I don't entirely place the blame on boomers for the raise of 1950s nostalgia and the corresponding misalignment of economic goals.
Someone (not a baby boomer) working in a traditional blue collar job today looks back at the portrayal of life in a rerun of a 1970s sitcom - Happy Days (or spin off, or even an "average" person sitcom from the 80s... Roseanne, Married with children) on late night cable and wonders what it would take to have that lifestyle today? Well, taxes are taking too large of a chunk of the family budget so people gravitate to candidates that say they'll cut taxes.
My wife will run in from the other room to skip “Sleepytime” because she knows she’ll be bawling by the end of it if she even thinks about it. Does me the favor because I will be too.
My endorsement of the show is that it feels like one of the great sitcoms like Cheers or Frasier, Golden Girls or Roseanne. The stories are never pandering or simple. You never quite know where they’re going to go with a plot line so when it lands, you’re often delightfully surprised or floored. Most kids shows seem like a low effort afterthought full of contrived vapid nonsense. As far as I’m concerned my kids can watch as much Bluey as they like and I’ll buy the shit out of their merch if it signals to other networks to get off their asses.
Forgot to mention the animation in the show is absolutely some of the best I’ve ever seen in a cartoon. I really appreciate the way the show models real physics as things would be in the real world. One of my biggest pet peeves of kids shows is when they show something that is physically impossible (not for comedic purpose, just lazy storytelling). It’s basically just thumbing its nose at kids’ intelligence.
For a college educated, white-collar view of the issue, I highly recommend the Priceonomics article about David Raether. He wrote almost 100 episodes of the TV show Roseanne, only to wind up living in a van. It wasn't due to drugs, alcohol, or mental disease. Just an unfortunate turn of events.
The top 5 scripted TV shows in 1992 were Roseanne, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, and Coach. The only show in top 30 that I would say was any good is Seinfeld.
Today, broadcast TV seems to be mostly procedurals and cable TV is mostly reality. If you like sitcoms, there has definitely been a dropoff since those have lost popularity.
Streaming is where can find the good TV shows. Remember, 1992 is before HBO started making good dramas and those were pretty rare before then. The big advantage of streaming is the variety, there are a bunch of mediocre shows in genres that barely existed before.
I just finished watching Derry Girls on Netflix, a comedy set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I would rather watch the 18 episodes of that than any amount of 90s sitcoms.
> Joe Rogan as recently as last week said the vaccine is mostly safe
- "How Joe Rogan Became a Cheerleader for Ivermectin" [1]
- "Fact-Checking Joe Rogan’s Interview With Robert Malone That Caused an Uproar" [2]
- "What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem" [3]
> But his main disagreement is pretending that it’s okay that biological males vs biological females is fair.
Sports isn't fair, period. It's why there's no "under 6 foot" NBA league. It's only with trans people that people suddenly (pretend to) care.
> And to correct you further, the 90s were the period where gay rights went mainstream
- "ABC shelves Ellen" (1998) [4]
- "Why Laura Dern Didn't Work For A Year, Despite Jurassic Park's Success" [5]
- "How ‘homophobia’ denied Sharon Bottoms custody of her son in the 1990s" [6]
Examples here are legion. Homophobia permeated popular culture (eg TV and box office movies). There was progress made, sure, but homophobia was so normalized at the time. I have to wonder if you lived through this era (as I did) or just read about it.
I mean, homophobia was still weaponized into the 2000s. Many credit Karl Rove with weaponizing state ballot measures on gay marriage to win the 2004 presidential election [7].
> Dawson’s Creek
technically the coming out storyline was 1999-2000 I believe and was controversial. Roseanne [8] is probably a better example. Picket Fences ended up censoring a kiss scene in 1993 [9] and caused quite a lot of controversy at the time.
Yes! This was especially obvious to me as a kid watching all the popular 90s sitcoms with my mom every evening.
