like the Numb3rs episode.
I've noticed this in a few BBC shows vs. American shows. In a British TV show there will be characters that just happen to be black, but in an American show it's going to get talked about eventually. Admittedly they aren't the same genres, but the shows that immediately come to mind for me like this are Sherlock and Dr. Who vs. say 30 Rock or Community.
This really reminds of the 30 Rock episode about porn for women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGcRz9jJJCU
Edit: before anyone questions it, I am not saying that in any derogatory manner. Just a similar concept in a way, though obviously this has very different value proposition.
This hasn't been the case for a long time, although for some reason it remains a common misperception. I think it's mainly a marketing problem because people are always reading comments like this online, or hearing about such-and-such series that "is on Netflix" but disappointingly isn't currently available in the UK, while simultaneously being unaware of all the content that is available in the UK but not in the US.
For example, Netflix UK has the first 2 Hobbit movies, Pixar's Up, the original Danish versions of The Killing and The Bridge, all of Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, 24 and The Shield - none of which are currently available in the US. There's a load more I can't remember off the top of my head. The UK also got Breaking Bad a few hours after it was aired in the US, whereas US customers had to wait several months, presumably due to an exclusivity deal with AMC.
Obviously the UK also gets all the Netflix original content. Occasionally a new season will launch a few months ahead in the US, but that's not really a big deal. I can only assume this is done for same marketing reasons that blockbuster movie launches are typically staggered worldwide.
There are a small number of US shows like 30 Rock and Better Off Ted that I wish were on the UK service, and Star Trek DS9 is conspicuously absent, but that list is much smaller than it was 2 years ago.
This reminds me so much of an awesome 30 Rock episode where Fred Armisen plays the middle eastern neighbor of Tina Fey's character. She ultimately gets him turned in for planning an attack, when he was just preparing for The Amazing Race with his friend.
Its sad how sensationalist and afraid we have become.
All true, but the main point is that the subject of BBT isn't "geeks", which explains the misguided haterade. For example, Raj seeking research/grant funding from Sheldon and their university office sharing hijinx hits home for a segment of nerds who aren't the type to frequent reddit or HN where the "laugh at geeks" narrative became popular.
This is esp. cogent if Community is supposed to be a "proper" nerdy show. The reality is a single-camera format is more conducive to a more subtle script (eg 30 rock, which geeks similarly like) than a cheap/quick multi-cam sitcom. The love seems to stem from the nature of the material, which is conflated with the material itself.
"I'm generally not very receptive to arguments along the lines of "OK, this show isn't great now but you owe it to the universe to give it six months" but I also don't really disagree."
That's not really the argument I was trying to make. I apologize if I wasn't clear enough! Usually my fault. Rather, what I was trying to say is that hindsight is 20/20, and at the outset, nobody at the network -- hell, nobody in Hollywood, including Tina Fey herself -- would have imagined that 30 Rock would outperform Studio 60. I was simply making a broad illustration of the difficulty of predicting winners, even based on (ostensible) quality of a script.
"Are there good examples of a really "knock them dead" pilot that didn't translate into a halfway decent show. Smith might be one possible candidate although I liked the show as a whole more than people in general apparently did."
There are some fantastic pilots that never even got made for various reasons. As for "best pilot that became a bad series," I think Studio 60 is up there. I'd also nominate The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a show with an ostensibly built-in fanbase and a great pilot that just ran out of places to go. Also, call me completely f'ing crazy, but I thought the pilot for SeaQuest DSV was really solid. The show itself? Kind of a massive, bloated embarrassment for all concerned (including Spielberg, one of the show's executive producers).
I'm sure there are plenty of others, but the problem is that -- as with most instances -- we suffer from a bit of a hindsight issue here. Also a bit of a selection bias. Because a lot of good-pilots-turned-crappy-series got canned after a few episodes, we don't remember them as much as we do the shows that lasted a season or longer.
"Related question. For a relatively big budget show, how expensive is making a pilot relative to non-pilot development costs?"
Pilots are usually more expensive than episodes of a show, for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is economies of scale. A running show has its scripts planned out in advance, a regular staff, a cast, and a series of continuously operating parts that reduce the marginal production cost of each episode over the course of a season. A pilot is more like making a small movie: you incur a lot of ad hoc and one-time costs to build something, and you gain no economies of scale. You set up the production, make the episode, then tear everything down and put the whole thing on pause until May.
Another big reason is talent costs. It's not uncommon to convince a prestigious film director or major actor to work on the pilot of a show to help sell it to advertisers and audiences. These folks won't stick around for the show itself, but spending money on them for pilots -- basically, as a form of insurance -- is an age-old tactic.
