Hacker Cinema
NewsRadio
1995 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Paul Simms
The office politics and interpersonal relationships among the staff of WNYX NewsRadio, New York's #2 news radio station.
2 positive9 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
That's what first came to mind as well.
For those not familiar / context, NewsRadio, Negotiation, S2E8 1995:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660208/quotes/>
<https://breezewiki.pussthecat.org/newsradio/wiki/Negotiation>
Jimmy James on Advertising (from the 90's sitcom NewsRadio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhrnMbhMgmw
Relevant quote from the TV show _Newsradio_:
Bill: In the olden days, a country squire would age his pheasants for weeks before they were deemed fit for consumption.
Lisa Miller : In the olden days, people died of ptomaine poisoning and blamed it on ghosts.
Let’s just make a deal, any episode with a Newsradio cast member goes away.
Xtree gold. And LapLink.
I was watching an old sitcom recently (Newsradio) and the prop computers on the set all appear to be running xtree.
Seinfeld, NewsRadio, and Frasier
I'm not familiar with NewsRadio, but both Seinfeld and Frasier are simply named after the main character. This inherently gives the show some latitude.
But, say, Three's Company was based on the premise that this guy was pretending to be gay in order to justify living with two women because they all were pretty poor and he couldn't find another place. That's pretty constraining as to what you can do with the plot line.
It means that any episode that was at the beginning holding out hope that one of the characters would suddenly start making more money and be able to afford to move or something was an episode where the viewer could confidently predict that this would fall through because if it didn't you no longer had a show with the premise that some guy needs to pretend he's gay in order to have an affordable housing situation where he lives platonically with two women.
What's funny there is the tension of, no, they aren't having a threesome. No, he's not sleeping with either of the women. No, he's not really gay, but most people would never believe he's honest to god just living with two women to split the rent if he weren't pretending to be gay.
It's funny because it casts some light on a lot of serious social issues in a way that's socially acceptable to poke fun at, but it's extremely contrived and you can't otherwise try to address those kinds of topics. They are too hot button.
So you can't do it humorously without an extremely contrived situation and you can't do it in earnest without it being terrible drama.
Humor is one of the ways society processes hot button topics and works through them without it turning into terrible real life conflict.
I did nearly the same thing for a long while, except it was Dynasty Warriors 3 on the TV and Mr. Show reruns on my computer. Although Newsradio is a show I rewatch and use as a background show often.
I felt very similar, like it was a zen feeling. I didn't get a similar feeling with another game until Minecraft, where I could just carve out giant holes in the land while watching TV shows.
No, you're correct. That should be your first thought :) Newsradio was amazing. I still rewatch episodes of it from time to time.
The problem with Joe Rogan is that he’s the standard bearer for that weird form of anti–intellectualism masquerading as intellectual curiosity.
For a bit of background: His first big “gig” was on a (rather incredible, imo) sitcom in the mid-nineties called NewsRadio. Somewhere in his audition he mentioned that he thought the moon landing was a hoax, which at the time was probably the craziest thing that the interviewers had ever heard (we didn’t have vocal flat-earthers on the Internet back then). So they decided that his part would be just that, the crazy conspiracy theorist engineer guy. Fast forward.
I bet a lot of us had some kind of phase in college where you started to learn a little bit about the virtues of skepticism, then later post-modernism and deconstructionism… Some folks go down that rabbit hole and the next thing you know you’re up at 2am bleary–eyed insisting that this glass of beer in your hand is corporeal. The guy across from you keeps repeating “well, prove it,” and that ostensibly makes him a smart guy.
And now we’ve got flat–earth conventions and “fake news” and Joe Rogan on the internet having earnest intellectual conversations with the entire gamut of thinkers, politicians, crazies and scientists. The problem is that at the end of the day, he is, as he’s willing to admit, kind of a dumb guy, and this style of discourse is just making everything else dumber.
> It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
Sorry, this sounds backwards.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResetButton
> This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order, and in part because (prior to the advent of the internet) watching or catching up on a missed episode could be nearly impossible for viewers.
See anything from Gilligan always ruining the rescue attempt to JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest on Scrubs. There's a long history of shows trying to make baby steps against this (resolving a 'will-they-won't-they' situation, for instance) and the show basically dying as a result. Exceptions like Babylon 5 where major things changed were rare.
Seinfeld was "about nothing" in that the things the reset button applied to were so minor that you basically didn't even notice the reset button most of the time - you wouldn't expect them to majorly change the characters. That, and that it wasn't super-location-centric in the way that Newsradio is "about a radio station" - I mean, it isn't, really, it's about the characters there too, but 99% of the action takes place in the radio station.
I was commenting that the g'parent poster's assertion was incorrect, and not about the term "space marine."
From the NewsRadio episode "Space": "Your space pod is so cold and drafty." "Fine, I'll get a space heater." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NDiBCD55-Y#t=10m40s
They also used an open graph meta tag, too. So people can easily share the prank on Facebook, presumably. A little ironic.
<meta property="og:description" content="Hulu.com is a video service on the World Wide Web that offers hit TV shows including X-Files and Newsradio. Our extensive library also includes classic TV series and blockbuster movies. Dial up and start watching now. No CD-ROM required." />