ABC shows (oddly with the exception of Roseanne, now that you mention, that set really balanced it out) always had a bright, almost washed out look, eg Ellen, Boy Meets World, Drew Carey Show. NBC shows always looked more cozy and lived-in regardless of story location, eg Just Shoot Me, Friends, Seinfeld.
They did something similar in “Roseanne.” The Connors were selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks like her family would get exposed to a better class of information.
Or could it be that it was never realistic in the first place? I remember a show of the same contemporary, Roseanne, lauded for its actually-authentic depiction of working class life and precarity. Meanwhile it always struck me as absurd that someone like Homer Simpson or Al Bundy would have a house approaching a McMansion. The Simpsons themselves even make fun of this in the Frank Grimes episode.
Depends what their job is, no? As an example, anonymous blue collar workers shouldn't lose their jobs (and they rarely do). Politicians should maybe have to face more consequences (and they rarely do). Entertainment stars are somewhere in the middle, but for some reason seem to get the most attention.
Now, "placate the Internet mob" is a bit disingenuous here. What's the Internet mob going to do if not placated? Tweet more? Oh no. They don't have any real power. Let's take Roseanne as an example. An Internet mob didn't take her show off the air. ABC execs did. You can blame tweets all you want, but it was ultimately up to ABC. Did they do it because of the tweets? Were they looking for one last straw? They have to answer to that. Did this badly damage Roseanne's career? Listen to Joe Rogan talk to Roseanne about this. He's trying his hardest to lead her into blaming that "Internet mob" for badly damaging her career, but all she says is, "I've got a new tour already lined up for 2019 and I've been spending more time in Hawaii with my son". Does that sound so bad?
Kevin Hart has 3 movies coming out this year. Louis CK has been performing at clubs. Aziz Ansari is on tour. It's hard to find someone who was badly damaged by an Internet mob...
As someone with no experience in that region, and as someone whose taste is much more toward the satirical (Seinfeld, Family Guy, Simpsons), I have a hard time trying to recall anything satirical in KotH.
Instead, I consider KotH to be similar to the Cosby Show, Roseanne, or even All in the Family - a respectful look at the type of family that was not historically portrayed in TV or the movies.
They do? What American TV shows focus on the poor or the working class? Other than Roseanne (which went off the air in 1997) I struggle to think of one.
The problem scale of Roseanne is within a believable distance from my own. I have had to dismantle washing machines and clothes dryers to repair them. A show like Seinfeld would make the appliance repairman a character and the repair would be the secondary theme of the episode. A show like Friends would either not acknowledge the existence of laundry machines, or pretend they do not ever break. The only show currently on broadcast television in which I would believe a broken washing machine as a plot element is The Middle.
Here's a potential middle-class The Middle plot line for you: the Glaussners wash the mud off of their off-road 4-wheelers in the street using the Heck household's hose. They do not turn the water off. It runs all week, straight into the gutter, before someone notices and turns it off. The Hecks get an unexpected $300 water bill, which passes unnoticed in their huge monthly stack of bills, as they pay the usual, average monthly amount. Then one day, their water is shut off, and they can't get it turned back on until after Mike's next paycheck.
That's a believable middle class problem. Can you guess why it's believable? Because it's based on a true story.
The logic is, "Well, I need to have a car in this movie anyway. Why not get a free car instead of paying for one, and in fact, the manufacturer will pay me to place their brand new car?"
The good news is more art is created at a lower cost. Great.
But the bad news is you perpetuate the idea that everyone has a new car (or new kitchen or new 3000 square foot house or whatever) all the time, no matter what their financial situation would be like in reality. This is especially insidious when there is easy consumer credit.
Here's a scene of a doctor buying a car from 1987:
The premise, if you don't bother to watch, is he doesn't want the car salesman to know his job, because then he won't get a good deal.
The quaint part is that 30 years ago, a doctor and lawyer raising a family in New York City were considered almost unimaginably rich by TV standards. Now they would be "middle class."
