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Is there any comedy that has high quality runs for more than 4 seasons without a notable dip? Modern Family dipped Parks and Rec dipped Always Sunny dipped I guess maybe Seinfeld and Frasier?
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Nov 1, 2018 06:16
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Is there any comedy that has high quality runs for more than 4 seasons without a notable dip? Dad's Army.
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Nov 1, 2018 09:22
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Brooklyn Nine-Nine?
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Nov 1, 2018 11:16
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Is there any comedy that has high quality runs for more than 4 seasons without a notable dip? Where would you class the Always Sunny dip? I'm still loving it as much as I was in season 3
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Nov 1, 2018 11:30
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Agreed on IASIP. Also, The League.
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Nov 1, 2018 11:46
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Is there any comedy that has high quality runs for more than 4 seasons without a notable dip? ur brain is broken and u will never enjoy anything as much as u previously did. ur life will be a continuous series of 'dips' until the end but u can only perceive this thru tv shows and not every other facet of life the royal 'ur'. we. all.
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Nov 1, 2018 11:48
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Red Dwarf has either five or six good seasons before it dips.
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Nov 1, 2018 12:37
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Peep Show, think it's on Hulu these days. Current season of Always Sunny is not the strongest as a whole, but there's still some hilarious episodes.
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Nov 1, 2018 13:48
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I'm working to get through West Wing, and I'm in the middle of season 6. Never watched the show before, and it's kind of funny how some of the political topics are way outdated. Just watched an episode where the Democrats in the White House were freaking out because the Republicans wanted to add a Gay Marriage Ban bill to the budget, and they knew it would look bad if they opposed it. I know there have been others, but that one is recent so it sticks with me. I have a feeling season 7 is going to be bad, but I haven't noticed that much of a dip once Sorkin left.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:03
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I like season 7 a lot. It's when the new writing team made the show their own and stopped pretending to be Sorkin. Season 6 has one of my favorite WW scenes ever where Bartlet and Vinick eat ice cream together and discuss religion.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:06
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EvidenceBasedQuack posted:Agreed on IASIP. No dip for The League? Are we just gonna forget about EBDBBNB. RenegadeStyle1 fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 22:14
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Is there any comedy that has high quality runs for more than 4 seasons without a notable dip? Lol Always Sunny hadn't even reached its peak by season 4.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:15
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:No dip for The League? Are we just gonma forget about EBDBBNB. Agreed on The League, it tried too hard last couple seasons to come up with another Fear Boner.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:37
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What season of The League was the Rafi and Dirty Randy One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest episode in? That was all kinds of hosed up and great. The League was p good when it was on form, pity Kevin being such a douche irl makes it a bit forever unclean if I watch it now.Bird in a Blender posted:I have a feeling season 7 is going to be bad, but I haven't noticed that much of a dip once Sorkin left. I really enjoyed Season 7 at the time. The latter half of 6 and 7 felt a bit like a second wind to me. Also... JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Is there any comedy that has high quality runs for more than 4 seasons without a notable dip? M*A*S*H Possibly Friends Possibly Archer Trailer Park Boys? I'm still enjoying Letterkenny which is on season 5 now, but they're short seasons. Gravy Jones fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 22:57
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:No dip for The League? Are we just gonna forget about EBDBBNB. I did forget about that forgettable episode. Apologies, thread.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:22
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After awhile I just started zoning out on whatever Taco was doing.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:51
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I started skipping past his songs from the second episode.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:53
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I'm not sure I ever finished The League. It was like a lot of fun at the moment when it really captured the feel of my group of college friends who were all in a fantasy league together that kind of served as our way to stay in each other's lives. But I kind of lost track of the League at the same basic time I abandoned fantasy sports. Which is odd because its not like the show was dependent on that, but I think it was probably more of a matter of where I was at life.
STAC Goat fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Nov 2, 2018 |
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Nov 2, 2018 00:32
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Eh, the last couple seasons are kinda forgettable anyway, as that was about when most everyone's careers started blowing up outside of TV ( except Rannazissi, lol whoops), so the main cast hardly ever had plots where everyone was together. I love Mantzoukas but when you start having Raffi-centric episodes, it's probably time to call it a day.
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Nov 2, 2018 01:22
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It still makes for good background/bedtime watching, though.
