Hacker Cinema
Modern Family
2009 · TV series · 11 seasons
Created by Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd
The Pritchett-Dunphy-Tucker clan is a wonderfully large and blended family. They give us an honest and often hilarious look into the sometimes warm, sometimes twisted, embrace of the modern family.
10 positive4 negative34 neutralfrom 48 commenters
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48 comments on Hacker News
Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.
Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.
Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.
The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.
Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].
Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.
Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.
Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.
[1]: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-vietnam-war-inspiration-explainer/
Parent comment was (I think), specifically talking about sitcoms from what I understood.
Sitcoms are - and I know this is a little condescending to point out - comedies contrived to exist in a particular situation: situation comedy → sitcom.
In the old day, the "situation" needed to be relatively relatable and static to allow drop-in viewers channel surfing, or the casual viewer the parent described.
Soap operas and other long-running drama series are built differently: they are meant to have long story arcs that keep people engaged in content over many weeks, months or years. There are throwbacks to old storylines, there are twists and turns to keep you watching, and if you miss an episode you get lost, so you don't ever miss an episode - or the soap adverts within them, their reason for being for which they are named - in case you are now behind with everything.
You'll find sports networks try to build the story arc around games too - create a sense of "missing out" if you don't watch the big game live.
I think the general point is that in the stream subscription era, everything has become like this "don't miss out" form, by doubling down on the need to see everything from the beginning and become a completist.
You can't easily have a comedy show like Cheers or Married... With Children, in 2026, because there's nothing to keep you in the "next episode" loop in the structure, so you end up with comedies with long-running arcs like Schitt's Creek.
The last set of sitcoms that were immune to this were probably of the Brooklyn 99, Cougartown and Modern Family era - there were in-jokes for the devotees, but you could pick up an episode easily mid-series and just dive in and not be totally lost.
Interesting exception: Tim Allen has managed to get recommissioned with an old style format a couple of times, but he's had to make sure he's skewing to an older audience (read: it's a story of Republican guys who love hunting), for any of it to make sense to TV execs.
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.
With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:
- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.
- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.
- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.
Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.
I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:
- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time
- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do
- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.
So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
Then using a tv remote control is Dunning-Kruger. Look, I push a button, then the tv turns on. How? I barely have an idea. I push this button, and then this button, and we are enjoying an episode of Modern Family. How? I barely have any idea.
Then programming in Python is Dunning-Kruger. Some simple text, and I somehow manipulate and manage all sorts of complex processes taken from the abstract all the way down to machine instruction, down to a trillion and one bare metal transistors. How? I barely have an idea. I am not a chip designer.
Then chip designers are just Dunning-Kruger flunkies. Sure they are experts doing amazing things, but what do they know of mining and smelting, logistics and accounting, and the zillion and one other things that people in our society do to empower each other in this collective enterprise.
Progress IS Dunning-Kruger.
You do not. But the people who eagerly jumped to smart homes, and voice assistants that are always on, to which privacy might as well not exist... Are going to love their own "Jarvis" which they can give shopping orders to while in the kitchen.
Basically, the Sillicon Valley "smart fridge" episode. Or even better, the Modern Family "smart fridge" episode.
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.
This reminded me. There was an episode of Modern Family made entirely on Apple devices.
I think one could base a Modern Family episode around Phil Dunphy's unsuccessful usage of this feature. He books a first class flight to Fiji, instead of coach to Chicago. He sells his house to Blackstone, and gets an A instead of a C- on one of Haley's take home exams.
And Apple handled that with product placement.
An episode of the hit sitcom Modern Family was centred entirely around a character's obssession with buying the iPad on Day 1.
"Game Changer, Season 1, Episode 19, aired March 31, 2010"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Changer_(Modern_Family)
While it makes some good points, I think a lot of it depends on what content you are consuming.
I feel like there used to be a lot of family oriented shows in the past. There may have been some innuendo for the adults, but nothing really sexual, no vulgar language, etc. It seems incredibly rare to find a show like that today. Think Brady Bunch vs Modern Family.