The sad part is it would be hard to justify a scene like this on a modern prime time TV show. "So, we're going to have a car in this scene? Great! I'll call up Ford. Wait, but what do you mean the car salesman would overprice the car? Don't you know they're running 0% APR or $2000 cash back for President's Day?"
Sure, there are shows that try hard to be more authentic. But for every Breaking Bad, there are 10 spinoffs of lawyer / doctor / detective shows where the characters live in a bubble of perpetual newness the article describes.
Perhaps a mention of Malcolm in the Middle would be part of a more complete history. But the author uses 2007 as the tipping-point between "yesteryear" and the modern sitcom; a show like Malcolm, which ended in 2006, would fall in place quite nicely in the author's argument and not prove an exception to the rule.
I haven't seen The Simpsons in about 15 years, so I won't comment on it—except to note that it debuted only a year after Roseanne, and the two overlapped for about eight years.
Roseanne was fantastic. No it didn't have a brand new comedy line for every episode, in fact it was largely the same problems over and over again (money, relationship, bitchy daughters, etc.) but I still love it and watch what little I can on Netflix because while the problems weren't always shiny and new, they were identifiable and made the characters more real. I can't stand most sitcoms because their problems have to be built out of literally nothing that would even tip my proverbial Problem Scale a little bit, and it comes off as cheap, and the characters just look weak and stupid.
Maybe it's a thing that only people who grow up in that kind of area get (I'm about 250 miles from Landford's fictional location) but seriously most sitcoms just make me cringe with disgust. "THAT's your biggest problem today? I'll trade you any day of the week and you can find out what a REAL problem is."
I grew up upper-lower-middle class in a dying manufacturing town near Chicago so the The Simpsons, Married with Children, Roseanne always felt like home.
I can't agree with the article tho. I still see that same grasping in current shows like Better Call Saul, Shameless (which, aside from Season 2, is fantastic), and, in a different way, The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley.
Most comedies are just joke delivery mediums with paper thin walls. But nothing has changed, shows have always been a reflection of their creators/runners and the networks fund people who've had hits.. Family Guy was a hit on DVD/[adult swim]? Ok! Order two more joke delivery vehicles from Seth MacFarlane!
James L. Brooks had a string of hits with a strong emotional core. So after he helped get The Simpsons on the air it made sense that he essentially forced the 20-something writers to build the show around an emotional/sentimental core instead of letting it to devolve into a gag factory out of the gate.
I remember growing up as a lower-middle class midwestern kid, Roseanne was a show I loved, because I identified with it so much. Dan and Roseanne were my parents, and my friends were just like Darlene and Becky.
Another similar show from that era is "Grace Under Fire".
As a 35-yo upper-middle class guy still in the midwest, I look at what's on TV (both broadcast and Netflix/Amazon/etc.) and see none of that representation of middle class America. Besides "The Middle", which I still identify with, there are no successful middle-class sitcoms on TV.
It's not just Europeans. I remember a conversation years ago where people from New York City were making fun of how "unrealistic" the Roseanne TV show was, "because people that poor couldn't possibly afford that house". Never mind that the show was set in a small Midwestern town, and small Midwestern towns are, in fact, chock-full of houses very similar to the one on the show, which are, in fact, occupied by working-class people.
Europeans, New Yorkers, and (increasingly) people from the Bay Area think that paying forty billion dollars a month to live in a closet is normal. It is not.
1 of those shows is still on TV. Sopranos ended all the way back in 2007.
Anyway, from a business standpoint only having 2 or 3 good shows mean people get out of the habit. Fox fed viewers from Simpsons into American Dad and Family guy, but when most channels are filled with junk people got out of the habit. When The walking Dead has a bad season there is nothing keeping people tuning into AMC.
Think filler B TV like Roseanne or Home Improvement the kind of show where the mass of humanity don't just turn them off even if nobody is lining up for a new episode.
