Stuart’s Top 30 Sitcoms of All Time: Part 2 (#25- #21)

Ok then, let’s get into Part 2 of my 30 Top Sitcoms of All Time.

Remember, these are just my opinion, so I urge some of the more sensitive souls out there not to get too upset.

25. The Office (US Version)

There’s been many a debate on which version of the Office is better, the UK or US versions.

To me there’s not much of an argument to be had.

The US version of the Office has perhaps a less realistic set of characters (I mean, how did Michael Scott actually get the job as manager in the first place?) but it had better actors, funnier and more diverse plots and achieved success over a much longer period.

I talk about it like it’s a thing of the past, despite it still – as of April 2013 – being on the air, and that’s because I stopped watching it.

So what’s it doing on the list? Well this, like many more shows that will feature probably go on longer than they should. As it stands, the Office has had 195 episodes, and it would be remarkable if they were all funny.

From Season 2 (because Season 1 was a terrible rehash of the UK series) through to Season 6 it was must see TV for me.

Best Episode: Safety Training

There’s a consistency about the Office that runs through the seasons I mention, but one of the defining moments for me – and one that still makes me laugh just thinking about it – is the bit where Michael plans on jumping off the roof onto a trampoline, and they try it first of all by using a watermelon.

The whole episode is good, but that bit still makes me laugh just thinking about it.

24. Futurama

Here’s another show I haven’t really watched much since it made its return, but in its original form, Futurama was a wonderful and totally underrated series.

Smothered a bit by the more popular – and by that time for less creatively satisfying – Matt Groening show, the Simpsons, Futurama is one that is deserving of anyone’s time.

Much like a lot of comedies, the first few episodes aren’t that great, and it’s easy to switch off before things start to get interesting. I only got into Futurama after it had originally stopped airing on TV.

The stuff they did after the series was initially cancelled was poor though, and while I’ve not seen much of the Comedy Central stuff, the straight-to-DVD efforts like Bender’s Big Score were brutal.

Best Episode: The Problem With Popplers

Even though – as far as I can remember – it doesn’t include the always amazing Hypnotoad, the Problem With Popplers is a gem.

23. Modern Family

Here’s a show that started out really strong, dipped a lot and is now operating on a bit of a hit and miss basis.

It’s a great idea for a comedy, even though I’m not quite sure why they occasionally talk to camera other than for the purposes of exposition.

The first two seasons are consistently excellent, the third became fairly terrible (the episode for example where they go to Disneyland was Modern Family at its worst, with all the characters having become caricatures) but now it’s mostly back on form.

By a long way, the worst character is Luke, but the odds of them killing him off aren’t especially high.

Best Episode: Not In My House

IMDB lists this as an episode much worse than the Disneyland one, so there’s no accounting for taste.

They all blend in a bit, if I’m honest, but the episode with Jay’s statue of a canine butler stands out for me as the funniest.

22. Parks & Recreation

When I recommend Parks & Recreation, my advice is to skip the first season entirely.

The key to the success of Parks is that it turmed the character of Lesley Knoppe from being an incompetent moron – a poor woman’s Michael Scott if you like –  into a silly, but incredibly talented and enthusiastic Government employee.

Still on and into its fifth season, Parks & Rec has suffered a bit by making some of the characters – like Andy Dwyer – unrealistically stupid, but there have still been some excellent episodes in 2012/3.

And it’s got Ron Swanson in it; one of TV’s finest characters.

Best Episode: Hunting Trip

There’s a fairly high standard set from Seasons 2-4 at least, and my top one in my opinion is the episode where – and you might be able to guess this from the title – they go on a Hunting Trip.

21. Outnumbered

Outnumbered is – or at least was – a brilliant premise for a TV show.

Two adult actors, one child actor and two kids just making things up as they going along.

It was one of the best representations of a real British household ever seen on TV, and in the first three seasons it was a sensation, mostly down to the character of Karen.