I didn't hate Studio 60 as much as others but, yeah, it should have been better.
>As great a show as 30 Rock became, it wasn't all that great from the get go. A lot of the magic happened in production, with the hiring of a fantastic writing staff and the time to let the whole thing gel and find audience fit.
I'm generally not very receptive to arguments along the lines of "OK, this show isn't great now but you owe it to the universe to give it six months" but I also don't really disagree. I confess to also liking 30 Rock but never quite putting it in the must see bucket. (In all fairness, I've really sort of gotten away from sitcoms period.) Certainly, I imagine we'd all like to see good shows get the opportunity to work out kinks rather than putting all the burden on one pilot.
I'm curious. Are there good examples of a really "knock them dead" pilot that didn't translate into a halfway decent show. Smith might be one possible candidate although I liked the show as a whole more than people in general apparently did.
[EDIT] Related question. For a relatively big budget show, how expensive is making a pilot relative to non-pilot development costs?
This has been rumored for years as Blizzard's (aka maker of World of Warcraft) next big MMO. It's cool to see all of those leaks and conspiracy theories add up, though they don't mention Blizzard in the article, just their parent (partner?) company Activision.
Here's my favorite one:
In February 2007, an episode of 30 Rock entitled Hardball aired and in the credits it said, “Promotional Consideration Furnished by Blizzard Entertainment.” What makes this interesting is that no Blizzard products were featured. No Warcraft. No Starcraft. No Diablo. No World of Warcraft. However, Halo was featured in the show! So Blizzard was advertising for Halo in 2007? This was right before word got out that Blizzard was working on a brand new MMO and they started hiring “Science-Fiction Texture Artists.” Coincidence? Maybe.
http://obsoletegamer.com/could-blizzards-next-mmo-titan-really-be-a-halo-mmo/
Content availability is the main problem. Hulu is really annoying because I pay for it yet still have to endure commercials, and their have strange restrictions on how you can consume the content. 30 Rock, for example, cannot be streamed through my Apple TV's Hulu. I could stream it to my laptop, however. Instead I wound up paying Apple for it, so I'm in the seemingly absurd situation of paying Apple $20, Hulu $8/month and Netflix $8/month, and I still don't get all the TV I want to watch--or even all of broadcast TV. I can't get Seinfeld without Crackle, and Crackle is about the worst.
These services are all partially overlapping solutions. Here's what I want:
- All TV shows, current season as it airs and all past seasons
- No commercials
- No time pressure to watch before "expiration"
I'm willing to pay substantially for this. I'm talking $40-60/month, and I don't care about HBO or Showtime either. Instead I have two services that charge me $8/month and have the selection of a small-town Blockbuster. If any of these services were actually trying to compete with cable, they could charge more and provide access to the rest of the content. Instead they seem happy to play the annoying long-tail game with off-brand crap, and it's deeply dissatisfying.
The real problem here is absolutely not technical. It's contractual with the companies that own the content. I doubt you could do better than they have without offering more money, but I think there could be a real niche there if you're willing to charge customers actual money to provide actual service.
Felt compelled to post because I hadn't seen Suits mentioned. Modern Family continues to be reliable for laughs and hasn't been added yet. The League is the other show which I find myself laughing out loud at least a few times every episode.
Hell on Wheels surprised me by having a strong second season.
I had high hopes for Copper, but it hasn't really grabbed me in the 1st handful of episodes.
Agree with all the obvious ones:
Homeland, Louie, Newsroom, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, Community.
My wife is addicted to Castle and I've come to really enjoy it too. Since we've caught up to date with that we've now switched over to Person of Interest, which I'm really enjoying.
I've fallen behind with the following and plan to catch up ASAP:
Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad.
PS: yeah, I watch a lot of TV :)
Disclaimer: I am German and I actually saw and liked 30 Rock (in English) ;-) As for 30 Rock: The problem with English shows on German television is that they are all dubbed. I won't say that they are doing a bad job (c.f. eastern european countries) but sometimes they are missing out puns and jokes which "can't be translated" without losing meaning. In the end this can make a funny TV show unwatchable. On the other hand you will never (as in never ever) see an undubbed show on German television. People are used to watch it in German, so most of them might just never watch it again in either language.
edit: s/Disclaimer/FYI/
It's even worse than that. If you know the right string to use, you can get to tonight's episode of 30 rock, in 720p, at a site that will let you download at 6MB/s happily with no wait.