PS: It's also all the same formulas and if you like it that's great for you. But, we are missing a lot of the off the wall TV like the twilight zone or MST3k.
Big hit TV shows are extraordinarily rare. Most fail; most fail quickly.
You can just about list on one hand every decade, the number of shows that last more than five years and bring in big ratings (audience / users). Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Roseanne, Mash, etc.
Hit TV shows are extraordinarily difficult to 'manufacture.' Out of thousands proposed and scripted by writers, one or two per year are hits if you're lucky. Out of those, a few survive five or seven years.
And that's all true even with the huge built-in audiences that companies such as NBC, ABC, CBS have that show up every night waiting to watch content. There aren't 100,000 other apps to compete with, just a few major deliverers of TV shows / networks; and the failure rate is still that high.
Publishing I can understand, but a seasoned sitcom writer -- especially a Roseanne alum -- should have been able to pick up more writing work. I'm not saying he's lazy or entitled or anything like that, just that the world can sometimes be a scary place where you end up in a bad situation just by luck of the draw.
"When an order for, say, Coneheads, comes in, she rushes to the giant videotape library on the far wall, retrieves the correct title, and hurries to insert it into the appropriate place in a gleaming bank of VCRs. During prime-time hours, two people share this job. But right now, on a Wednesday afternoon, it's all Fran.
Fran may or may not realize that her job category will soon be phased out. Her employer, cable colossus Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), is conducting this market test with AT&T and US West. But all the other interactive television trials just getting underway are powered by computers, not by people like her."
The article ends in a chowderish claim:
"Watching any movie, any time - video-on-demand - is supposed to be the killer app that propels dozens of new interactive TV services into American homes by the end of the century. The home shopping, the custom news programs, the play-along game shows, the dozen or so simultaneous football games, the home banking, the on-demand Roseanne, the whole 500-channel scenario that cable companies have been hyping - all of this is supposed to piggyback on the raging success of movies-on-demand. But there's one glitch: there's not much demand for movies-on-demand"
TV's problem has ended up not being lack of demand, but disaggregation. People want movies on demand, and they can get them better and cheaper from companies that aren't in the traditional "TV business".
The same is happening all around. Newspapers' incomes are not down due to lack of demand for classifieds. It just happens that people who used to pay newspapers to print classifieds now post them somewhere else.
Hacker Cinema
24 comments on Hacker News
I don't entirely place the blame on boomers for the raise of 1950s nostalgia and the corresponding misalignment of economic goals.
Someone (not a baby boomer) working in a traditional blue collar job today looks back at the portrayal of life in a rerun of a 1970s sitcom - Happy Days (or spin off, or even an "average" person sitcom from the 80s... Roseanne, Married with children) on late night cable and wonders what it would take to have that lifestyle today? Well, taxes are taking too large of a chunk of the family budget so people gravitate to candidates that say they'll cut taxes.
Though, they're missing out on the 1950s tax structure... where people making $200,000 (1950s dollars - about $2M in 2020s dollars) were getting taxed at 91%. Corporate tax rate was much higher too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates
The plank of "we're going to raise taxes" doesn't get as many nostalgic votes for people hoping to return to the lifestyle of the 1950s.
There's a whole lot of other factors too.
A right leaning 30 year old today is voting to try to have what they perceived how it worked in the 1950s from shallow portrayals of the period.
My wife will run in from the other room to skip “Sleepytime” because she knows she’ll be bawling by the end of it if she even thinks about it. Does me the favor because I will be too.
My endorsement of the show is that it feels like one of the great sitcoms like Cheers or Frasier, Golden Girls or Roseanne. The stories are never pandering or simple. You never quite know where they’re going to go with a plot line so when it lands, you’re often delightfully surprised or floored. Most kids shows seem like a low effort afterthought full of contrived vapid nonsense. As far as I’m concerned my kids can watch as much Bluey as they like and I’ll buy the shit out of their merch if it signals to other networks to get off their asses.