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Nov 2, 2018 01:24
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Gravy Jones posted:M*A*S*H M*A*S*H started to dip after Radar left.
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Nov 2, 2018 01:26
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Gravy Jones posted:Possibly Archer Archer definitely took a dip with the weird one off themes seasons it’s been doing recently. The flashback noir poo poo was just meh.
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Nov 2, 2018 02:03
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Mister Kingdom posted:M*A*S*H started to dip after Radar left. I’d even say post Frank Burns. Charles wasn’t a bad replacement, but I definitely preferred Frank.
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Nov 2, 2018 05:24
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Mu Zeta posted:I like season 7 a lot. It's when the new writing team made the show their own and stopped pretending to be Sorkin. Season 6 has one of my favorite WW scenes ever where Bartlet and Vinick eat ice cream together and discuss religion. Bird in a Blender posted:I'm working to get through West Wing, and I'm in the middle of season 6. Never watched the show before, and it's kind of funny how some of the political topics are way outdated. Just watched an episode where the Democrats in the White House were freaking out because the Republicans wanted to add a Gay Marriage Ban bill to the budget, and they knew it would look bad if they opposed it. I know there have been others, but that one is recent so it sticks with me. Yeah, Season 7 was carried largely on the back of Alda and Smits. It feels like a different show, and it's honestly a pretty solid return to the Sorkin-era form.
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Nov 2, 2018 05:36
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Bankok posted:I’d even say post Frank Burns. Charles wasn’t a bad replacement, but I definitely preferred Frank. I used to think that, but over the years I've decided that Charles is a much richer, more interesting character that opened up their stories a lot. And also, David Ogden Stiers was an amazing actor, but that almost goes without saying. Frank Burns was fun, but as a character he was pretty limited in terms of what you could do with him; his massive array of overwhelming personal flaws (he's a coward AND a terrible surgeon AND a hapless philanderer AND a board-certified idiot AND a greedy child) meant he could never be anything other than an antagonist, and outside of that, his martinet/gung-ho tendencies didn't bring anything to the table that you couldn't get from random guest stars playing visiting Army brass. Which, again, doesn't mean Frank wasn't a fun character who made the show great -- he definitely was, and there's 120+ episodes to prove it -- but if I had to compare him directly to his replacement, I'd have to say that Winchester wins out by a small margin. Of course, I'm also of the opinion that BJ was a step up from Trapper John, so I might be a heretic. (Trapper's just Hawkeye with a different haircut and a wife to cheat on, and the show treats him as such; BJ is a separate character who gave the writers much more to work with.) But I do agree with Mister Kingdom that losing Radar did some serious damage to the series that it never really found a way to repair properly.
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Nov 2, 2018 07:31
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Teddybear posted:Yeah, Season 7 was carried largely on the back of Alda and Smits. It feels like a different show, and it's honestly a pretty solid return to the Sorkin-era form. Ok, good to know that season 7 of WW is still good. The show overall is very hit or miss, but I like most episodes. Don’t plan to ever watch it again, but glad I’m going through it once.
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Nov 2, 2018 11:29
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Trilobite posted:Of course, I'm also of the opinion that BJ was a step up from Trapper John, so I might be a heretic. (Trapper's just Hawkeye with a different haircut and a wife to cheat on, and the show treats him as such; BJ is a separate character who gave the writers much more to work with.) This. Wayne Rogers had complained about Trapper being too similar to Hawkeye. The producers made a good move with replacing major characters with those that were the opposite of the ones they replaced. It's funny, too, that they essentially neutered Hawkeye as the series went on. Even going so far as to having an episode where all the nurses got together to make fun of his lechery.
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Nov 2, 2018 12:35
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Into the Badlands If you can deal with everyone's power levels fluctuating wildly depending where the plot needs to go , Into The Badlands is amazing. Nick Frost shows up as the best character in Season 2, so you've got that to look forward too!
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Nov 3, 2018 01:01
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Been watching Qin Empire: Alliance on Netflix. It’s terrible in pretty much every way; and it’s not bad enough even to be campy. But I’m plowing through it anyway (50 drat episodes) for some reason; I think maybe I’m permanently scarred / warped from too much Kung Fu Theatre growing up.
