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A lot of Married With Children come off as well as a 30-year-old sitcom would, but 'Requiem for a Dead Barber' comes pretty drat close to being unwatchable with all of the gay panic jokes.
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Jul 30, 2017 07:28
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mind the walrus posted:I still wish that episode "you're getting old" was the series finale. It would have been a complete surprise and absolutely the best creative end possible. Yeah, that show should have been it because it somehow fits the whole ethos of the show. And the '90s, come to think of it: becoming so cynical that you just end up being in your own hell of bland nothingness. Edit: Oh, I was going to go on a South Park rant here but I saved that for the Very Special Episode stuff. I think South Park can be summed up like this: Trey and Matt were rich kids who grew up to be rich adults and successfully marketed their white libertarian bullshit views for twenty years. Don't buy any excuses from them about philosophy or politics because they mean nothing. It's all marketing. They're just two white rich dudes who now realize their twenty-year old money dispenser on Comedy Central maybe affected American life in a way that may actually affect their lives in an adverse way. They're chickening out on Trump not because of a lack of comic potential, they're doing it because they're partially responsible for their 'nothing matters LOL' political mentality bearing rotten fruit and that scares them because something did matter in the most horrible way possible. Gaunab posted:I know there are Law and Order episodes that didn't age well but I can't think of any specific ones at the moment. How about the SVU one where everybody is shocked that a guy can get raped by three women, and spend time just making GBS threads on him and trying to figure out if it works that way? Combined with American censorship on network TV, they had to find ways around the old 'but isn't getting hard considered consent' and 'but wouldn't a guy enjoy it' and all of that? Oh, and one of the women is a lawyer and cross-examines the guy on the stand and intimidates him and stuff. That whole thing was awkward as gently caress. Also, no, they didn't even try to consider that maybe the guy was sodomized with something by the women either. It was just heterosexual sex. Gaunab posted:I don't think this scene was played for laughs, just that the audience was uncomfortable with it. '70s TV was weird in the way it thought the medium could cover any issue, as if TV was an effective teaching tool. While All in the Family kinda gets a break from it due to it being a relatively new thing, it also did start the idea that 'Very Special Episodes' were effective and not paid PSAs for a show could get some free advertising and goodwill by parents groups and other right-wing orgs. Plus, as a child who grew up in the '80s, it's amazing just how strange a lot of those eps were since they often contrasted with everything else in the show. I couldn't take them seriously then and now I just see them as actors getting another paycheck for a lazy week of filming. Very Special Episodes ever aged well and tended to go rotten very quickly. Bright side is that they often are now very funny but for all the wrong reasons. Especially the Diff'rent Strokes one with Nancy Reagan when you consider most of the people on set (including Reagan herself) were on some heavy poo poo. I think the only one who wasn't was Conrad Bain, and I want to think he was eyeballing heroin or something so he didn't feel left out. Mad Doctor Cthulhu has a new favorite as of 18:43 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 18:39
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mind the walrus posted:That reminds me of a great early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation for this thread: The Outrageous Okona. I always got the feeling Okona was one of those episodes where Roddenberry or someone thought that TNG was just the Original Series with less limitations and tried to make the most of it, only to realize twenty big years of social progression happened and their viewpoints were insanely outdated. Another case was that episode where the Federation was being taken over by bugs and Picard and Riker literally blew up a guy who had the queen incide of him and it was pretty gory for '80s standards. TNG could have really, really changed into something else if Roddenberry kicked around for a bit longer. And I doubt it would have been as fondly remembered. evobatman posted:Married with Children is now a sci-fi show about how it's possible to support a wife, two kids, a dog, a car and a mortgage with one shoesalesmans income. Considering all that Al was able to withstand punishment wise, I imagine it's really the story of an immortal who didn't have the smarts to invest and ended up in his own personal hell: the only things he really owns is the lovely house (that was eventually bought up and brought back when yuppies started moving in) and he has so much seniority at the shoe store that he actually makes a fair bit of cash and nobody has had the urge to ask him why for fear of being destroyed utterly, so they roll with it. Or he's just the manager of the store which would make more sense: stuck with all the poo poo work and a meaningless promotion that allows him a slight living wage but no real power at all, just like in real life. Guy Mann posted:The period between the fall of the soviet union and 9/11 was a weird one for entertainment because we had no idea what nebulous evil to dedicate ourselves to fighting so just clung onto whatever was convenient, whether it was identity politics or conspiracy theories. And it turned out we were really good at seeing ourselves as the enemies (see X-Files for that one). Mister Kingdom posted:And Jefferson was a much better partner-in-crime for Al than Steve. Yeah, Ted McGinley's addition to the show was really a nice bit of serendipity. He's probably the one who helped the show get at least two more seasons before Fox dropped the axe on them. Detective No. 27 posted:Things only get worse when Tennent comes back. Especially during his finale and "OBAMA WILL SAVE US!" Also a dude fucks a slab of concrete. "OBAMA HAS A PLAN TO SAVE THE ECONOMY" and the President-Elect going into danger despite that being a position that, normally, is only held for two months and involves getting their own Administration in order.....well, it used to be funny, now it's just downright bizarre. When Doctor Who fucks up, it doesn't hold back. It goes big. Calaveron posted:Duckman too because it's an ugly, ugly world but that wasn't a nickelodeon show I hope Duckman also got into some interesting psychological territory, too, so the strangeness of the artwork could have been impressionism written large. Of course this discounts the series finale which just shits out its entire premise five seconds before the crew flips the audience the bird.
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Aug 5, 2017 20:25
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as all poo poo about how far above this material she is. Then we get to the climax of carbon-dating. The one bit that puts this episode exactly in 1988. Data goes to the Holodeck to conference with one of the greatest comedians in history.