Forgot to mention the animation in the show is absolutely some of the best I’ve ever seen in a cartoon. I really appreciate the way the show models real physics as things would be in the real world. One of my biggest pet peeves of kids shows is when they show something that is physically impossible (not for comedic purpose, just lazy storytelling). It’s basically just thumbing its nose at kids’ intelligence.
For a college educated, white-collar view of the issue, I highly recommend the Priceonomics article about David Raether. He wrote almost 100 episodes of the TV show Roseanne, only to wind up living in a van. It wasn't due to drugs, alcohol, or mental disease. Just an unfortunate turn of events.
https://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/
The top 5 scripted TV shows in 1992 were Roseanne, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, and Coach. The only show in top 30 that I would say was any good is Seinfeld.
Today, broadcast TV seems to be mostly procedurals and cable TV is mostly reality. If you like sitcoms, there has definitely been a dropoff since those have lost popularity.
Streaming is where can find the good TV shows. Remember, 1992 is before HBO started making good dramas and those were pretty rare before then. The big advantage of streaming is the variety, there are a bunch of mediocre shows in genres that barely existed before.
I just finished watching Derry Girls on Netflix, a comedy set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I would rather watch the 18 episodes of that than any amount of 90s sitcoms.
> Joe Rogan as recently as last week said the vaccine is mostly safe
- "How Joe Rogan Became a Cheerleader for Ivermectin" [1]
- "Fact-Checking Joe Rogan’s Interview With Robert Malone That Caused an Uproar" [2]
- "What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem" [3]
> But his main disagreement is pretending that it’s okay that biological males vs biological females is fair.
Sports isn't fair, period. It's why there's no "under 6 foot" NBA league. It's only with trans people that people suddenly (pretend to) care.
> And to correct you further, the 90s were the period where gay rights went mainstream
- "ABC shelves Ellen" (1998) [4]
- "Why Laura Dern Didn't Work For A Year, Despite Jurassic Park's Success" [5]
- "How ‘homophobia’ denied Sharon Bottoms custody of her son in the 1990s" [6]
Examples here are legion. Homophobia permeated popular culture (eg TV and box office movies). There was progress made, sure, but homophobia was so normalized at the time. I have to wonder if you lived through this era (as I did) or just read about it.
I mean, homophobia was still weaponized into the 2000s. Many credit Karl Rove with weaponizing state ballot measures on gay marriage to win the 2004 presidential election [7].
> Dawson’s Creek
technically the coming out storyline was 1999-2000 I believe and was controversial. Roseanne [8] is probably a better example. Picket Fences ended up censoring a kiss scene in 1993 [9] and caused quite a lot of controversy at the time.
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/joe-rogan-covid19-misinformation-ivermectin-spotify-podcast-1219976/
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/arts/music/fact-check-joe-rogan-robert-malone.html
[3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/21/1074442185/joe-rogan-doctor-covid-podcast-spotify-misinformation
[4]: https://money.cnn.com/1998/04/24/bizbuzz/ellen/
[5]: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2485962/why-laura-dern-didnt-work-for-a-year-despite-jurassic-parks-success
[6]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-homophobia-denied-sharon-bottoms-custody-of-her-son-in-the-1990s
[7]: https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=230634&page=1
[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Ask,_Don%27t_Tell_(Roseanne)
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%26_Spice_(Picket_Fences)
Yes! This was especially obvious to me as a kid watching all the popular 90s sitcoms with my mom every evening.
ABC shows (oddly with the exception of Roseanne, now that you mention, that set really balanced it out) always had a bright, almost washed out look, eg Ellen, Boy Meets World, Drew Carey Show. NBC shows always looked more cozy and lived-in regardless of story location, eg Just Shoot Me, Friends, Seinfeld.