That's how bad it is, and I assume it's because of how easy it is to throw up megaupload clones and a blog with links.
And thus far they're about as effective at impeding my access to copyrighted content as they are impeding my access to illegal drugs.
Seriously:
1) Google "watch 30 rock online"
2) Click first link
3) Click "Search links" for newest episode of 30 rock
4) Go to second to last page of results (just because the first and last page of results are always fake, as a rule - you always shoot for the middle)
5) Click random link
6) Watch Dove Soap ad
7) Watch tonight's episode of 30 Rock
Replace "30 rock" with pretty much any other TV show (at least one that's been over for more than 30 minutes) or movie, and the same approach will get you to a working video, though you may have to click a few fake links before finding a real one.
Is there a solution to this? Idunno. I do know that the "overseas" thing is a total red herring - in this particular example, that "first link" that I clicked was sidereel.com, registered to the Rovi Corporation in Santa Clara, CA. Completely and utterly within the jurisdiction of the US government, and clearly linking to pirated versions of almost every TV show that's on the air right now, and pretty much nothing else. If linking to content was such a clear and easily prosecutable crime, I'd think they'd be taking down sites like that, too, rather than leaving them active.
I can't help but wonder if perhaps there's not such a legal consensus on how criminal sites like Sidereel are, and that's why they're trying to go after the endpoints that sites like this point to instead, as well as passing laws that would specifically make linking to them illegal.
Cotton was used to the environment where he knows there is a limited amount of time to make his case to the public. He (attempted to) connect it with a subject they care about (jobs) and then did everything he could to shut down any substantive exchange on the issue by talking over Alexis. Within the limited amount of time available, Cotton got more of his message across than Alexis.
I feel like I should be uploading episodes of 30 Rock to every site I can find just to even things out.
I tend to use Netflix more as a cable substitute with TV shows than a full movie library. The number of full backlogs of great shows in the U.S. at least (30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Party Down, Breaking Bad, etc.) for 8/month vs. 100/month for cable is an astounding savings for me personally. The movie selection is meh, but I can live with that for what I'm paying.
I am strangely reminded of that episode in 30 rock where tracy realizes he can just pay a fine to make obscene comments and do obscene things on TV ...
Thanks! Keep working hard and you'll be just fine. We all feel that we need to play catch-up to someone. My boss had like 25 publications by the time he was my age, so I know the feeling. Like others have said, use it to your advantage as a way to push yourself harder.
There are a few competitors, but generally they're celeb fashion/gossip blogs. We're the only site that I'm aware of which is focused on actually being more like a search engine. It's been tried a few times throughout the last 15 years, and even Liz Lemon mentions it at the end of a 30 Rock episode. The problem is that costume designers are very busy and in general Hollywood does not want to work with you, so you need to do all the legwork yourself.
Additionally, it's only in recent years that crowdsourcing has become a viable solution, both in terms of paid (e.g., Mechanical Turk) and organic (e.g., StackOverflow) platforms. We rely heavily on crowdsourcing to help us generate some of our data and it's so far worked out really well in private testing. The key is really about getting an efficient, organized workflow that you can repeat and scale out. It wasn't easy to find, but I think we have it down now and are looking forward to launching in November! :D
It's difficult to come up with examples off the cuff, because, you know, it's implied.
hrm
a classic example of implied (but not really) is cockney rhyming slang
... but really it's about reading between the lines. I can recall the point when I realised that the 'old way' of implied speech was dead in public discourse with this article
http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty_pool.html
It's not going to make a lot of sense out of context. In context, it was an article that came out when a superstar athlete in swimming, a national hero, announced his retirement, and the media pundits were basically of the opinion that he was somehow being a traitor to Australia.
This article is lampooning the slavering media, not the athlete. To someone brought up with classic Australian English (similar in nuance to British), it's blisteringly obvious what this article is getting at by halfway through the second sentence. As in, 'it's not worth pointing out' obvious. I thought the article was tedious and waaaaay too long, but the premise was funny.
What was scary was that only about 10% of the people commenting understood what the article was about - the rest completely missed the point, thinking that this was another article calling the athlete a traitor, and rushing to his defense. The article was actually saying "leave the athlete alone, damn the media are reactionary idiots".
Like I said, you'll read it now and it'll probably seem more obvious out of context.
Examples are kind of hard to come up with off the cuff, so what other examples... When we first started watching 30 Rock, we were fairly puzzled and joked that "surely this doesn't have American writers" due to the high amount of innuendo and unpsoken communication in it; jokes that are woven into discourse without having to be focused on and made obvious.