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah Roddenberry, like Brannon Braga and Rick Berman, is one of those creators where they deserve a lot of poo poo for the stuff they did but also were instrumental in keeping the franchise alive. Roddenberry would have strangled the show by the end of the third season. Some of his edicts were literally dumb poo poo like "in the future we do not mourn our dead" or "no interpersonal conflicts because everyone is so evolved." When you couple it with episodes like Code of Honor (Space Africans kidnap white lady), Up the Long Ladder (19th Century Irish people in space debate the number of clone wives they can have; for loving real), and that one where the paradise planet is depicted as blonde hair Ayran supermodels... yeah Roddenberry was a messed up motherfucker even for his day. The closest representation to this I can point to was when Jabootu (of all places) took on the second Jurassic Park movie and noted that Spielberg was playing games with the adventurer character, and how he wanted him to be the good guy but realized that after a few decades he was just as morally wrong as a lot of villains (the living face of colonialism and such). In a way, that's how I feel that the Okona episode when wrong: Trek was trying to harken back to its swinging '60s past and really didn't get why they were wrong or expected sci-fi to be the same as it was back in the '60s when nearly everything went and it was a very white male focused sort of universe. Of course, the Jabootu guy also was slamming the movie for ignoring the white male adventurer character where I feel most people would be of the other mind, appreciating what Spielberg was doing by bringing that archetype in and then taking it down a peg. Also, Roddenberry had some really lovely ideas for drama as well. No emotion? No conflict? How the gently caress are you going to have any dramatic impact then? That's another thing that Trek in the '90s really did wrong: piss away any dramatic focus that showed the Federation as being less than perfect. Just because you take away the need for survival doesn't mean humans stop being assholes, jerks, or bigots. He did a good job saving the show and letting it become what it is today, but holy poo poo a lot of that had to be some amazing luck. Besesoth posted:As it turns out, James Woods has also aged poorly. I want to see the James Woods of Videodrome interact with the James Woods of today, because I sincerely doubt it's the same person. Koyaanisgoatse posted:James Woods is also the guy who sued a weird twitter account for defamation because he made a joke about James Woods doing a shitload of cocaine That actually may be the difference.
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Aug 6, 2017 03:36
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IShallRiseAgain posted:Star Trek: The Next Generation had the episode Conspiracy, which was a horror episode that tonally didn't fit with the rest of the series and it was awesome. The threat in that episode was what the Borg was originally going to be. I really regret that this didn't make a comeback somehow, because the idea of a Borg that literally invaded flesh in a Cronenbergian way is a bit more fascinating than the Borg, and a whole hell of a lot gooey. That way, among many of the syndicated horror shows, one of the most forgotten is War of the Worlds where the gore ratio was really amped up. It was a sequel to the movie that George Pal did but was really creepy much in the same way this episode of TNG was. I can't find any examples on YouTube sadly, but if do some searching you can find the entire run on Amazon for around $30-35. The first season is the best as it was Earthbound and full of the gore that was similar in spirit to the early episodes of Freddy's Nightmares before they toned that way the gently caress back. Calaveron posted:The only time Al ever won was when he showed genuine love for his family or honest pride in his high school accomplishments instead of lovely bravado and I had never noticed that One of the downsides of Married With Children, however, is how the creators really misunderstood the appeal of Al's horrible luck. While they did it because he was a jerk, you could tell that when the show really took off that he was seen as someone a lot of people could relate to which was pretty disturbing when you really examine why. There was an E! True Hollywood Story behind the making of the show and when you see people really cheer the entrance of the characters (especially Al) it's pretty weird to watch all of these people side with Al without really getting that you shouldn't, and that the whole family is rotten as sin. In some ways I think a lot of '80s/'90s TV never really made that clear at the time. The best example, Seinfeld, pretty much came out with the whole 'these people are jerks why didn't you get that' right after the finale came out with a loud wet splat and people started bitching.
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Aug 8, 2017 05:59
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Way back in the thread because it's moving fast, but there was that episode where the punchline was that this really amazing sexy woman that they were going to build a whole brand on turned out to be transgender, which ruined one of their get-rich-quick schemes. Can't remember the episode title, but I have thought about it, as well as of Ace Ventura, as comedy that thankfully wouldn't be done today. Oh yeah, I remember that: and the lady was banging Bud and then she admits to her sex change on television and leaves Bud there in stunned horror. Almost forgot about that one. Outside of the one I mentioned way, waaaay back in the beginning of the thread (the gay panic thanks to Al going to a hairdresser), it's hard to remember Married With Children episodes since it's been about twenty years. A lot of the sexual politics were really drat insulting for everybody involved: being a women means no work, being a man means being worked too much and used until you die like a horse, any change to that system results in Marcy and her own issues (which is doubly problematic since she's gay in real life), et cetera. The whole show was funny when it was brutal even if it wasn't fair at all, but it got weird in its later seasons. I still don't know what they were going for by having Seven or Amber in the show and both of them vanishing pretty much shows that the showrunners didn't know either.
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Aug 13, 2017 07:15
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Aesop Poprock posted:It produced this though which is one of the funniest scenes I can remember from the series The best part is 'I'm one part robot and three parts rear end in a top hat. URP." "JESUS CHRIST." That always gets me, every single time. SEX BURRITO posted:Sex and the City has someone buying an apartment in Manhattan and dozens of pairs of designer shoes despite writing one sex column a week. Wasn't Sex in the City partially produced by Aaron Spelling or some poo poo? Because that's usually one of his big things in the shows he produced: rich people as superheroes of glamour that, nowadays, is incredibly out of date and somewhat pathetic. In fact, do Aaron Spelling shows even translate to people from the '90s and beyond? I'm not talking about his '90s soaps like Melrose Place or the now-forgotten 90210, but Dynasty and all the other poo poo where being rich apparently meant everything was a Donald Trump wet dream with old world rococo stylings and the like. Eventually that whole '80s fad died out but I'll be damned if Aaron Spelling didn't really stop being relevant as soon as the new century happened and he just vanished completely. I'm sure he died sometime after 2000 (be hosed if I'm going to look) but for his creative output, I don't think anybody even mentions it anymore. It's kinda like Quinn Martin who seemed to vanish after 1981 and now is pretty much forgotten unless you're old or a big TV geek. Zamboni_Rodeo posted:David Rakoff did a brilliant monologue about why Rent is terrible: That's pretty much the same thing Ebert chastised "Reality Sucks" with: the idea that the artist label in the '90s was just a nice way to dress like you were auditioning for a grunge band and do nothing and excuse it by claiming you hadn't 'sold out.' Then again, my memories of the '90s were lovely TV, grunge overtaking rock and then flaming out big time shortly after, and then more hip hop/rap filtering into lame white America while the Internet made life infinitely more interesting. In fact, what we think of the '90s today really was just everything right up until the middle of the decade when all mainstream movies and music really really started to suck on ice as a lot of '80s sacred cows were butchered or forced into direct-to-video poo poo.