They did something similar in “Roseanne.” The Connors were selected to be a Nielsen family and Roseanne made the family watch nothing but PBS, documentaries, etc the whole time. She wanted to hack the ratings so that over time, regular folks like her family would get exposed to a better class of information.
Or could it be that it was never realistic in the first place? I remember a show of the same contemporary, Roseanne, lauded for its actually-authentic depiction of working class life and precarity. Meanwhile it always struck me as absurd that someone like Homer Simpson or Al Bundy would have a house approaching a McMansion. The Simpsons themselves even make fun of this in the Frank Grimes episode.
Depends what their job is, no? As an example, anonymous blue collar workers shouldn't lose their jobs (and they rarely do). Politicians should maybe have to face more consequences (and they rarely do). Entertainment stars are somewhere in the middle, but for some reason seem to get the most attention.
Now, "placate the Internet mob" is a bit disingenuous here. What's the Internet mob going to do if not placated? Tweet more? Oh no. They don't have any real power. Let's take Roseanne as an example. An Internet mob didn't take her show off the air. ABC execs did. You can blame tweets all you want, but it was ultimately up to ABC. Did they do it because of the tweets? Were they looking for one last straw? They have to answer to that. Did this badly damage Roseanne's career? Listen to Joe Rogan talk to Roseanne about this. He's trying his hardest to lead her into blaming that "Internet mob" for badly damaging her career, but all she says is, "I've got a new tour already lined up for 2019 and I've been spending more time in Hawaii with my son". Does that sound so bad?
Kevin Hart has 3 movies coming out this year. Louis CK has been performing at clubs. Aziz Ansari is on tour. It's hard to find someone who was badly damaged by an Internet mob...
As someone with no experience in that region, and as someone whose taste is much more toward the satirical (Seinfeld, Family Guy, Simpsons), I have a hard time trying to recall anything satirical in KotH.
Instead, I consider KotH to be similar to the Cosby Show, Roseanne, or even All in the Family - a respectful look at the type of family that was not historically portrayed in TV or the movies.
They do? What American TV shows focus on the poor or the working class? Other than Roseanne (which went off the air in 1997) I struggle to think of one.
The problem scale of Roseanne is within a believable distance from my own. I have had to dismantle washing machines and clothes dryers to repair them. A show like Seinfeld would make the appliance repairman a character and the repair would be the secondary theme of the episode. A show like Friends would either not acknowledge the existence of laundry machines, or pretend they do not ever break. The only show currently on broadcast television in which I would believe a broken washing machine as a plot element is The Middle.
Here's a potential middle-class The Middle plot line for you: the Glaussners wash the mud off of their off-road 4-wheelers in the street using the Heck household's hose. They do not turn the water off. It runs all week, straight into the gutter, before someone notices and turns it off. The Hecks get an unexpected $300 water bill, which passes unnoticed in their huge monthly stack of bills, as they pay the usual, average monthly amount. Then one day, their water is shut off, and they can't get it turned back on until after Mike's next paycheck.
That's a believable middle class problem. Can you guess why it's believable? Because it's based on a true story.
If you create a show with the set design of Roseanne or even the Cosby Show in 2016, you're missing out on opportunities for product placement:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/04/brett-ratner-comments-ads-marketing-x-men.html
The logic is, "Well, I need to have a car in this movie anyway. Why not get a free car instead of paying for one, and in fact, the manufacturer will pay me to place their brand new car?"
The good news is more art is created at a lower cost. Great.
But the bad news is you perpetuate the idea that everyone has a new car (or new kitchen or new 3000 square foot house or whatever) all the time, no matter what their financial situation would be like in reality. This is especially insidious when there is easy consumer credit.
Here's a scene of a doctor buying a car from 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKMlx5p6n8k#t=1m58s
The premise, if you don't bother to watch, is he doesn't want the car salesman to know his job, because then he won't get a good deal.
The quaint part is that 30 years ago, a doctor and lawyer raising a family in New York City were considered almost unimaginably rich by TV standards. Now they would be "middle class."