There are plenty of shows available today that are highly sexual, but most of them have moved out of the mainstream because you can cater to the niche more than if it were for a general audience. Sex Life, Spartacus, etc has lots of sexual content. I'm not sure if Game of Thrones fits with the author's take or mine, but there are likely examples of each depending on the scene. We don't really need this content in blockbuster movies when we can get even more graphic content through these shows.
No, I meant American sitcoms like Friends, Seinfeld, Home Improvement, Modern Family, etc. None of these shows show anything dramatic or larger than life - it's just a couple of friends or a family going through relatable yet sanitized everyday situations.
Many of these shows were the pillar of people's evening ritual - the whole family would gather around the TV to watch a fictional family experience life.
It's difficult to tell whether this is a stage or a permanent feature in media.
Look at black representation - there was a time where they would either be black stereotypes or just be normal characters with black actors but no reference to it in the story. (Eg the token black having a suburban house, with no black friends, surrounded by other white people). Probably, the actor was black but everybody involved in writing and producing the film was white. Or not interested in listening to their black colleagues, or thinking that the film is made "for white people" therefore doesn't need to include any black representation besides having a black actor.
Nowadays we have things like Modern Family, Black-ish, which actually incorporate diversity into the characters without being offensive. Obviously the shows still get criticised, but part of the reason they do better is that there is more diversity in the industry and network's views on what the public want have moved forwards.
Maybe, the same shift will happen for LGBTQ+ characters.
More recently, in an episode of Modern Family, Jay keeps discovering there are more floors on the hotels he's staying in, where he thinks he's on the most exclusive top floor only to be denied some service or other which is reserved for the tier on the floor above.
Coincidentally came across a comment by Neil Gaiman today, related to this topic on Reddit: I don't write much about gay sex, as people who have read my book would know. But oddly, I don't read tweet like this and feel to convert. Instead I read it and vaguely wish I'd actually written more about gay sex. (Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/me_irlgbt/comments/x79303/me_irlgbt/ ).
Isn't it an interesting perspective from a writer? Inspiration and creativity comes from such moments, and tomorrow if this writer creates a gay character for some story, you can feel the author will do a good job of characterisation and making such character feel real. When the writing is good, an actor feels connected to it and the director and show-maker too are inspired to do justice it. Right now it doesn't often feel like that. sometimes when I see some of the awful effort of some of these LGBT / person of colour (PoC) / powerful women scenes, out of boredom I often find myself imagining how such a scene was shot - someone at the production unit suddenly remembers, "Ok, who is playing the token LGBT / PoC / Women? Let's get on with it. What's the scene about - Is it about them facing humiliation 'cos of their identity, showing them being accepted, a sex scene with them, or them finding their own voice or power?" ... (And later in the editing room some director instructing some intern) "OK, trim these hour long footage of the LGBT / PoC / woman character into 1 to 5 minutes snippets and insert it somewhere in episode 1, 5, 7 and wrap it up!" ...
As for every story requiring an LGBT character because they "exist everywhere", can't many other vulnerable / minority group too lay a claim on that? For example, I am sure there are more muslims in the USA than there are LGBTs - should every American TV show now start including muslim, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Indian-American, Chinese-Americans characters etc., etc? Obviously, you realistically can't. (And note that all these groups too face bigotry and hatred just because of who they are).
As a non-american, I prefer the previous format of American television where good story didn't have such contrived caricaturisation and only relevant characters that added to the stories. Will and Grace or Modern Family come to mind when I think of how LGBT characters were relevant, well integrated and portrayed well in the story. Recently I finished watching Atlanta and really love the show, especially due to the insights on black culture (in the US) it offered. Shows like "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight" show women empowerment so naturally and elegantly that you don't even notice it while enjoying the drama. I feel such dramas do more justice to an LGBT / PoC / woman character than some token characters inserted forcefully.
> Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?
I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.
For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.
I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.
Couldn't say for sure but I would speculate it has to do with, you can link directly to a video and it won't show a bunch of links to other videos to watch, comments, ads, etc.
Whereas if you post your serious acting monologue on Youtube, even unlisted, it's going to have a bunch of distractions and videos from other people that you probably don't want the casting director being pulled into.