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Aug 15, 2017 18:44
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RC and Moon Pie posted:I don't see how it's aged exceptionally poorly. It's quite 1970s, but still has some pretty decent bits. Even Vicki Lawrence playing Hattie McDaniel isn't anywhere near as bad as it could be. Yeah, Carol Burnett stuff maybe a tad lame nowadays, but a lot of it is still funny. Tim Conway alone is worth a watch because the man is insanely awesome. stone cold posted:it's pretty freaking racist Mama's Family? Could you refresh my memory? I'm not denying it at all but it's been years since I've seen it and I've nearly forgotten. A lot of what sticks out about the show is how bizarre it got when it went to syndication and how casual it was with sex-shaming and exploring the direness of Midwest/Southern living where everybody was scraping to get by and there was a real lack of upward mobility combined with a genuine lack of anything to intellectually challenge anybody. Hearing Mama call her own daughter-in-law a floozy constantly is just downright insulting considering she remains faithful to her husband throughout the show while Iola -- the sexually repressed homebody who can't escape her parents' manipulative clutches -- is more than willing to elope with Vint and run off a few times on the show. In fact, thinking about the parts I remember (so bear with me), the whole show is a nice look into lives of quiet desperation. Vint starts off as a man who doesn't work hard as much as he drifts through life looking for a big payout before becoming a dense clod with a dead-end job. His wife works as a cashier and while they both have the ability to purchase things to keep them happy momentarily they never have enough to escape their mother-in-law's basement. The whole thing has the weird stink of permanent enforced childhood through poverty that becomes a hell of a co-dependent relationship with Mama herself: they can't leave because they don't make money. She only has Iola to hang with most of the time because her personality is so toxic she can't help but keep pushing people away, even her own daughters who eventually just left the state and their responsibilities to run like hell. In a way, the only way the show really fails is that the anger and depression and anxiety doesn't manifest itself with the lot of them sitting around watching Fox News and screaming about Obama, and that's only because these people are products of a culture that limits people into roles they will never be happy with. The only sign of this is Bubba and Mama herself who fight to get out of it but even then that was a hard struggle with Bubba having a criminal record (that hangs over his head for a season or two) and Mama being afraid to complete her education due to being humiliated at school. There are ways out but holy poo poo the whole thing is a minefield that may get you regardless of how many times you pull at your bootstraps. loving hell, did I just defend Mama's Family? I think I need to start drinking.
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Aug 16, 2017 06:05
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Ha! Yeah, I'm afraid as a young child I would watch the show a lot and as a result it's sometimes stuck in my head. The saddest thing when reading that article was that I looked at the price and muttered 'if only he waited seventeen more years he could have gotten the complete series from Time/Life for $70 because Amazon has it and it even has the original openers when the house they all lived in looked like poo poo and.....' Yeah, I've wasted my life on lovely TV. I think one thing that enables it is the DVD craze that has allowed a lot of TV that should have been forgotten over time to come back. I mean, think about it: out of all the shows to get quality treatment from Time/Life, one of them is loving MAMA'S FAMILY. Jesus Christ. Anyway... Inescapable Duck posted:Pre-9/11 media was something else. A lot of shows got episodes delayed or pulled because of portraying cities getting wrecked. I think Transformers: Robots In Disguise (not to be confused with the current ongoing show by that name. What is it will all the goddamn same name reboots) ended up aired way out of order for that reason. Likewise, pretty much anything with guns at a school before Columbine. Though it makes Heathers even more of a pitch black comedy nowadays. (and if anything, even more on point) The '90s really are a foreign land and time when you look at it today. Does anybody remember when the X-Files movie started off with a pretty close recreation of the Oklahoma City bombing? You can't really do that poo poo nowadays but it was cool with Fox that, two to three years after the fact, they could reference a real life tragedy for a opening to a movie based on a TV show. And it was pretty much a throwaway reference just to drum up attention for the film. And today that's pretty much forgotten much like everything else pre 9/11 attacks are. I'm not sure if that was brass balls or just a callous disregard for a tragedy, but that poo poo won't happen today.
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Aug 17, 2017 14:52
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Last Chance posted:I think a lot of conspiracy theory lovers really liked X-Files because it was the first mainstream + popular show to explore some of those ideas that might have only been explored on dark usenet groups. Same here. The '90s were a good time for all of these weird theories to come into the limelight and the popularity of the show really helped. Hyrax Attack! posted:The X-Files season 1 episode "Darkness Falls" has 30 loggers missing in a forest in Washington State, with ecoterrorists suspected. The only response is the deployment of two FBI agents and one local park ranger. It would have been funny if the show began after the initial investigation because since the things doing it are lightning bugs pacified by light that any real investigation with huge gently caress-off lights would have kept the bugs dormant, meaning nothing would be found initially until Mulder and Scully showed up. That would have been a nice twist. Also, I spoiler-tagged that because everybody should check out that episode, it is quite neat. I think the X-Files can age well if you take the time the show aired into account. There are some episodes that simply don't (the VR one) but a lot of them really do still pack a nice punch. You just need a bigger suspension of disbelief than usual.