Compare to the more frequent style of US TV, my classic example of a Friends episode where the joke is "Books are so expensive, if only there was a place you could borrow them, and give them back when you're finished!", which gets a dirty look from character B. Joke made, move on. Nope, character B has to say "There is, it's called a library". That kind of punchline being eviscerated from a joke and laid out on a plate is anaethema to British comedy.
I also find it more difficult to speak in metaphor with an American audience, who usually take a much more literal interpretation of what's being said (of course, it varies considerably among Americans - New Englanders seem to understand this kind of speech much more easily).
I do agree that British English speakers are more reticent, but in something of a different way. I spent three months going coast to coast in the US and one thing I loved about it was that Americans just talk to strangers in a way you don't get in other English-speaking countries. Random people walking in the same direction or on the same public bus would just start talking and you'd end up with a good conversation out of it. That rarely happens here.
I've probably waffled on enough at this point (I'm a little drunk), so perhaps best leave it there :)
NOTE: I hate the way HN expires internal links. What, am I going to maliciously link to this reply page? Just because the above took a while to write in this little box shouldn't mean I should run the risk of having to lose a comment I spent some time on. Luckily this time I had it in pageback, but I've lost other comments on other browsers. The point of proscribing pondered (perhaps ponderous?) positations is perfectly puzzling, I put forth. Pshaw!
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification.
You can use bittorrent to download and watch a film that's been released on DVD. This deprives the content created of a sale/hire/watch on demand, so in theory they lose out on revenue.
You can also use bittorrent to download and watch a TV show that was broadcast in another country the night before and that will never be shown on your country's TV network. Think about NBC or Comedy Central - 30 Rock and Colbert aren't going to be broadcast in the UK any time soon, and their content owners refuse to let international users watch online. Torrenting this content is therefore a victimless crime.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was the episode of 30 Rock where Jack talks about "Meetings Magazine." Too funny.
Anyone ever seen the 30 Rock where she goes to her reunion, and the whole time, she thought she was bullied in middle school and high school, only to find out that everyone was terrified of her, because she made such cutting remarks?
"Hey, Liz, how's your new telescope?"
"I don't know Kelsey, how's your mom's pill addiction?"
I think a lot about that episode, and I thought more about it reading this blog post. I knew there was a reason Patton was one of my favorite comedians.
FWIW I find IT Crowd funny, but it's not on my 'must have' list. - Office, Green wing, Alan Partridge, blackadder, brasseye, day today, extras, league of gentlemen, psychoville, police squad, 30 rock, etc would all be above it.
IT Crowd is great, but I wish it was a bit more cutting/daring rather than settling into a formulaic sitcom.
People like to claim that TV is only full of crap. This is grade A, Microsoft-FUD-level, Bullshit.
Like anything, sure, most of it is crap. Just like if you went to a bookstore and picked up 10 random fantasy novels. You might conclude that they're all just cookie cutter pablum - most are - but then you miss out on George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, LeGuin's Earthsea, and other truly excellent works of fiction.
But like anything, it takes some investment to tell the good from the bad. If you just watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, Entertainment Tonight, and According to Jim, yeah, you're better off without the TV altogether. But I claim that there's more good TV being made now than at any time in history, particularly for niche markets.
Here's some of my recommendations: Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, Supernatural, Dollhouse, The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, The Simpsons (not as great as it was, but still fun), The Daily Show/Colbert Report, Mad Men... and more, there's just a ton of really high quality work being done.
If your argument is that instead, you watch things online/through netflix, that makes sense. If I didn't enjoy live sports sometimes, I'd consider doing the same.
Not everyone has to have a hobby of watching television, or movies, or reading for that matter, but the opinion that it's all crap is extremely ill-informed and snobbish, and I strongly encourage it to be dropped as something that makes you sound actively stupid when you say it. It's an anti-pattern.
Haha ... I am laughing now thinking of the 30 Rock episode when the guy played by Alec Baldwin thinks up the smallest microwave ever, and that was like a funny thing. And now its a reality, :) ( by the way the microwave showed in that episode was bigger than this one )
I wonder if the entertainment industry is headed to a model comparable to venture capitalism.
Isn't it like this already? Shows like 30 Rock and The Late Show are created by production companies owned by Tina Fey and David Letterman. The shows are jointly owned by the production companies and the star's production companies. Even smaller potatoes productions are owned by production companies, not the networks. I.e. all that crap like "Rob and Big" on MTV is joint owned by MTV and a production company owned by some random dudes.
The finance and ownership issues relating to TV and Film are probably more sophisticated than high-tech venture capital.