The sad part is it would be hard to justify a scene like this on a modern prime time TV show. "So, we're going to have a car in this scene? Great! I'll call up Ford. Wait, but what do you mean the car salesman would overprice the car? Don't you know they're running 0% APR or $2000 cash back for President's Day?"
Sure, there are shows that try hard to be more authentic. But for every Breaking Bad, there are 10 spinoffs of lawyer / doctor / detective shows where the characters live in a bubble of perpetual newness the article describes.
And even Breaking Bad did its share of product placements: http://www.bustle.com/articles/5963-how-breaking-bad-product-placement-helps-or-hurts-products-like-stevia
Perhaps a mention of Malcolm in the Middle would be part of a more complete history. But the author uses 2007 as the tipping-point between "yesteryear" and the modern sitcom; a show like Malcolm, which ended in 2006, would fall in place quite nicely in the author's argument and not prove an exception to the rule.
I haven't seen The Simpsons in about 15 years, so I won't comment on it—except to note that it debuted only a year after Roseanne, and the two overlapped for about eight years.
Roseanne was fantastic. No it didn't have a brand new comedy line for every episode, in fact it was largely the same problems over and over again (money, relationship, bitchy daughters, etc.) but I still love it and watch what little I can on Netflix because while the problems weren't always shiny and new, they were identifiable and made the characters more real. I can't stand most sitcoms because their problems have to be built out of literally nothing that would even tip my proverbial Problem Scale a little bit, and it comes off as cheap, and the characters just look weak and stupid.
Maybe it's a thing that only people who grow up in that kind of area get (I'm about 250 miles from Landford's fictional location) but seriously most sitcoms just make me cringe with disgust. "THAT's your biggest problem today? I'll trade you any day of the week and you can find out what a REAL problem is."
I grew up upper-lower-middle class in a dying manufacturing town near Chicago so the The Simpsons, Married with Children, Roseanne always felt like home.
I can't agree with the article tho. I still see that same grasping in current shows like Better Call Saul, Shameless (which, aside from Season 2, is fantastic), and, in a different way, The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley.
Most comedies are just joke delivery mediums with paper thin walls. But nothing has changed, shows have always been a reflection of their creators/runners and the networks fund people who've had hits.. Family Guy was a hit on DVD/[adult swim]? Ok! Order two more joke delivery vehicles from Seth MacFarlane!
James L. Brooks had a string of hits with a strong emotional core. So after he helped get The Simpsons on the air it made sense that he essentially forced the 20-something writers to build the show around an emotional/sentimental core instead of letting it to devolve into a gag factory out of the gate.
Yes, as a British person I'd say an example of a middle class sitcom is something like Frasier, not Roseanne.
I remember growing up as a lower-middle class midwestern kid, Roseanne was a show I loved, because I identified with it so much. Dan and Roseanne were my parents, and my friends were just like Darlene and Becky.
Another similar show from that era is "Grace Under Fire".
As a 35-yo upper-middle class guy still in the midwest, I look at what's on TV (both broadcast and Netflix/Amazon/etc.) and see none of that representation of middle class America. Besides "The Middle", which I still identify with, there are no successful middle-class sitcoms on TV.
It's not just Europeans. I remember a conversation years ago where people from New York City were making fun of how "unrealistic" the Roseanne TV show was, "because people that poor couldn't possibly afford that house". Never mind that the show was set in a small Midwestern town, and small Midwestern towns are, in fact, chock-full of houses very similar to the one on the show, which are, in fact, occupied by working-class people.
Europeans, New Yorkers, and (increasingly) people from the Bay Area think that paying forty billion dollars a month to live in a closet is normal. It is not.
1 of those shows is still on TV. Sopranos ended all the way back in 2007.
Anyway, from a business standpoint only having 2 or 3 good shows mean people get out of the habit. Fox fed viewers from Simpsons into American Dad and Family guy, but when most channels are filled with junk people got out of the habit. When The walking Dead has a bad season there is nothing keeping people tuning into AMC.
