Robert David Sullivan

A backlash against single-camera sitcoms?

Salon's Kartina Richardson doesn't like this season's live-audience sitcoms (few critics do), but she's hoping for a rejuvenation of the format:

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

Perhaps there will be a "skipped generation" phenomenon in which the children of Arrested Development fans prefer the 1970s-style comedies of their grandparents' era. Right now I watch mostly single-camera sitcoms, but I miss the high-wire acting in shows like All in the Family. (It's no spoiler that multi-camera shows will make up most of my Top 100 episodes list.) One barrier to a comeback, however, is that even cable networks seem loath to cast actors with lots of theatrical experience as leads in any kind of programming. They just don't look as sexy blowing air kisses as Whitney Cummings does.

NOTE: I initially wrote  "grandmother effect" to refer to the phenomenon of people adopting their grandparents' tastes in music, clothing, baby names, etc., either as a form of rebellion against their parents or just an a desire to be different. But when I looked it up, the phrase means something quite different. So is there a phrase that describes what I'm talking about, or did I imagine the whole thing? 

UPDATE: The groundswell for a return to decently written multi-camera sitcoms continues with the A.V. Club's Joel Keller, who contributed to a forum on "magic pop-culture wishes":

When a show like Frasier or Everybody Loves Raymond comes along, the comedy seems so natural and effortless that it’s easy to forget the show is being done in front of an audience. Thanks to CBS, TV Land, and—surprisingly—Disney and Nick, the format is far from dead. But with more writers coming up who were “raised” on web shorts, Adult Swim, and single-camera shows like The Office, the legions who were students of the multi-camera form are starting to disappear.

Rob Lowe wastes 9 hours a day in the makeup chair

This People magazine "didja know" item is insane. Rob Lowe is playing former TV news star Drew Peterson for a Lifetime reboot:

To play the 57-year-old former Illinois police sergeant — jailed since May 2009 on charges he drowned his third wife, Kathleen Savio — the chameleon-esque actor, 47, goes through a nine-hour transformation every day.

I don't think "chameleon-esque" is an accurate adverb for someone who needs several hours in a make-up chair to become a middle-aged man with no physical deformities or superpowers. A chameleon would be someone who can make you believe he's become a different person through some kind of non-latex, wizardlike process (like acting).

Does People call Joan Rivers a chameleon because she's had face lifts? Is Manhattan chameleon-esque because it only took 300 years to transform itsself from forests to skyscrapers?

This reminds me of what I consider the "jump the shark" moment for Saturday Night Live, when it seemed to devote more effort to the makeup for celebrity impressions than do clever writing.

Photo from Lifetime television.

Crossposted at Extra Criticum.

Weak Broadway belting, Santorum leaks plans, and a fan of Fung Wah

Here's what to talk about if you're stranded on a highway on the way to New York tonight:

• Charles Isherwood complains in the New York Times that "television and movie exiles" are bringing down vocal standards on Broadway, calling Daniel Radcliffe "light" and "reedy," Sean Hayes "well-drilled" rather than "naturally gifted," and Catherine Zeta-Jones lacking in "delicacy and emotional truth." He does admit that this is not an entirely new phenomenon, pointing to the "modest singing abilities" of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. I have to confess a sympathetic response to the lead-throated movie stars in Isherwood's piece, as I have been relegated to tunelessly talking my way through "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" at more than one piano party.


• Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has made it semi-official that he's running for president, beginning what all headline writers hope is a long campaign with plenty of opportunities to sneak in references to the Dan Savage definition of his name (a "frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the anal sex"). JoeMyGod goes for the obvious, with "Frothy Mix Makes It Semi-Official," but Dave Weigel wins the day more subtly with "Santorum Makes Splash on 2012 Field." I await the report of "Santorum Fever Spreading in Iowa," hopefully accompanied by a color-coded map with Iowa's quilt-like county lines.


• The Daily's Reihan Salam praises the Fung Wah bus line, which runs between Boston and New York, as a cheap and efficient alternative to high-speed rail (a.k.a. "billions of dollars on routes to nowhere"), seemingly oblivious to Fung Wah's status as a punch line involving crashes, fires, and "comically calamatious ineptitude."

If a movie isn't worth seeing twice, it's not worth seeing once

PEN America's David Haglund has some thoughts on the rules surrounding "spoilers" in critiques of movies and TV. Here is the last line of his piece on The Awl:

And if a work of art can be "spoiled" when we know the ending, it can't really have that much to say about life, can it? 

I agree, and he makes a good point about Citizen Kane, though I want to give Orson Welles the benefit of the doubt, preferring to see the ending as something of a joke on moviegoers expecting a tidy resolution.

I avoid spoilers for TV series that are buzzworthy among critics or among my acquaintances because it's fun to speculate, between episodes, on where the series is going next. For movies (and plays), I almost feel at a disadvantage not knowing the ending because I can't tell how effective the filmmaker is at reaching that ending. I can forgive a boring film more easily than one with a twist ending that, upon reflection minutes after leaving the movie theater, negates almost everything that came before it.

 

The theater critic as death panel

Ouch! I would hate to have anything to do with a performance that causes a critic to break down and confess, in print, that he's abandoned his longtime policy of not walking out on a show before the end:

In the past few years, I have softened my stance on this issue because I have come to believe that there is a point of no return, when hope of a recovery is lost. When the patient dies, it’s not unreasonable for the rest of us, especially those who had to listen to the yammering fool, to try to move on.