The fact that Vimeo doesn't have the same level of content match might play into it too, if you want to show off a clip from the episode of Modern Family where you had two lines you don't want ABC to pull it.
I'm sure network effect drive it as well, if you're trying to break into an industry and you see that lots of already successful people are using Vimeo, you're going to use it too.
This was my thought too (about the API part). From my experience, the TV app on Apple devices has a pretty good search and it shows you all the services a show or movie is available on- even the ones you aren’t subscribed to. For example, if I search ‘Modern Family’, it tells me I can buy seasons 1-11 on iTunes, watch seasons 1-11 on Hulu, watch seasons 1-11 on Peacock, watch season 1 on the ABC app, season 7 on the NBC app, and for some reason also watch specifically season 7 on 6 other apps (Bravo, Syfy, USA, among others).
I really doubt Apple has a public endpoint for these searches and data but I also have never really looked. The point is they’ve done the scraping; they have the data. If someone can leverage it and do the curation, I can see a really useful product.
The sitcom Modern Family had an episode in which kids had to do an egg-drop project and were helped by their respective parents.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Egg_Drop
> sponsored the de-stigmatization, normalization, and legalization of homosexuality in the United States over the past 30-50 years
Well, I wonder how to quantify all the "normalization" of homosexuality in tv shows/movies over the last 20 years or so (guesstimate) for example. Surely tv shows like Six feet under and culminating in Modern Family had a role to play though I wouldn't know how to put a dollar figure to it.
This has been proposed as a technical possibility for a long time -- and yes, it is a terrible possibility! And yes, you can find an example of it happening, like the Chinese TV example! -- but "may soon" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the title. They talked to a couple of business people who said, more or less, "making money is good". They reaffirm the technology is good. There's no real evidence they're in discussions with any actual studios or there are any actual advertisers planning to do this. There's no discussion of how the logistics would work in terms of streaming services. The only western example given in the article is Modern Family, which I'm pretty sure is referring to contemporaneous product placement (e.g. an episode was shot without product placement, but the intent was always to key it in in editing)
I don't think this is impossible and if it happened I would be frustrated and angry. But let's hypothetically say that I'm right, and this is not going to happen. That would make this article almost definitionally clickbait: a remote possibility is brought up with an infuriating headline designed to share, and the comments section is filled with people who clicked and are riled up emotionally. I think both journalists and people sharing things should be as conscious as possible about this and not participate in the click-attention game.
(I recognize a certain irony in commenting to say that no one should react to this, when I'm reacting to the reactions.)
Weaving a product into a film or television program may be just about acceptable - whether payed for or not (the Modern Family Apple episode or advertising in Blade Runner stand out).
But adding/replacing ads in “classic” well regarded movies really destroys any notion that these are works of art or classics in any way.
You're describing a show like Modern Family. There's room for those types of shows. But something like The Capture is best left at 6 episodes and at best a couple seasons.
I think physical comedy just has a broader audience, which worked well in silent movies and thereafter. The broadness is also why it’s considered cheap and used sparingly. It’s like shouting. As Friends went on and the writing got lazier every character was shouting all the time.
But a recent example of a well done pratfall I saw in a show mostly about dialog and editing was Modern Family (season 2) where Cameron turns to give his husband a kiss who pulls back (due to discomfort with public displays of affection, the theme of the episode) and Cameron overleans and falls head over heels over the back of the sofa quite roughly; he’s a big guy too. I laughed a lot partly in surprise because I basically never see a pratfall in comedy shows I like.
Your marijuana point makes no sense. Now your logic is circular --
1. Normilization is when the police stop enforcing something
2. More and more people started to disagree with the legal status of marijuana
3. It became hard for police to enforce drug laws.
You are now arguing that step 3 is normalization. What do you call step 2? I think most would agree that step 2 is normalization, and its effect is step 3. If step 2 is not normalization, then what is it?
Remember - people truly believed marijuana caused people to murder and rape people all the way back in the 30s. In terms of public perception, it wasn't too far from child trafficking.