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Nov 4, 2018 03:08
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7 Seconds. anyone have a good video of some cop getting wasted with buckshot?
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Nov 4, 2018 04:20
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Inspired by reading a recently released biography of the pair, I've been rewatching the British sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie (just finished season 2). It must be close to ten years since I watched it last. I guess it falls into the same category as all sketch shows, in that you remember the best sketches as being indicative of the whole. I should qualify the following by saying I really enjoy the show and the pair (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) enormously, but the flaws of their work a much more evident on a rewatch. Their main issues are that most sketches go on far too long (often with fairly anaemic punchlines) and that there is not a great deal of variance among the sketches themselves (generally Fry as an overbearing, loquacious madman and Laurie as the common man - lots of "I'd like to buy..." or "Come in, take a seat..." two handers). Being that they wrote all the material themselves, as opposed to having additional writers or being members of a larger comedy trope explains the later, I think. I've also read an interesting comment by John Cleese, where he said that Hugh Laurie mentioned to him that the shadow of Monty Python loomed so large over subsequent generations of sketch writers that they tried to avoid emulating Python for fear of comparison. The result, I think, is that there is a traditional streak that pre-dates Python in the work, when they would benefit from having the freedom to be more fluid and abandon sketches earlier. That said, when they hit, they really hit. All of Laurie's songs are fantastically realised (no better than the very first, called Mystery), and when Fry finds the right venue to exploit his larger-than-life, Wildean wordsmith-ery (the language expert in season 1) it is sublime to watch. The show doesn't seem as regularly mentioned as other British sketch shows, and the duo are far more famous from other ventures (together and apart), perhaps for the reasons I mentioned above, but their best sketches are classics and worth seeking out - if on youtube if nowhere else. Also of note is the radio show Saturday Night Fry, an immediate precursor to the tv show that is able to be more surreal due to being audio only (and features performances from the sublime Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent). It's a shame that Fry & Laurie never released comedy albums, Fry's monologues balancing out Laurie's songs with some of the more verbal sketches thrown in, as I think they would have rivalled the Python albums in re-listenable silliness.
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Nov 4, 2018 06:28
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TheUnifiedHeart posted:I've also read an interesting comment by John Cleese, where he said that Hugh Laurie mentioned to him that the shadow of Monty Python loomed so large over subsequent generations of sketch writers that they tried to avoid emulating Python for fear of comparison. The result, I think, is that there is a traditional streak that pre-dates Python in the work, when they would benefit from having the freedom to be more fluid and abandon sketches earlier. This was indeed very real. It was summed up nicely by the ensemble cast of comedians that formed Not The Nine O Clock News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asUyK6JWt9U Python broke with old, more formulaic comedy but made it impossible, due to being so popular, to actually follow in its footsteps. Eighties' comedians had their work cut out for them, but I think a lot of very good non-Pythonesque humor was created, and Fry & Laurie definitely fall among that. TheUnifiedHeart posted:That said, when they hit, they really hit. All of Laurie's songs are fantastically realised (no better than the very first, called Mystery), and when Fry finds the right venue to exploit his larger-than-life, Wildean wordsmith-ery (the language expert in season 1) it is sublime to watch. Hello! We're talking about language.
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Nov 4, 2018 10:00
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Meatgrinder posted:This was indeed very real. It was summed up nicely by the ensemble cast of comedians that formed Not The Nine O Clock News: Thanks for the link! An absolute classic. I hope my criticism of Fry & Laurie didn’t come across as too harsh. I do adore the pair, but I think it is the way of sketch comedy to be very hit or miss, with only the absolute best individual sketches standing up to time and repeated viewings. Sort of like pop music, I suppose. Incidentally, for those interested in British sketch, may I recommend Sally Phillips’ new series My Favourite Sketch where comedians talk about their comedy influences. The first series is now available to binge, to return back to the mission of this thread!
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Nov 4, 2018 11:12
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Quick fire interludes between longer gags has been a staple of sketch comedy shows since like the 60s or 70s or something... and the man-on-the-street vox pop stuff on A Bit of Fry and Laurie is my favourite (possible tied with The Muppet Show). But yeah, the show in general is great.
