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JAN/FEB 2018 TV DISCUSSION


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I recently watched some episodes of Friends and I learned I hate just about anything with a laugh track, with a few exceptions (Seinfeld). The one thing that stuck out though was their apartment. Holy balls! You'd have to be rich as shit to afford an apartment that large in Chicago. 

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6 hours ago, Mickie Zeidler said:

Seriously? Nobody is gonna defend No Soap, Radio? Seriously?

The fact someone besides me remembers No Soap Radio besides me just made my fuckin' day!

James

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2 hours ago, Craig H said:

I recently watched some episodes of Friends and I learned I hate just about anything with a laugh track, with a few exceptions (Seinfeld). The one thing that stuck out though was their apartment. Holy balls! You'd have to be rich as shit to afford an apartment that large in Chicago. 

Wasn’t the apartment a family thing? I seem to remember Monica and Ross’ family owned it or something.

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Yes. Their apartment, also ridiculous. JOEY DOES FUCKING NOTHING. He makes next to nothing unless he picks up an acting gig and the work he gets is all small shit until he gets on the soap opera. And even that is short lived because he gets killed off.

Fuck. Why do I know so much about Friends?

Rachel isn't even a barista. She clears the fucking tables. Monica is a chef, but not the kind that would rake in the bucks. The only two people they establish with any ability to make money are Ross and Chandler. Even Chandler I want to say doesn't make that much money, but they establish that he's incredibly cheap and saves everything. Even then, shouldn't Chandler not have a ton left in savings since he's likely covering for Joey's share of the rent?

Oh my god. This is like arguing about why wrestlers shouldn't rebound when they hit the ropes, isn't it?

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One of Friends' legitimately great episodes was in the first season where there was a conflict between the ones that had real jobs and the ones that were broke and how money affected the group dynamic. 

And then they never really engaged with that again.

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2 hours ago, odessasteps said:

I always figured Monica and Rachel had rich Long Island parents and were subsidizing it. 

Past that, we are into "repeat to yourself, it's just a show, you should really just relax" territory. 

Rachel has rich parents, but they cut her off when she abandoned her fiance at the altar in the premiere.  Monica and Ross's parents seemed comfortably upper-middle-class but not rich.   And Chandler started off not making a lot, but kept getting promoted through the series. (I know so much because I legit loved the first two seasons when I was in high school and college and it was new, but I fell off the wagon hard after that, and I watched most of the last season while sharing an apartment with my fanboy brother.)

 

Also kind of ridiculous: the idea that Monica and Rachel's mega-apartment was across the hall from Chandler and Joey's "TV Small but fucking huge for Manhattan" apartment.  What kind of floor plan is that?

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Is it just me or was X-Files a chore to sit through tonight?  I legit can't remember the last hour of tv I enjoyed less.  They really od'ed on the 'Here's what you think you know, but HERE'S WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON."  And yet they manged to make the mythology of the show even more incomprehensible.

The retcon with the son makes me think Vince McMahon is secretly booking the show.  I expect the monster next week to be a three-foot super penis.

I'm out for good.

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Out of all the '90s sitcoms I saw as a kid the only ones I liked and didn't just sit through because my parents were watching them were Roseanne, Seinfeld, and Just Shoot Me. Unfortunately I don't remember jack about Wings. 

You all know way too much about these things too, you know

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On 1/2/2018 at 6:56 AM, turk128 said:

Catching up with my favorite seasonal series, The Librarians... the Silver Screen episode is probably one of the funniest episode I've seen anywhere. It's shockingly fantastic.

We got a kick out of it but really have no use for Noah Wyle. The show is so much better when he's not around. It's interesting that John Rogers is just a consulting producer this season. That makes me feel confident that we might actually get that Lin Manuel Miranda Name of the Wind show after all.

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13 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Out of all the '90s sitcoms I saw as a kid the only ones I liked and didn't just sit through because my parents were watching them were Roseanne, Seinfeld, and Just Shoot Me. Unfortunately I don't remember jack about Wings. 

