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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it.

What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers.

Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved:

Similar plots are wasted later

The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy.

Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution.

Big brother and the bachelor are cultural touchstones and bill payers, as are dool and eastenders and home and away - that doesn't make them great tv. In fact I think you have identified exactly why satc doesn't usually make it onto the lists of prestige tv shows - it's a forty minute sitcom*. The characters don't face consequences for their actions, they are resolved through plot contrivances and contradictions. The wire, the sopranos, breaking bad - these shows are considered prestige because there are consequences for the characters' actions, writing wise.

At any rate you haven't convinced me I am missing out by not watching it, or that if I was more intelligent I would spend dozens of hours watching a show with plot holes so frequently that they are considered part of its structure.

*which is not to shit on sitcoms, many of which I love, they just aren't prestige tv, they don't elevate or transcend the medium the way those shows do.

I could do the same things with occurrences throughout Breaking Bad or (at least the later seasons of) The Wire; the difference being that when there's a yawning plot hole in those shows they shove a bomb into it or handwave corruption somewhere in the system as covering it up. An understanding boyfriend is a much more logical plot contrivance than a robot machine gun.

What is your list of top sitcoms? I just finished How I met your Mother with my partner and it was remarkably anti-feminist for so recent and so popular a show.

That is a good question. Personally my favourite sitcoms are of the "sitcoms are for comedy, get your drama out of here" philosophy, so my tops are Seinfeld, It's always sunny, 30 Rock, Arrested Development and Newsradio. But I think it would be crazy to make a list of top sitcoms that didn't include himym or Friends or Scrubs or The Office, all of which had hilarious moments and episodes, and much broader appeal than my first picks. And even now my list is being unfair to older sitcoms - I think sitcoms evolved pretty significantly over time though (not to mention the effect on comedy of the backlash against pcness that cim mentioned below), and it's hard for me to tell what jokes in say All in the family or The Jeffersons or Taxi or Cheers* I am biased by nostalgia to appreciate - they definitely don't get as many laughs from younger friends as newer shows do.

*Special mention for Frasier, which did an amazing job for four seasons of relying heavily on farce and still managing to find humour and surprises. Pity it went on for seven seasons.

Edit: ffs as I hit post I realised I was being geographically biased too - I've left out Blackadder, Linehan's shows, Extras, The League of gentlemen, Darkplace and The mighty boosh! For the Aussies, I didn't include Hey Dad for obvious reasons, and I never watched Kath and Kim, which is basically the extent of Aussie sitcoms. Welcher and Welcher? Aussie comedy seems to work better in sketch shows anyway.

I think the key element in that review is that he was watching it at night with his wife.

SATC is like porn to the female mind, I imagine that must have worked to get her in the mood.

Watching it alone as a man is like getting cucked by a gross, older woman.

Her best-selling book and the racy TV series it inspired taught a generation of women that they could ‘have it all’.

But Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell, 60, has admitted that she regrets choosing a career over having children as she is now ‘truly alone’.

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