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Aug 18, 2017 15:41
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funmanguy posted:Lots of early episodes of xfiles had guest stars who went on to big careers and it's kinda jarring to see jack black get murdered via malicious lightning strike after a weird series of events all started by virtua fighter 2 arcade cabinet. And he died to a the Filter song 'Nice Shot,' which is....kinda awesome, actually. davidspackage posted:Yeah that kinda got slipped in there, maybe elaborate They probably should have because that's one thing that really hamstrung a lot of Very Special Episodes: if you don't put anybody in danger then why would anybody care? Nobody cares about single episode friend who can be fed into the woodchipper. Wheat Loaf posted:As I recall, the Grange Hill kids recorded a hit charity single called "Just Say No" and were even invited to the White House to meet Nancy Reagan, then years later one of the cast became notorious tabloid bait for his drug problems. Nancy Reagan must have been the patron saint of turning TV actors into drug addicts. See 'Diff'rent Strokes' for more examples of that. davidspackage posted:Yeah, I should've said "a kids' show as milquetoast as Saved by the Bell". Blossom had the brother who was a recovering alcoholic, too. They might as well have called the older brother 'instant drama' because the only reason they wheeled him into a scene was so they could do another Very Special Episode without much setup. In fact, I don't recall a teenage/twentysomething alcoholic in any sitcom I watched that wasn't just an opportunity to have a shorthand Very Special Episode waiting in the wings in case the show needed a quick Emmy. I think Mr. Belvedere had one, even, just so Bob Uecker could pretend to act.
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Aug 21, 2017 13:43
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Kit Walker posted:I feel that the increased acceptance of poly relationships is going to make a lot of love-triangle-based dramas age poorly. Like, if you two really love that other person and they reciprocate your feelings then maybe just roll with it? Sheesh. Absurd Alhazred posted:Yeah, I remember feeling that way about the Bill/Sookie/Eric triangle in True Blood. She even has a dream where they're all making love, and then she breaks up with them because that's just not right. Or it might change from a 'polyamory is bad because THE JESUS' and turn into a criticism of the whole idea of monogamy and the like. In a way, that's the most interesting part of watching the Baby Boomers' hold on culture slowly start to fade: they've held on for so long that a lot of assumed norms in TV are now being questioned outright so many of them will fade. Especially since there's no longer three to four hands on the TV dial, but hundreds if not thousands that are all looking for eyes and can escape unwelcome attention by sheer numbers alone. Even if some stations go the superstation route and start pandering to the same old 'basic' TV audience, there's still a lot of them out there that exist and offer a platform for other people. Maybe the funniest thing of this thread isn't that some TV episodes will age badly, but eventually all of them simply due to American attitudes in the twentieth century simply dying out and being questioned without the power of the status quo to quash an even-handed discussion of it. And oddly enough, all of those 'progressive' episodes that do take an evenhandedness with then-contemporary controversies will age badly as well. Imagine a world, years from now, where they offer mega-discs in gas stations of old TV programming where the youth laugh at the inability of Will & Grace to deal with homosexuality without any overt signs of affections that are allowed for the heterosexuals. I guess, in some ways, it's funny to realize as time goes on those old '40s filmstrips used for education will be those '90s sitcoms where being gay is shocking and any talk of sex is filtered and obscured through pathetic childish lingo.
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Aug 27, 2017 00:09
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Most real life poly relationships I know have been shitfests, too. But on occasion they work. But you don't even have to go as far as polyamory, just open relationships, period. If Sheldon is so asexual that it's a struggle for him to even hug Amy, maybe it makes more sense for her to get sex, which she realizes she does want, elsewhere. (Although she should have left Sheldon a gazillion times because of how abusive he is, why do I keep hate-watching this show someone send help!) I wonder how well Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men will translate in the next few decades. They're not that funny and you can practically see people in twenty years going 'this is how TV in the 2000s were' and then multi-page dissections of just how backwards and unfunny they are. So kinda like 'Friends' is seen now but with more words describing how unfriendly they are to another opening of the cultural norm.
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Aug 27, 2017 01:46
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Detective No. 27 posted:That really goes to show how much the show relies on the showrunner. Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor was brilliant, but the showrunners really sabotaged his tenure. Plus at that point John Nathan-Turner's antics and appealing to the fanbase really just destroyed the show. To his benefit he tried to resign a number of times but I think the BBC basically told him that if he goes he's fired outright from the organization or the show ends and he didn't have the heart for the show to sink. Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy really got the shaft because they were awesome and did their best, but everybody in control either wanted the show dead or had just run out of steam to care anymore. McCoy got lucky because the people who took over for most of the day to day in his reign wanted to do 2000AD stuff so it was a change for the better even if the music sucked on ice. ReidRansom posted:Always Sunny is still going strong and they're going into 13, I think? Though I'd be lying if I said it wasn't feeling like their peak wasn't well behind them and that they're maybe approaching a point where they need to consider wrapping it up. I wonder though if maybe its lifespan is aided by the shorter seasons it and so many other shows employ these days. Didn't one of the people leave at the end of last season? Riptor posted:it was total garbage actually I think the X-Files has a special case for it being outdated, and that's due to it being a real child of the '90s. Living through the 2000s where those types of conspiracy nuts to be emotionally-damaged bigots who need a superiority boost just takes the luster off of the show and my memories of it. If the X-Files wanted to really showcase what it was all about, it would have another season where everybody is a screaming bigot who is screaming for Trump to save them and then show them doing it for the cash as their mental illnesses go untreated and they start to lose control of their lives. Also, at this point the idea of the government being controlled by a bunch of shadowy men is a loving cliche.