The problem is that the kids have grown up into the sort of unlikeable brat you’d cross the street to avoid and the semi-improvised nature of the show has made way for a fully scripted and largely unfunny show.

The Christmas Special was the classic example of a show that should never have been made, and I’d urge them to forget about any further episodes, but when it was good, it was terrific.

Sadly, there does appear to be a new season in the works.

Best Episode: The Wedding

Probably the best example of how the show worked, you had the Brockmans going to the wedding of a member of their extended family they’d slagged off, Karen telling all this to the bride and the kids questioning the Vicar about God and how it didn’t make sense.

It was superb.

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Stuart’s Week in Entertainment – 02 October 2012 (It’s Back!)

It’s been a few months, but now that the US television season has started again and there’s more to watch on TV than the Olympic Games or Euro 2012, Stuart’s Week In Entertainment is back! Huzzah.

The premise is simple; I’ll do a quick review of the forms of entertainment I’ve enjoyed or endured over the past week. People like it, I like doing it, so let’s begin with TV.

Be aware that there are spoilers ahead. I can’t discuss some of these shows without revealing aspects of them that may surprise you if you haven’t seen them. Just don’t look and skip ahead to the next one if that’s the case.

Television – The Comedies

Ok, let’s start with the comedies that have begun again over the past couple of weeks.

It’s fair to say that there have been some hits and some – well one – miss here.

Mad Mosby – Still a Sociopath

Of the shows that I regularly watch, I was happy to see that the Big Bang Theory remains a brilliant watch, with a level of consistency in both the scripts and plot as it moves into its sixth season. I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Stewart character (the guy who runs the comic book store) as he’s pretty one-dimensional. Hopefully he doesn’t get used in every episode. There were some great lines though, and again they mostly came from the Sheldon/Amy double act. Good to see that it retains its flavour after all this time.

Slightly hit and miss was the return of Parks & Recreation, which began with a terrific first episode but only had a merely average second one. I’ll take that as a blip, and would put it down to a lack of Ron Swanson, and I’m expecting that soon enough the whole cast (currently split between Pawnee and Washington DC) will be reunited quite soon.

Surprisingly decent was the return of Modern Family. It’s a vastly overrated show of course, because it absolutely does not deserve to win all the awards that come its way (they swept up at the Emmys last week), but it was still a better episode than they served up for most of the last season. It occurred to me while watching it that I never even bothered to finish the Season 3 as I didn’t know Gloria was pregnant; that’s how bad it got. That episode in Disneyland was brutal. As I say though, it improved and provided more laughs than the second episode of P&R.

Meanwhile the show that got off to a bad start was How I Met Your Mother. Three of us watched it, and all three of us came away thinking ‘Oh for fuck’s sake just get on with it’. As they draaaaaaaag out the mystery of who the mother is, the eighth season begins with the reveal that Ted meets her at a railway station. It doesn’t say who she is, but simply that he meets her there at the end of the current season. It’s glacial in its pace now and the episode just wasn’t that funny. There was one joke the whole episode –   that Lily & Marshall are so tired looking after their newborn baby that they can’t focus – and they flog that horse long past the point of death. The actual focus is on Mad Mosby and his latest stunt to find eternal happiness in the form of a wife. Here, he’s hijacked an ex’s wedding because ‘She Might Be The One’. So he’s run off with her, only to find that her fiancée had also run off because he couldn’t go through with the wedding either. So he asks him why, and he says that he couldn’t marry her because he knew she wasn’t the one. And so it appears as though Ted thinks she’s not the one either based on the fact someone else thinks she’s not the one for him. Fucking sociopath.

The one impressive thing about the episode was that Barney manages to recap the plot of the entire seven previous seasons in under a minute without stopping. What was less impressive about it though was that it showed up the face that HIMYM uses canned laughter, because if it was filmed in front of a live studio audience, they’d have given him a round of applause.

The Dramas (spoilers for anyone who watches Dexter, Grey’s Anatomy or Revenge)

It’s not just the comedies that are back this week; the dramas are back too.