Think filler B TV like Roseanne or Home Improvement the kind of show where the mass of humanity don't just turn them off even if nobody is lining up for a new episode.
PS: It's also all the same formulas and if you like it that's great for you. But, we are missing a lot of the off the wall TV like the twilight zone or MST3k.
Big hit TV shows are extraordinarily rare. Most fail; most fail quickly.
You can just about list on one hand every decade, the number of shows that last more than five years and bring in big ratings (audience / users). Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Roseanne, Mash, etc.
Hit TV shows are extraordinarily difficult to 'manufacture.' Out of thousands proposed and scripted by writers, one or two per year are hits if you're lucky. Out of those, a few survive five or seven years.
And that's all true even with the huge built-in audiences that companies such as NBC, ABC, CBS have that show up every night waiting to watch content. There aren't 100,000 other apps to compete with, just a few major deliverers of TV shows / networks; and the failure rate is still that high.
Publishing I can understand, but a seasoned sitcom writer -- especially a Roseanne alum -- should have been able to pick up more writing work. I'm not saying he's lazy or entitled or anything like that, just that the world can sometimes be a scary place where you end up in a bad situation just by luck of the draw.
Not necessarily a new idea. Just an old idea repurposed to fit a legal loophole instead of a technical need.
From Wired Sept 1994, Fran-On-Demand: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/cable.labs.html
"When an order for, say, Coneheads, comes in, she rushes to the giant videotape library on the far wall, retrieves the correct title, and hurries to insert it into the appropriate place in a gleaming bank of VCRs. During prime-time hours, two people share this job. But right now, on a Wednesday afternoon, it's all Fran.
Fran may or may not realize that her job category will soon be phased out. Her employer, cable colossus Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), is conducting this market test with AT&T and US West. But all the other interactive television trials just getting underway are powered by computers, not by people like her."
The article ends in a chowderish claim:
"Watching any movie, any time - video-on-demand - is supposed to be the killer app that propels dozens of new interactive TV services into American homes by the end of the century. The home shopping, the custom news programs, the play-along game shows, the dozen or so simultaneous football games, the home banking, the on-demand Roseanne, the whole 500-channel scenario that cable companies have been hyping - all of this is supposed to piggyback on the raging success of movies-on-demand. But there's one glitch: there's not much demand for movies-on-demand"
TV's problem has ended up not being lack of demand, but disaggregation. People want movies on demand, and they can get them better and cheaper from companies that aren't in the traditional "TV business".
The same is happening all around. Newspapers' incomes are not down due to lack of demand for classifieds. It just happens that people who used to pay newspapers to print classifieds now post them somewhere else.
Using inputs from IMDB, I think these are the shows he is alluding to.
>Roll your freelance success into your first sitcom staff job. ... After three years of miserable, seventy hour weeks someone ... cancelled
My Two Dads http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092410/
>Facing unemployment, fight to get on a hit show that everyone else is fighting to get off of because the star ... my agent a mack daddy?"
Roseanne http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094540/
>the star, while undeniably talented, has a few personal issues not to mention a coke-addicted boyfriend
Roseanne (BoyFriend was Bill Pentland)
>Roughly nine years after walking through that first door, finally get a chance to create your hit sitcom.
Not sure, nothing on IMDB got cancelled in 5 weeks in this time period.
>Your employers think it's a swell idea but instead want you to write a sitcom about a blue collar single mom on videotape.
Grace Under Fire http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106017/
>gal cast by your employers to play mom, hates kids, hates people, hates sitcoms and, most importantly, hates you.
Brett Butler
>Quit the hit show you created and get right to work creating another hit sitcom for another wack-job diva because you are just plain stupid.
Dharma and Greg http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118303/
>when you're about to quit the business in disgust, write a pilot script with an old friend.
Two and a Half Men http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369179/