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Aug 29, 2017 05:11
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YeahTubaMike posted:The episode where he dies really hosed me up. It was the last ER episode I ever bothered with, mostly because the whole death scene was done on a level of Wile E. Coyote. While I appreciate the madness of it, it really seemed like the writers had just run out of things to do at that point and were going to see how far they could push NBC before the series ended. IShallRiseAgain posted:The main plot episodes were always kind of terrible though. While having more serialized TV shows is cool, I do wish shows would still sometimes have stand alone episodes. Sometimes there are cool plots that don't really work if they are tied into a larger and longer narrative. I should admit that right after I poo poo on the X-Files I almost bought the entire thing on blu-ray. So I'm a hypocrite on some level, but a nostalgic one. Oh well.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:36
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BioEnchanted posted:I feel that when Red Dwarf did it it was doing it ironically, but I'm not sure... Evil Rimmer was amazing though, and as far as I recall he was the only one who was like that. Also note that when Rimmer got a computer virus and turned against the crew, he was dressed in drag. With a penguin puppet called Mr. Fibble. In some cases I think it's due to being a counterweight to Rimmer being against his better nature. Notice at his best he's genuinely a sweet and awesome person that, despite being heterosexual, takes no offense at a male superior coming onto him. He gently asserts his orientation and the matter is dropped in a very mature way. What a guy. Now that I'm thinking about it, wasn't Rimmer tortured by his parents by dressing in drag as humiliation? Maybe that's where the crossdressing-as-evil comes from? Okay, found another episode that hasn't aged well: the second season premiere of Bosom Buddies, the old show where Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari dress in drag to get an affordable apartment. So by the second season they're tired of the premise and want to get rid of it. So, Tom Hanks' character outs himself to the woman he's dating who lives in the same apartment building. She's understandably upset and betrayed, and the last act of the show (all seven to nine minutes of it) is dedicated to the aftermath. In a normal show, this should be the focus of another episode itself. This upsets the balance of everything: every single female character should react, apologies and rationalizations should be made, et cetera. How is it resolved? Everybody just accepts it blankly. "Men living in our female-only apartment building that is designed that way for safety's sake? Eh, no biggie" and it's basically written off as some sort of elaborate prank. Finally, Tom Hanks' character and his girlfriend make up and....no, she's rightfully pissed but since there's only a few minutes left in the episode, he pushes her down, holds her down, proclaims his love, and kisses her while stock footage of fireworks go off and the audience cheers and...roll credits. Yeah, it kinda looks like sexual assault, really. Tom Hanks committing sexual assault because his girlfriend is upset that he posed as his own sister to possibly get close to her and take advantage of her trust and he proclaims his true feelings while holding her down so she can't get away. It comes off even more awkward than what I'm saying.
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Sep 2, 2017 11:01
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Krispy Kareem posted:I feel that was kind of manufactured. It's not like we didn't have TV shows or movies about ladies having babies without partners before Murphy Brown. 3 years before that the movie Baby Boom had a very similar plot and no one cared. Looking up the Murphy Brown plot line, it almost sounds like something the Christian Right would like (ditching a radical parter, having a baby against all odds): What didn't age well (starting from that) was the idea of TV episodes that pushed boundaries and the like. In fact the '90s were quite the decade for blowing up the idea of stagnant TV and launching into full revolt against the Religious Right's way of creating outrage to extort the media into toeing the line they created that was supposedly 'real America.' Seriously, look at the change from the early '90s with the Right bitching about Murphy Brown to 2000 when the Internet is showing all sorts of porn and other discourse while most of America decided paying for TV was better than dealing with five to six different networks that was offering poo poo like Shasta McNasty and Homeboys from Outer Space. We literally went from starched collars screaming that giving birth was obscene to free and ready Internet porn that nobody could control. It was quite brilliant, actually. So, the idea of outrage to blackmail TV into toeing a Christian line is something that has completely vanished. Yeah, I'm sure there are freaks doing their little lists about what not to watch (aka what to be scandalized about when you're complaining instead of living), but notice that a lot of shows getting bullshit outrage are either rightfully ignored or actually courted as a way to make more cash.
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Sep 16, 2017 21:20
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Krispy Kareem posted:Flanders was weirdly religious, but not so much that everyone couldn't immediately relate to him to that one family that seemed normal on the outside, but when you stayed over you found out they only watched Christian television and thought spices were indecent. I think Ned only became that religious when it was apparent that living next to Homer would drive anybody to move unless they were a complete doormat. Even the cool Ned of the first few seasons would get sick of Homer's poo poo after a while with all the thieving and stupidity. And Ned has been an interesting carciature: his religion is a front for some deep insecurity and emotional problems. The Hurricane episode shows that if he hits a limit then EVERYTHING comes loose and he flips out just as easily. And at the end, he's still just reset back to uptight. He will still run you over with his car (even if it's a Geo) if he's pissed enough. He's not the perfect neighbor, he's just wound so tightly that it takes a lot before he snaps. He's just as hosed up as the rest of the town.
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Sep 17, 2017 13:12
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Inescapable Duck posted:Stealing cable has aged extra badly given the modern equivalent, digital piracy, is something audiences are completely sick of hearing about and even artists mock, given the main anti-piracy crusaders tended to make themselves look like cartoon supervillains. Plus this makes the main point of the Poochie episode a bit more laughable: how are we supposed to give creative types a break when they run out of ideas when you're actively paying for the content outright as many people were starting to do in the '90s with the rise in cable subscriptions? I'm not going to rehash the problems in that episode (there's a whole thread on that elsewhere), but it's kinda funny to see TV types get pissy about being called out on creative laziness by employing the idea that nobody pays for their free TV so they should be grateful to get anything they get....meanwhile people were getting so sick of that they would rather pay out the nose to escape the dull boredom of that model. Plus, the idea that ripping a movie or a TV show was the same as stealing cars was pretty hilarious, especially in the frame of mind that the devaluation of media was already going ahead full steam ahead during the VHS to DVD switch near 2000: VHS tapes were massively overpriced and DVDs eventually became so cheap to produce that a lot of them dropped in price drastically. Anybody remember Deep Discount DVD and how easy it was to buy cheap discs legally and without sales tax? Kinda hard to scream piracy when you showcase how easy those discs devalued because companies wanted a quick turnaround on their investment. Why yes, I am old.