The big one for me is Dexter, which is back with a bang. The cliffhanger of the last season saw Deb catching Dexter ‘in the act’. Superb, and some might say overdue.

Well they threatened a few things in the episode, like starting with a prolepsis that looked like it might be the end of the season (something that really pisses me off in TV because it’s so overdone) and then hinting that Dexter might manage to convince Deb it was a one time act of insanity, but no. They’ve blown the whole dynamic of the show out of the water with the cliffhanger at the end of the episode where Deb confronts him with all the evidence that she’s found of him being a serial killer. And he admits to it! Superb.

Predictions for the season ahead? LaGuerta will be murdered when she susses out that Dexter was the Bay Harbour Butcher; only I reckon that it’ll be Deb that does the deed. That – along with the bloke who has a bee in his bonnet about Dexter – will be the main thrust of the season while the stuff with the Ukrainian mob will simply be padding to give him a weekly victim.

Excellent stuff though.

Also returning to our screens is Grey’s Anatomy, which takes the interesting decision of starting off months after the plane crash that stranded our heroes in the last season, rather than following up straight after it. I understand they’ll go back to that in the

Re-Casting from the mindset of ‘They All Look The Same’. Long live the 1970s…Oh wait…

next episode, but this first one is to show the fallout of what happened.

And hot on the heels of Lexi Gray being killed off, the best character in the show by a distance – Mark Sloan – is killed off as well. I’m disappointed by that, not only because it’s another good cast member gone, but rather because the only way Shonda Rhimes seems to be able to write a character out is by killing them. Everyone seems to die in Grey’s Anatomy rather than simply leave to get a job elsewhere; it’s ridiculous and it’s overplayed.

Not that the episode wasn’t good, but it just felt very ‘same old same old’. Interesting to see Arizona has lost a leg though. How will they deal with that? My guess: depression, followed by an inspirational tale of recovery and by late in the season she won’t even be walking with a limp anymore. A bit like Paul Robinson then.

Then we have the return of Revenge. Now it was a fairly straight forward episode that followed on from the events of the last season, but two things stood out for me. The first is that it was obvious Victoria wasn’t dead but considering they went to the trouble of leaving the actress’s name out of the opening credits, having her turn up after 15 minutes with no fanfare whatsoever seemed pretty stupid.

The other item of note was possibly the worst bit of recasting I’ve ever seen. Clearly working from the belief that ‘They All Look The Same’, the casting director of the show has recast a Japanese businessman from a bloke in his 40s with a full head of hair to a guy who looks like he’s about 70 with a bald head. It’s the equivalent of recasting Patrick Dempsey with Patrick Stewart because they are both called Patrick.

Not all shows have been good though. I tried a new one – Revolution – about a world where electricity has gone off for good. It intrigued me as it seemed like the US was finally tackling the Survivors type angle. But despite having a decent cliffhanger, the show was pish. They seem to have come up with the idea of showing what the world would look like in 15 years without any electricity and forgotten about writing scripts. I’ll wait and see if it survives and maybe watch it all again once the season is over.

Other Stuff I’ve Been Watching Lately

I’ve got a little bit of a backlog of other stuff that I’ve watched over the past few weeks too.

Let’s pay for Andrew Marr to fly out to a foreign country and film 8 seconds of footage. That’ll be cost effective

Pointless: I’ve got right into Pointless lately, but I’ve found the stupidity and ignorance of some of the people who go on the show to be staggering. Now, I don’t consider myself some sort of intellectual snob; I just feel I have a decent grasp of general knowledge. I find people who consider knowing only about ‘sophisticated’ things like philosophers and classical musicians to be just as intolerable as the sorts who think that knowing about Sex and the City is more worthy than knowing who the Shadow Chancellor is. General knowledge is just general. Yet some of the people on the show just don’t have it.

I mean, you’ve people claiming that films made before 1993 are ‘before her time’ (well nobody is missing out other than her) or people who can’t name a single Michael Jackson song from the 1980s. Worst though was the round on political parties where everyone involved declared that they knew nothing about politics as if it were some form of badge of honour. It’s general knowledge people.