>Note that is different than the normalization of child trafficking itself.
It's not - you cannot remove those two. You can take parallels to how LGBTQ are portrayed in media. People credit Modern Family - which featured a homosexual couple - as normalizing homosexuals in our society, but you are making the claim that is"only normalizing homosexuals on tv." Thats ridiculous - the two are inexorably linked. It's not what happened.
It showed people that if you are gay, you no longer have to live in hiding, that people will accept you, and you can live this "happy sitcom" life.
If I am a child trafficker, and I see this guy Epstein shaking hands and kissing babies with a top academic, how is that not sending the message that "hey we know you kidnap kids, but we don't mind, come to our dinner"? Isn't that normalization?
I haven't watched many recent sitcoms, I think the last one I wanted regularly was How I Met Your Mother which had zero gay lead characters (even though the biggest womanizer on the show was played by and actor who is gay in real life).
There are some gay focused shows (Grace & Frankie, Will and Grace), but looking at the top 5 current sitcoms [1]
1. Big Bang Theory - none of the main characters are gay
2. Modern Family - out of 11 main characters, 2 are gay
3. Brooklyn Nine Nine - out of 10 main characters, 1 is gay
4. The Simpsons - I don't know how to count main characters, but I don't think any are gay
5. Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Out of 5 main characters, one is (or might be?) gay.
(I used Wikipedia for most of these, so I may not have gotten the counts completely accurate)
This doesn't seem to be a gross over representation of homosexuality - I wonder if you're suffering from observation bias, or if maybe you're just watching sitcoms that have more gay characters for whatever reason.
[1] - https://www.ranker.com/list/best-current-tv-sitcoms/ranker-tv
> I mean QA & Testing should catch it, sure.
I believe they have been working on FaceTime Group for 5+ years now.
In 2015, Modern Family had an episode where the entire plot focused around the family using FaceTime on their iPhones --- but they had the Group feature[1]! I remember being blown away when I saw that, figured it'd be coming in the next iOS update. It didn't. 4 years later, they finally released it..then recalled it immediately
[1] https://www.mlive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/02/tech_review_modern_family_epis.html
edit: managed to find a short clip from said Modern Family episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy3jUOBxQuI
Though in the full episode you see a lot more of the Group feature
This is just watching tv. I can make my wife laugh with our injokes based on our own life and stories but also based on Modern Family and Fresh Off the Boat episodes we’ve both watched.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it will pretty much never be cost-efficient to make a German language movie with a limited market compared to a English movie. No matter how great it is. It is even worse for smaller countries like Finland or Netherlands. There will NEVER be comparable ratings for a Dutch comedy show vs Modern Family with a global audience. So unless regulated, investments will shift to the lowest common denominator, ie. English.
> As I pointed out in a sibling comment, I think Netflix actually has the same problem. There is a significant presence of long-running shows that people love to watch on Netflix: Friends, Breaking Bad, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, etc..
Is that really true though? As video content gets older it usually gets watched less, becomes cheaper and gets re-aired everywhere it can. Once you watch it many don't re-watch. I'd love to know if there were statistics on this either way!
Music, on the other hand, doesn't show its age nearly as much and old music is constantly replayed even in the latest TV shows and movies. Seems to be music is almost timeless whereas video is not. But, again, I'd love to see some data around these topics to valid (or invalid) what I think to be true.
It seems that I am unable to navigate the offerings.
I don't navigate them at all. I hear about shows from coworkers, or occasionally trip across something right here on HN. As a recent example, I present The Orville. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15333242) I mean, I'd heard of it, but it didn't sound like it was for me. As the thread shows, I was wrong. Now my wife and I are hooked. Or sometimes a show will just get mentioned in passing here, I'll look it up, watch an episode to find out if we'll like it. Once in a great while Netflix or iTunes will come up with something "you might like, mikestew!" that's worth watching. Not very often, though.
That's it, we just watch what I've tripped across serendipitously. And we can't keep up (just now getting to the third season of 12 Monkeys). Granted, our viewing habits might not match most (if there's nothing on, then we do something else). But if we want to sit down and watch something, we rarely lack for something of quality.