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Sep 17, 2017 19:04
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The Bloop posted:I think the crassening of the Simpsons was part of its downfall too. Once they showed Ned's doodle on TV it was the end of an era. No footlongs.
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Sep 18, 2017 18:56
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Your Computer posted:The internet isn't known for eating its words, and I swear most of the time when I see Breaking Bad brought up online it's in terms of "that show was so good, Walt is a badass and Skyler was such a bitch lol". It's depressing. I think it's because a lot of people mistake 'protagonist' for 'automatic good person.' And Walt isn't: for someone concerned about his family's welfare, taking their savings and buying a mobile lab is pretty loving lovely to start with. He even admits it at the end when he says it was all about him: it was, and it wasn't about curing his cancer or caring for his family, it was to be the big man he always wanted to be but never had the opportunity until he thought he had nothing to lose...even if it leaves his family as social pariahs and himself as being remembered as a violent druglord. And you see a lot of that in shows nowadays as well where disturbing people are given one hell of a pass because the show features them and the audience gets to know them more and more. TV storytelling has reached quite a new level, and it's stretching a lot of people who never put the thought into the shows they watched into going down some really weird mental paths. So instead of saying 'I should examine this more and more' they come off as thinking 'this is now okay.' One could make a valid point for this mentality becoming a reason why America is in the political state it is now, but that's beyond this thread's mandate. Needless to say, with Breaking Bad, you can see that Walt's behavior is not only made okay by his role as the lead but actively defended to the point of people relating to it far too much. It really makes me wonder how this will be seen as time goes on as people are either forced to examine TV shows in a deeper light or simply don't and we hit a point where some people really cannot deal with deep meaning in their TV and end up going down some really, really, REALLY dark paths. And in a way, this isn't anything really new. As we've discussed before, Married With Children dealt with this and eventually became consumed with it to the point where the Bundys weren't seen as losers but as relatable people that reflected a part of America that many of us don't see. Even Seinfeld had trouble breaking free from this when their finale revealed that maybe we shouldn't find any sort of relation with these people and their antics. For some reason a lot of people believe that the Glass Teat mentality of TV that Harlan Ellison used to write at length about cannot change so when it did the stretch of turning poo poo timefiller into an artform in its own right -- one that changed its own nature in such a subtle manner that people still have problems recognizing it -- we're still having trouble relating to it because it's not mindless enough. Quite an interesting situation, really.
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Sep 30, 2017 05:55
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hawowanlawow posted:help, I can't watch a show without obsessing over what I would do in a characters place Well that's... *looks at your avatar* ...oh dear. BiggerBoat posted:Seinfeld has aged really well for the most part. I'm starting to think that Seinfeld started making their characters sinister and then tried to use the final episode to explain that away. George's finance dying was a step too far and I think it ruined the fine line it used to tread. As for Breaking Bad, I think the whole 'what if you had to live six months' thing was pretty much erased by Season Two when his cancer went into remission.
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Sep 30, 2017 20:47
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Der Kyhe posted:One state almost made it to law that pregnant women cannot be put on trial for murder. Suddenly 'Lamb to the Slaughter' has an interesting new twist. Besesoth posted:That's why she yells "this is all your fault" at Bashir when she's actually giving birth - Alexander Siddig who is great as R'as al Ghul in "Gotham" this season was the father. I actually read that spoiler, and now I may be watching Gotham. Didn't see that coming today. Ein cooler Typ posted:the actress got pregnant in irl life but the character couldn't have a kid because she wasn't married so that's why they had to do that weird thing where she's carrying Keiko's baby That's downright twisted. Odd that a Sci-Fi show in syndication had people care enough that this couldn't have just been a thing on its own.
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Oct 21, 2017 04:35
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SEX BURRITO posted:The family of John Ritter must have been pissed about how it was handled. The Dad dies off screen, they do a couple of sad episodes, then replace him with a kooky cousin played by David Spade and a grumpy grandpa. Other than a few sappy moments, the Dad isn’t mentioned again. Nah, the worst part is how Ritter's death was made into a promotion for the series to continue. So a crappy sitcom that wouldn't have lasted that long (and was startlingly misogynistic in the way it treated daughters as property) has a lead die and the result is a bunch of mourning that this year-old sitcom suddenly needed to continue because of a need to remember the guy who was on Three's Company. Nothing against Ritter, but the whole thing stank of using his memory to continue a disposable sitcom. Instant Sunrise posted:There’s a persistent rumor that a contractual clause between Terry Nation’s estate and the BBC requires the BBC to use the Daleks once a season or else the rights for them will revert back to the Nation estate. At this point I'm thinking the reason the gaps between Doctor Who seasons are getting longer and longer is because showrunners are having trouble coming up with ideas for it. Granted, sometimes you get very lucky and have a Season 9 with Capaldi doing great work, but overall a lot of the people running it are fans who have been doing creative work with the franchise for decades at this point. Maybe it's collective burnout combined with realizing the fanbase now is more concerned with the Doctor wanting to screw his companion instead of whatever nostalgia they may have for it. Horace posted:Even worse the specific time I watched the death episode. You know, if the show ended on that note and then cut to static for the next 25 minutes, it would have been the best thing ever. And possibly a more fitting tribute to Ritter because that would have just been hilarious. Squidster posted:BSG, for those who missed this theatre of the absurd. This is gold.