As an aside, I found the amount of Pointless answers in the Dr Who round to be staggering. The question was ‘Name a character or alien that has appeared in both Classic and New Dr Who’. Obviously my instant answer was ‘Macra’ and that was Pointless, but even the likes of the Silurians were coming up. I suppose that’s slightly more specialised knowledge, but still…

Andrew Marr’s History of the World: I’m finding this to be a very informative and interesting programme that really does make the early days of human civilisation seem like a game of Civ 5. I’d highly recommend the show, but I do wonder why the BBC think that it’s acceptable to waste money sending Andrew Marr  – dressed in massively inappropriate clothing – to all corners of the globe to simply walk up a street that he’s narrating about. They could have saved their money there.

QI: A show that’s always worthy of a viewing, but I was especially interested in the Phantom Time Hypothesis – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis. Coincidentally I’d only been discussing that nothing seemed to happen around that time earlier that day. Spooky.

Castle: Started watching Castle on recommendation from a few friends. An entertaining and modern take on the murder mystery format, in the vein of Diagnosis Murder. A bit formulaic but the cast is good and they work well together.

Family Guy: I stopped watching Fanily Guy during the 8th season because it had turned into turgid unfunny shite, but I gave the new season a go and was pleased to see it’s back to form somewhat. Probably because they aren’t just doing the same old same old with the paedo guy and how everyone hates Meg. In particular, I enjoyed the episode Back to the Pilot, which has Stewie and Brian going back in time to the first episode.

WWE: All I have to say is this…“I’m the Tag Team Champions”. Daniel Bryan and Kane are pretty much the only thing worth watching these days.

Gaming – FIFA 13

It’s October, so that means it’s FIFA time again.

I’ve had a quick go of the new game and so far I’m enjoying it greatly. Attacking seems far more fluid compared to previous FIFAs where scoring a goal depended upon engineering specific scenarios like the ‘Exploit Goal’. In earlier editions you could just shoot from outside the box without it going nowhere near the goal 95% of the time. Now, if you get in position, you’ll score.

Mind you, this has led to some fairly high scoring games.

The only issue I’ve had so far is that online gaming is still a bit sketchy, with EA clearly needing to release a patch to sort it out.

Oh, and the research for the game is terrible. Being that I’m in charge of research for the far more authentic Football Manager series, I can say with authority and track record that whoever does the Dundee United data needs a slap. I can understand that they maybe had the starting team based around who played that weekend for the team, but there are basic issues like Keith Watson being a centre back and Mark Millar (who hadn’t played for us before this past Tuesday) being our best midfielder.

Tut tut FIFA, tut tut.

Stuart’s Almost Fortnight in Entertainment: May 7-18 (US Season Finales Special – Including Spoilers)

I missed last week’s ‘Week in Entertainment’ so I’m doubling up this time.

Over the past fortnight, the US Television Season has come to its conclusion, and so for this article I’ll do a quick summary of how the seasons have gone and how well they concluded.

Warning: There will be spoilers

Community

When the 16th episode – Virtual Systems Analysis – aired last month, I was genuinely worried that Community was on the decline. I wrote about it a few weeks ago, but if you didn’t read it I thought it was horrendous.

Thankfully though they turned it around again and finished on a high with three fantastic episodes aired on Thursday night.

The first of them – an episode set within an old school 16-bit SNES-likegame – was absolute genius. The attention to detail in

No, this isn’t a game, this is Thursday night’s Community. Genius, eh?

making it look like an actual game, with the music, the graphics and the way all the sprites looked and acted like the show’s characters was terrific for a child of the 80s and 90s like me to see. And the humour was tremendous as well;

It didn’t stop there though as the next episode paid homage to classic ‘heist’ movies as the Greendale 7 sneak their way back into the Chang-ruled campus to save  the Dean, while the final episode was more about providing a potential conclusion to the series, were it to be cancelled by NBC.