Contrast that with the "25 years ago" you use as a comparison. My memory of TV in the 90s was using the TV set to watch movies and ST:NG. I don't think we watched much, if any, actual TV shows because I recall that there was nothing worth watching except ST:NG.
Games are the same for me, whatever my circle mentions, and whatever Bethesda has put out recently. That might or might not work for others, especially if you don't like RPGs like Bethesda puts out. I've tried paying attention to IGN and the like, but, yeah...
That's not to argue that it isn't a crapfest out there. It's partially why I quit paying attention. Let's take Modern Family as an example. Seems to get rave reviews, it's been on for a while. Hmm, might be decent. I didn't even know that shows still did laugh tracks. And the jokes were recycled versions of what was on TV 40 years ago in the 70s. Drop an episode in a time machine to 1978, and the only difference viewers would notice are those strange glass hand-held devices the characters keep staring at, and wow, their microwave sure is small.
We're starting to feel the pain a bit with the online unbundled alternatives, sure.
Right now, I have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping but it also has some shows I like), Crunchyroll. And I'm still missing things I want, which would require: Funimation, HBO Now, CBS. At that point, I'd be close to my old cable bill again, and still wouldn't have new content from AMC or Showtime. Would also love to have TV Japan, but if you think ESPN gouges you ... that requires satellite TV, the more expensive dish/receiver, and costs $25 a month for just that one channel!
I would welcome an ala carte system for shows, but only if they were reasonably priced. Definitely not paying $1 for a completely predictable episode of Modern Family or a "why is this still on the air?" Simpsons episode. But Real Time? Sure. Game of Thrones? I'd happily pay double. I may just start waiting until seasons end, sign up, binge watch a whole season in a month, and cancel.
I don't even think music has become reasonably priced yet. Sure it's $1 a song, but you're still paying $15 if you want the album. Even though they no longer have to make a CD, ship it to stores, and give a large markup to the retailer. And the MP3 is way lower quality than the lossless CD. Yet they still want the same price.
My biggest problem with Hulu, even more annoying than the ads was that they didn't have all the episodes of the shows that they presumably have rights to. For a show like Modern Family for instance, they would have the latest episodes but not the previous seasons. And I saw the same for other shows as well. Ads were annoying, but they fixed that by charging more. But not having the content I cared made me cancel my premium subscription.
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.
>> for a normal sitcom or drama, costumes can be bought off the rack and shots can be done on location or on a sound stage with easily-sourced furniture / decoration / etc.
Worth noting: for sitcoms, staff costs are often as high/higher than the SF shows that make it to the screen. For example, actors on _The Big Bang Theory_ are rumored to earn $1m per episode each. Ditto other shows like _Modern Family_.
Likely there are relatively few Sci Fi shows because the Sci Fi writ large has yet to figure out how to connect with audience sizes beyond a niche. If they achieve mainstream reach, the cost of the sets will not matter as much.
In some countries, the children learn from the parents. The children never try to teach the parents.
The TV show, "Modern Family", the daughter of the owner of a closet manufacturing company tries to show she can contribute by offering her new design ideas only to hear from her father that her designs are great cause they did the same thing decades ago.
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
In older stories, sure. But the "action hero" died a while ago. Have you not noticed the rise of the weak male lead in movies/TV/commercials? It's hugely prevalent in romantic comedies, but even TV shows like Modern Family (bumbling Phil and razor-sharp Claire) depict archetypes that are becoming quite common.
The formula is a charming yet incompetent male lead who's mainly driven by sex, paired with a strong, capable female lead who's always two steps ahead of him.
If I had children, I certainly wouldn't want them watching TV/movies that depict their gender as incapable or unintelligent. And that's equally true for girls and boys.
I usually drown my sorrows in a TV show binge (Modern Family, usually) and try to stay around other people as much as possible so I don't lose my sanity.
She played Darlene in Modern Family! Some hilarious episodes!
As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.
Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.
Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).
The issue is that you don't get the full benefits of encryption.
If you upload the map to the rayiner family treasure that only you have seen you're good. No one else will be able to read it.