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Oct 23, 2017 17:54
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Oh, come now. Sandy Frank has been a walking cadaver for at least the last 20 years (woman on the right is his ex-wife, and a former model if you can believe it): Jesus. I was going to make a joke about Sandy Frank looking like the living embodiment of his own body of work (pieced together haphazardly to give the appearance of a manufactured whole), but I'm not sure if he's a burn victim or not. DACK FAYDEN posted:Following this one down the rabbit hole (because I wondered why I had never heard of something this lovely) I went to Wikipedia, then to its one cited source, and it's even weirder than I'd imagined: Angel Cop is horribly antisemitic? I remember watching that years ago via Manga Entertainment and never once caught that. That's insane on its own standards, even if the show itself had some interesting visuals, like the face that appears in the fog only to be revealed as a severed head being held by some monster. That's pretty sad, really.
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Oct 26, 2017 16:29
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Choco1980 posted:I like how the article all but ignores that Brascia (whose biggest role was as the challenged kid who gets killed at the beginning of Friday the 13th Part 5) has been alleged by Corey Feldman to have been a major link in the chain in the 80s and 90s for connecting young kids wanting to make it big with hollywood elite pedos. Like, regardless of how terrible Sheen (probably) was, you might want to get a better source. So when you see Joey get axed to death every Halloween, take special pride that not only is Vic doing the world a favor, he's literally butchering a possible child molester on screen as well, making that scene the Best Thing Ever For Multiple Reasons. Also, the National Enquirer does occasionally do good investigative reporting. They're not always scum, just like...95% of the time. And honestly, it has been hinted that Sheen did some really REALLY shady stuff at the time.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:17
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Solice Kirsk posted:I still can't believe half of the things Audie Murphy did and lived through. I think he actually wanted to die heroically in battle and just kept on living despite his best efforts. Maybe he knew James Doohan and figured he had to outdo that mad Canadian bastard.
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Dec 6, 2017 00:12
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Mister Kingdom posted:It's fun to watch the main characters pausing while waiting for the cheers to subside when they enter a scene. The best part is how the show was at its best when it was mocking the gently caress out of Al for rightfully being a loser, only to switch around Season Six because the audience somehow identified with him and his trials. I think that's when the creators finally just realized they were getting paid either way and just walked and let the audiences enjoy whatever hell they had created for themselves. At least one of them went on to create the same show for the WB and made it darker, which at least made some twisted sort of sense and explains why that show hasn't been seen for nearly twenty years. Edit: also, removing the laugh track from Big Bang Theory (which they couldn't completely do without cutting into lines) really just shows that nobody is really a character, they're all a setup for lovely jokes. How long is one of their scripts, really? About 13-15 pages?
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Dec 9, 2017 04:52
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bitterandtwisted posted:One Foot in the Grave killed off the main character and implied his wife murdered the person responsible. Oh God, that entire episode is just so sad. It's filmed like an hour-long drama and has the hapless Victor going to his high school reunion....only to realize he's the only one left. The rest had died and he was the final one. So he makes his way back home, only to be run down outside the train station. And then it gets WORSE with the wife struggling to recover and reaching out to someone only to find they're the murderer and then...she's driving off into the sunset. Possibly a murderer. And the best part was that the show often would have leadups to very dark moments only to recant on them. So all of this just came out as something really, really horrifying. It's one of those episodes that I think not only fucks with your mind, but kinda makes it where you don''t want to see the series ever again because it's that disturbing. Anyway, if we're bringing up 'I Married Dora,' we should probably bring up the final episode of Moonlighting. It's an hour-long drama, the plot runs out at the last commercial break, and the last few moments are the guy who played Booger on 'Revenge of the Nerds' weeping over a dead body, the set being taken down, and the main characters getting chastised for loving up the show by getting together. Then it ends. Which was kinda messed up. Also, sorry about bringing up Unhappily Ever After. I didn't recall it being that loving horrifying from the clip that was shown, but I do remember it being such a clusterfuck that they had two of the leads leave (the mother-in-law being one of them, whose character presumably ended up buried in the backyard) and then them making it only to 100 episodes so they could go into syndication but then... Wikipedia posted:The show was sold into syndication for the 1999–2000 and the 2000–01 seasons, but was not re-offered the following fall due to lackluster clearance rates and low ratings. It has been off the air in America ever since. Literally off the air for about two decades. Edit: I just did a check on Nikki Cox's career since I was curious just how badly everything went for the people from Unhappily Ever After. On the good side, this show did not kill many careers, a lot of the people are still working (even the nice lady who left in the fourth season is still getting work, which is awesome). However, Nikki Cox stopped getting roles right around 2008...when she turned thirty years old. Which is incredibly depressing. Mad Doctor Cthulhu has a new favorite as of 22:30 on Dec 9, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 22:25
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BioEnchanted posted:I think that that was my favourite episode because it was definitely a hell of an ending. Also, Victor wasn't the only one left. As he leaves the Pub dejected, another elderly man approaches, this one with a noticable limp. "Limpy" was one of the friends that Victor was describing to his waiter when reminiscing. If Victor had just waited 5 more minutes he would have met with one of his friends. Victor wasn't the only one left of his class - but Limpy now is. As Dustin Hoffman once mused in Stranger than Fiction: Dramatic Irony. It'll gently caress ya' every time. Oh wow that's even more twisted. Day late and dollar short, and now dead. Poor Victor. And I completely forgot that Charlie Sheen show even existed. They actually made a hundred episodes in advance?? Edit (again, sorry): holy poo poo, they actually made 100 episodes. And it was cancelled shortly afterward, and that was it. And it had a few weird acting choices in it: the dad from Family Ties, the son from Family Matters, Selma Blair was fired because Sheen threw a hissy fit, and one of the ladies from Reno 911....my God, that is insane. And it was produced by the guy who ran the Drew Carey Show who by all rights should be used to a few seasons worth of effort being turned off during the summer months due to the company losing all sorts of faith in it. That whole thing sounds like a train wreck but I've never seen an episode. And it looks like they stopped releasing it on DVD as of 2014. Mad Doctor Cthulhu has a new favorite as of 00:36 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 00:29
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married but discreet posted:It might also coincide with plastic surgeons turning her into a ghoul, which is depressing as well. Yeah, I finally dug deep and googled for a whole minute and came out with the story, I think: she started doing botox and other things for her lips in 2005, when she was on her 'Las Vegas' TV show, and by the time that show ended she had the first of many plastic surgeries that destroyed her looks. So while one could say that Hollywood doesn't treat actresses very well, in this case she was someone who was really attractive and took it too far to the point of looking really bad. That's really depressing. Oddly enough, it didn't stop her from doing voice roles, but she really didn't need that. Yikes.