The good news is the show has been renewed for another 13 episode run at least, and based on the ones that just aired, the writers have plenty left in them.

Modern Family

Modern Family used to be a good show. Unlike Community, when the unfunny episodes started coming in, it wasn’t a blip.

They’ve run out of ideas and they can’t seem to get away from the same format that drives the show every week.

I’ve said it before here, but I’ll say it again. Every character seems to have exactly the same type of storyline every week. After almost 50 episodes, I think this became quite tiresome, and since the writers had no intention of mixing things up, they’ve simply run out of fresh situations to put them in.

The most recent episode I saw was the Disneyland one, and sadly I didn’t laugh once. Was I supposed to? Was it funny that Manny wasn’t interested in the theme park because he was too preoccupied with selling imaginary shares for an economics assignment? Because I didn’t. Nor did I laugh at any of the other storylines, like Phil feeling ill on Big Thunder Mountain. BTM is hardly a white knuckle ride, is it? And of course Claire was the uptight mother, Cam & Mitch had troubles with Lily, Gloria was being angry, Haley got back together with her boyfriend and Jay had a moral to the story.

So the same as every other week then.

Like all the shows I’ve watched, Modern Family has been renewed. They have a lot of work to do to rescue this show.

Parks & Recreation

Great season, great finale.

Parks & Rec maintained a high standard throughout and did what so few sitcoms actually bother to do; adapt.

The season finished with Leslie Knoppe winning her seat on the Pawnee council, while Ben takes the opportunity to work for the summer on a campaign in Washington, Anne & Tom get together and Andy looks as though he might be joining the police.

So next season will have plenty of scope for fresh storylines and new angles.

One comment on the episode from a couple of weeks ago; it was disappointing that they had Bradley Whitford in it and not have him in a scene with Rob Lowe. I only thought about that the other day too. Missed opportunity, but I loved the way they had Whitford (who has aged a lot worse than Lowe since their West Wing days) in a classic ‘Walk and Talk Scene’, straight out of the Whitehouse show.

Big Bang Theory

This show always provides me with a laugh, and I’m surprised how many people seem to be so dead against it.

The Fifth Season of BBT ended with a wedding. Awwww.

Like Parks & Rec, BBT has been consistent throughout. You always get a laugh and a good set of performances from the ensemble cast.

The finale saw Howard and Bernadette get married, and subsequently Howard was sent up in a rocket to work on a project on the International Space Station

The final shot of the rocket leaving Earth wasn’t exactly full of tension; it’s not like they are going to kill Howard off is it?

Still though, a great series and one I look forward to resuming in the autumn.

Grey’s Anatomy

Ok, here’s the one with the real spoilers in it.

Going into the finale of the always excellent medical drama, it was a commonly held belief that many of the original cast were leaving the show at the end of the season. For the last few weeks, the storylines have been preparing for it too; Meredith & Derek were leaving to work at Harvard, Karev had secured Johns Hopkins and Yang was off too.

And then the second last episode ended with a plane crash, and the previews had one character dying.

To me the safe money would have been on one of the aforementioned characters perishing in the accident – Derek being my choice.

But that’s not what happened.

Lexi Grey (highlight to see the name) was the one who died. And it was a quick death too. You expected it to be the usual US TV deal where they dragged it out to the end for maximum effect, with plenty of false finishes and a variety of potential death candidates, but that’s not what happened. She died less than 10 minutes in without too much fuss, which I thought was brave writing. And of course it was still very sad too.

I think it’s a pity that Lexi is leaving the show. She’s one of the more likeable characters and I know a few of my Grey’s Anatomy watching friends won’t be happy about it.

But what I found interesting was that as the episode developed, it became more and more apparent that the other characters weren’t getting out of that predicament by the end of the episode and that it would have to carry through into the next season. And then I read that all the characters who were supposed to leave had signed on for another two years.

So it was a swerve; and a bloody good one at that.

I keep saying it, but if you don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy, you should; it’s consistently brilliant.