But if you upload the latest episode of Modern Family and Disney gets ahold of the same rip you used they (if they can get a government to help them out) can see what you did and charge you with copyright infringement (or whatever the appropriate crime would be).
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 :)
You know, sometimes there just needs to be a match to light the fire. Supposedly (but indeterminately) Clark Gable wearing no undershirt drove undershirt sales down 75%[0]
I reckon an episode Modern Family or Community where this type of toilet/bidet is a positive driver of the comedy would bring in a lot of sales for bidets.
[0] http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/gable1.asp
I thought the section on TV shows was nonsense as well. He cherry picked a few examples that fit his model.
Off the top of my head some modern comedies that don't fit are Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, and Desperate Housewives.
There were plenty of classic shows set in the city as well. Mary Tyler Moore, The Jeffersons, The Bob Newhart Show, Three's Company, Taxi, Welcome Back Kotter.
But what about movies? Netflix has a few target groups:
- People who want to watch TV shows when they are released to DVD
- People who want to watch on-demand movies
The US has Hulu plus ABC/CBS/FOX/NBC all have on-demand online channels. In the same respects they only hold seasons for so long. So the market in the TV area is really no different than iPlayer/4oD/etc.
The top online TV series rental for Lovefilm is Robot Chicken - Star Wars.[1] I've been in the UK long enough to know that there is much more demand for US television series than Robot Chicken. (Modern Family for example, comes to mind)
The real challenge here is if Netflix UK has the same ownership rights as Netflix US. Otherwise they will sit no differently than Lovefilm.
Disclaimer - I'm American, but currently live in the UK.
[1] - http://www.lovefilm.com/
What is their advertising revenue versus subscription revenue?
I have Hulu plus and I really don't care for it. I don't like the commercials forced upon me. Originally, Hulu would display the length of the commercial and keep it under 30 seconds. Hulu has been increasing commercial lengths and frequency and sometimes removes the time display for commercials, particularly the longer commercials.
I would like if Hulu had a 'channel' where I could watch a continuous stream of all the ads Hulu served. I do like commercials, but not the way the commercials interrupt the viewing experience, unlike Netflix.
Also, rewind and fast-forward is severely delayed. If you watch a TV show, and you missed something right before it went to commercial, you cannot rewind and watch the portion again and then the commercial. You must wait through the 2 one minute commercials to be able to rewind 15 seconds backward, but it takes another 10 seconds for the streaming server to respond to the request to rewind backwards for 15 seconds.
Compared to Netflix streaming, it is an inferior product technically. Netflix seems to have every movie Hulu Plus has, but charges less. Rewind and Fast-forward are near instant.
Netflix could kill Hulu by offering an enhanced TV streaming tier of service. I would rather give my money to Netflix. I would probably pay up to $30/month, maybe $35 if Netflix offered current season Comedy Central shows and Modern Family.
Why is Workaholics delayed by 3 episodes on Hulu?
This site: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/18/wednesday-final-ratings-modern-family-criminal-minds-adjusted-up/72722 shows 9.2MM viewers for that night's episode.
I am currently paying for Hulu Plus and can't figure out whether it's worth it or not. Things that bother me are (1) commercials despite me paying, (2) the fact that I can't reliably play the videos on my Ubuntu boxes since they use Flash, (3) lack of content from certain networks (e.g.: Survivor is only available on cbs.com, not on Hulu which makes it kind of useless to try to build a media center PC around Hulu), (4) all the silly clips of shows they have: I am trying to watch full episodes and think that clips are for YouTube, and finally (5) the fact that since I started paying they pulled a bunch of content (e.g.: first season of Glee, first season of Modern Family, etc.) despite the premise that you pay for that content being available.
On one hand I'm still actively using their service. On the other, I am trying to figure out the most effective way to tell them that I am not satisfied with it. Canceling will lose them $120/year which is measly. Anybody got any ideas of how to make an impact on what they do?
Alternatively, does anyone know of (legal) alternatives to Hulu? I have no problem with paying for a good service, just can't find someone to give my money to.