You all know way too much about these things too, you know

Some of us were already "adults" by then, too. I was in grad school studying popular culture (including a class on sitcoms), so that's my excuse. 

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The place Wings occupies in popular culture has always seemed weird to me.  There are decent if not uproarious laughs in just about every episode, the characters are well-enough developed to not feel like shitty caricatures, they have a lot of good guest stars.  It's like knowing going in that you're gonna get a 2 1/2 star match; there are a ton of better things to watch, but spending as much time shitting on it as the internet does is a waste of shit that could easily be spent on something worse.

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It's like DEAR JOHN or SPIN CITY. It doesn't have the nostalgia cache of shows that appealed more to kids like FULL HOUSE and it's not batshit weird enough like NEWS RADIO to be interesting to revisit. And it wasn't innovative enough to be considered important.

It's kind of like BENSON. When Robert Guillaume died I wondered why, with all these old time t.v. networks you never see BENSON. It's like a big important long-running show that no one ever makes jokey references to because it wasn't weird enough, bad enough, or good enough. So it has just sort of disappeared from everyone's memories.

Sometimes I freak out at forgotten shows like that. Anyone remember ANYTHING BUT LOVE? I swear no one will believe you if you tell them there was a show where Jamie Lee Curtis's love interest was fucking Richard Lewis. But it was right there for like four or five seasons.

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6 hours ago, piranesi said:

It's like DEAR JOHN or SPIN CITY. It doesn't have the nostalgia cache of shows that appealed more to kids like FULL HOUSE and it's not batshit weird enough like NEWS RADIO to be interesting to revisit. And it wasn't innovative enough to be considered important.

It's kind of like BENSON. When Robert Guillaume died I wondered why, with all these old time t.v. networks you never see BENSON. It's like a big important long-running show that no one ever makes jokey references to because it wasn't weird enough, bad enough, or good enough. So it has just sort of disappeared from everyone's memories.

Sometimes I freak out at forgotten shows like that. Anyone remember ANYTHING BUT LOVE? I swear no one will believe you if you tell them there was a show where Jamie Lee Curtis's love interest was fucking Richard Lewis. But it was right there for like four or five seasons.

It's weird that you mentioned those shows in particular. Spin City was my very favorite sitcom for most of its run and I loved what I saw of Anything But Love. And Dear John was something that I only vaguely remembered, but ended up Googling two days ago after seeing Jere Burns on Max Headroom.

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9 hours ago, Keep Calm, Akira Hokuto On said:

Is it just me or was X-Files a chore to sit through tonight?  I legit can't remember the last hour of tv I enjoyed less.  They really od'ed on the 'Here's what you think you know, but HERE'S WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON."  And yet they manged to make the mythology of the show even more incomprehensible.

The retcon with the son makes me think Vince McMahon is secretly booking the show.  I expect the monster next week to be a three-foot super penis.

I'm out for good.

I tapped out after maybe 3 episodes last season and decided to give it another shot.  So I was absolutely lost in addition to being a ridiculously dull episode.  When the fuck was X Files about muscle car chases?  There were so many lingering, loving shots of Mulder's midlife crisis mobile that I kept saying, "holy fuck is this product placement?"  And then, in the end, I saw that the episode was indeed sponsored by Ford.  That's fucking laughable.  But enough about that.  The episode was so talking, so full of speechifying.  Chris Carter is like George Lucas, or Vince McMahon, for that matter.  Some decent ideas but holy fuck do not let him write the entire ting.  So yeah, no idea how long I'll last this season. 

And yeah, it's ironic as shit that a show that used to be pro countercuture and anti government is sponsored by one a "too big to fail" corporations.

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Yeah X-files was awful. Even outside of the ever continuing plot nonsense, the whole episode was poorly directed and edited. I couldn't believe it was the same show I used to watch. Rapid fire cuts within scenes, cutting between two ongoing dialogue scenes quickly so that nothing is given time to breathe, poorly framed shots, Duchovny mumbling through his voiceovers, far too many shots of him driving, etc etc. Just mind numbingly dull, boring television. It makes me annoyed because this show was far better than this once upon a time.

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