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Dec 10, 2017 00:41
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There was this British sci-fi show, Blake's 7. It felt like a really understaffed Star Trek, so that 50% of each episode would be somebody "planetside" (invariably an unused Midlands factory) calling up to be transported, only for no-one to be in the transporter room as they're busy somewhere else on the ship. Also, as an added bonus, the ship itself had a sentient computer that could have done it but often didn't or couldn't be bothered. It was a nice way to push the menace and lack of trust the crew had for each other.
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Dec 24, 2017 06:41
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EdBlackadder posted:Oh boy it returned. One later series had a background plot of the Federation are gunning citizens drugged into blank compliance down in the street to see if they will react. Yeah, Blakes 7 really did showcase that the main power of 1984 dystopias rely a lot on the setting. Being in space and in gravel pits every so often means that the main thrust of the menace has to be carried by the characters. Which they really did do well, but that means you have to keep watching it as the anxiety over being hunted by something as cruel as the Federation is something else. And the ending, yes.... The UK show '1990' did not age that well. It concerns Britain being taken over and being made into the Soviet Union. It aired for two series...and then the year after it ended Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and showed just how a capitalist dystopia would go, making all of '1990's' fearmongering delightfully outdated and quaint. At least the Soviet-styled masters in the show realized people had to eat. 1990 is on DVD right now in the UK, finally being released earlier this year. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_(TV_series) Figured I should give a link in case anybody is interested. It has a lot of familiar faces in it, especially if you like The Equalizer and Keeping Up Appearances.
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Dec 24, 2017 18:43
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Trauma Dog 3000 posted:Would have been nice if the real Soviet Union realised this 1990 hinted at food shortages brought on by embargo. Oddly enough, the hero of the story also had this thing where people could be shipped out of the country by hiding in ships, making one wonder why didn't they all do that. But whatever, it was a pretty good series despite reality kicking it in the balls. Since it's Christmas Eve, I've been watching the Married With Children Christmas specials throughout the years and the very first one aged badly but in a very sad way: the plot revolves around the opening of a brand new mall that is getting all sorts of press and excitement (which takes away from Al's mall). Flashforward to today and the attitude is very different: malls are pretty much collapsing around us as they either die out or are repurposed. It's hard to watch this episode and realize that at one time in America malls were like town centers to gather and hang out as well as shop, which requires leaving the house. Not to mention the mall would hand out gift certificates of $20 each just to push more business to every store there.
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Dec 24, 2017 21:20
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Absurd Alhazred posted:
What makes it stranger is that Blakes 7 really had the same budget as the Tom Baker Doctor Who, so going from aliens to child molestation dystopia was one hell of a jump.
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Dec 25, 2017 01:24
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muscles like this! posted:When Rimmer leaves the show and they add alternate universe Kristine Kochanski the whole premise falls apart. Indeed. Red Dwarf works best when they have six episodes per series. Stretching it to eight only resulted in madness and...well, wasn't very good.
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Dec 27, 2017 03:18
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Nutsngum posted:FFS Paul Reiser being on Stranger Things 2 is NOT an open season on giving him a career back. Why would he go back to a lovely sitcom that was bland and annoying to begin with? poo poo, if you're in a big Netflix production, why not say 'gee, my role in Aliens could be revisited, why not do that?' Why aim low with a sitcom that only existed because it was one of those Thursday night horrors that lasted for years because it was stuck between two hits? Paul Reiser has gotten older. But apparently, he has gotten dumber as well.
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Dec 28, 2017 04:30
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Krispy Wafer posted:Documentary film maker is the biggest TV character professional cop-out since lifestyle reporter. That show really was terrible. Wasn't the guy from Spin City in that as an agoraphobic who later found love? The show is slowly coming back to me and I'm not liking what I'm remembering. The one thing everybody should remember about Mad About You is that its popularity came right before people started ditching free TV for the Internet and basic cable. NBC put out a remarkable amount of lovely, long-running TV by sticking it in between more popular TV shows and the thought was 'I'd might as well let this play so I don't miss Seinfeld/Friends/Cheers/etc.' It's remarkable in a way because you don't see that anymore. The paradigm changed so having gap shows like that no longer work. So you have shows that ran for an obscenely long period of time but in all honesty shouldn't have. Also...renting beds was a thing? Jesus. I wonder how good they were. I would be more scared of them not being cleaned well enough or being really cheap pieces of poo poo.
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Dec 28, 2017 15:36
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funmanguy posted:snl is the biggest example of Not Aging Well Which is amazing, considering it changes its cast pretty regularly. But also most of its time is filled up with topical humor, which tends to destroy any replay value. So it's kinda like South Park. Topical humor is like cheating on your homework. Yeah, you'll get high grades at the time, but don't expect the final to be as kind.
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Dec 29, 2017 01:15
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bitterandtwisted posted:Darts was incredibly popular on TV in the UK in the 80s and the players were allowed to drink and smoke while they played. I never knew that about Not the Nine O'Clock News, but that's still a drat funny sketch on top of having a point. But since we're hitting the high points of the show, this still has legs today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQamw4xxxHY
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Dec 29, 2017 21:39
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