Big epiphanies

In yesterday's post I made the sweeping, near-blasphemous statement that all one-camera sitcoms from the 60s are terrible and unwatchable. (there's a couple exceptions).

It just insults me that Darren yells, "Sam!" , Sam winces and says, "Well." and the laugh track laughs hysterically. I grew up watching this stuff, it took me years to realize not only isn't this funny, but it's terrible!

The catalyst was a visit to my high school journalism class by Joan Dinerstein, a Philly news personality. Far from being the smiling news anchor we saw on TV every night, she was a little more blunt about TV and TV news.

One of the things she said that stuck with me was, "Watch your family watch TV; are they laughing at the comedies?"

And she was right, no one was laughing at the comedies, we just sat like zombies.

Joan Dinerstein pretty much ruined TV for me. But in a good way.

The first time I actually burst out laughing at a TV show was that scene in the Simpsons where Homer skateboards into a canyon, gets pulled up by stretcher, banging his head on every crevice, and all in the space of 20 seconds, he is loaded into an ambulance, the ambulance hits a tree, the back doors pop open and Homer's gurney comes flying out of the back of the ambulance and back down the canyon!

Bwahaha!

So it took about 30 years of watching TV before I laughed out loud.

I'm talking about the sitcoms of the '60s and 70s, and though single-camera sitcoms with laugh tracks are pretty rare nowadays, the three-camera sitcoms in front of live audiences are guilty of being lazy and sweetening the laughter. Watch "Friends,"  or even "Big Bang Theory," for that matter. It's all set-up, punchline, hysterical laughter, set-up, punchline, hysterical laughter. Compare this to "Modern Family or "Kimmy Schmdt." These are single-camera sitcoms with no laugh track. We're not told when to laugh, we have to figure it out ourselves. The writers have to work for the laughs, they just can't have Ed O'Neill say to Sofia Vergara "Gloria!!" and Gloria says, "well."

Lost opportunities in television Part 2: Bewitched cast

Though I grew up watching them I can no longer watch one-camera sitcoms with laugh tracks. They're unwatchable, and worse never funny. (some exceptions below)

Let's think with our heads and not with our hearts. "Bewitched" was a terrible show.

Use the below variables to make your own episode.
Sam's Mother, aunt, uncle, cousin, daughter....
casts a spell on Darrin and turns him into a monkey, dog, zebra, someone who can't lie, someone with polka dots, etc....
on the same day the big client is coming for a presentation. Fortunately the client mistakes the curse for the proposed advertising campaign and thinks the idea is brilliant!

This was every episode. (except for that one weird one where Sam helps a local boy build a soap box car which appeared to be an unsold pilot script for a totally different show)

In fairness, there's some bright spots: Bernard Fox's unhinged doctor, and I have to give them credit for Maurice Evans' and Agnes Moorehead's characters' relationship to each other. On TV, no one ever was divorced, yet here was a couple who were separated for years apparently, but still had  a fondness for one another. This was unique for TV in the 60s.

(and for the record, Dick York was a better Darrin than Dick Sargent. York could easily switch from flustered to loving, whereas Sargent always just seemed pissed.)

So here's my point, the show was terrible, but the cast was actually pretty good. Here's my lost opportunity: Picture the same cast in an MTM-style 1970s sitcom for grownups.

An office comedy, full of slightly damaged, yet optimistic characters trying to get their jobs done, making mistakes, having differences, but still getting along.  It could have been done.


Picture the exceptionally talented Elizabeth Montgomery in a comedy written for grown-ups! With old Shakespearean Maurice Evans, Orson Welles vet Agnes Moorehead, and the unhinged Bernard Fox! It would have been wonderful.

There  is precedent for this. Bob Crane, star of the morally indefensible "Hogan's Heroes," starred in the "Bob Crane Show" for MTM where he played a middle-aged man who trades in his comfortable life to follow his dream to go to medical school. Or Bill Daly, who went from playing the wacky best friend in the terrible Bewitched rip-off "I Dream of Jeanie" to play the wacky neighbor in MTM's immeasurably more sophisticated "Bob Newhart Show."

(Gavin MacLeod in some weird exception to this, was in the terrible one-camera with laugh track "McHale's Navy," then moved onto "Mary Tyler Moore," arguably the best sitcom of all time, then slid backward into the terrible one-camera laugh track "Love Boat.").

(some exceptions to the one-camera laugh track sitcoms are terrible rule: "That Girl" and "Get Smart")

Review: "How to Murder Your Wife"

I just caught this Jack Lemmon comedy on TCM (again). If I turn on the TV and it's on, I have to sit through the whole thing.

First of all, it's a relic! An anachronism! A Mad Men, first couple seasons of Bewitched look at how men regarded woman in the early 60s. Single women were for sex and ogling, and wives were smothering/mothering annoying obstacles to freedom! And, it was a man's world, what MST3K would describe as "when doughy white men walked the earth." Lots of martinis and palling with the boys, and suits and ties.

The creators had no idea they were making a timepiece

If you ignore some of the unsavory implications (at one point, Lemmon slips his wife a "goofball."), it's actually very funny. And the last scene between Lemmon and his wife (Virna Lisi, filmed to look even more beautiful than she really is) is actually very sweet.