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Nov 4, 2018 12:46
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The vox pops are a great linking device. It’s interesting to see how they develop, too. In the first series they largely are legitimate non-sequiturs that make little to no sense in isolation (but which makes them funny), before developing into genuine one-liners and self sufficient gags (though still very random).
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Nov 4, 2018 13:25
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Meatgrinder posted:
Just a tangent here but on the other side of the ocean I think there was a short run where different comedy troupes actually tried to pick up the Monty Python ball. In the 80s we had The Kids in the Hall, the 90s had The State and Mr Show, and then The Whitest Kids You Know. I know they aren't all like Python, but they each held their own in terms of witty comedy. My question is... Where's the next high energy smart yet dumb humor sketch show? I feel like it's been years since one has stood out in that vein. I mean TWKYK ended in 2011 already. It's been 7 years since there's been a stand out skit show right? Dragon Ball update: We finished all of Dragon Ball, Z, Super (eng dub) and then we started GT... Holy poo poo we may stop. Pan is god drat annoying. I don't mind Goku being cursed back into a little kid again, but Pan is maybe the worst lead character in the show. It doesn't help that the voice actress is maybe the worst actor in the show. So combine a poorly written character with a horrible acting job and that is the lead for their show? What the gently caress were they thinking? An Ounce of Gold fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Nov 4, 2018 |
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Nov 4, 2018 14:52
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An Ounce of Gold posted:Just a tangent here but on the other side of the ocean I think there was a short run where different comedy troupes actually tried to pick up the Monty Python ball. In the 80s we had The Kids in the Hall, the 90s had The State and Mr Show, and then The Whitest Kids You Know. I actually have a theory about that. Sketch comedy, at least in Britain and Australia, was born on stage and on radio. Silly/surreal comedy thrives in these settings, as the limitations of the form leave much to the imagination and by their nature ask the audience to make a leap to accept their reality from the start (you have to actively image a world on the radio, on stage you have to accept that a desk and two people is an entire office building etc, etc). When a sketch makes a turn to the surreal or highly silly, it is much easier to make that jump with the writers/performers as you are already in an unreal world and mindset. Pre-00s television sketch comedies are very similar, as they are filmed almost like a stage performance (walls shaking, props minimal, costumes exaggerated). You are already in a silly world. Many Fry & Laurie tv sketches are performed with a black curtain backdrop. With the advent of HD camera's and the death of live audiences, sketch comedy started to be filmed much more like regular tv. It was shot on location, the surroundings reflecting the actual world. This makes the performances slightly subdued, and while some great satirical and character comedy can be made this way, it is much harder for the audience to make the jump from what looks like real life to a completely silly world at the turning point of a sketch. It's too real for highly silly comedy, but perfect for low key observational comedy (see the rise of the mockumentary format). While not perfect, I think a more modern example of a sketch show that creates a non-real world from the outset to allow true silliness to thrive would be Comedy Bang! Bang!
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Nov 4, 2018 16:11
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An Ounce of Gold posted:Just a tangent here but on the other side of the ocean I think there was a short run where different comedy troupes actually tried to pick up the Monty Python ball. In the 80s we had The Kids in the Hall, the 90s had The State and Mr Show, and then The Whitest Kids You Know. But you also have to consider that Youtube and social media exploded within the last decade, and it became far easier and more economical to put sketches online than try to get a pilot greenlit. I was in a sketch troupe for a few years and we just did online clips and local live shows, but it's hard to sustain unless you're really great at self-promoting or someone discovers you. WKUK got their start that way too.
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Nov 6, 2018 08:04
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Mister Kingdom posted:M*A*S*H started to dip after Radar left. But that was after 7 seasons. I do agree that is a good stopping point on M*A*S*H. If I see M*A*S*H on and Klinger is the company clerk, good chance I am going to change the channel. Nothing against Klinger. He provided one of my favorite moments of the series in season 3 (it is the one were MacArthur visits).  Trilobite posted:I used to think that, but over the years I've decided that Charles is a much richer, more interesting character that opened up their stories a lot. And also, David Ogden Stiers was an amazing actor, but that almost goes without saying. I also use to think that Frank > Charles when I was younger. As I have gotten older I appreciate how more complex Charles was than the one note Frank. One thing I am pretty even on is Colonel Blake vs. Colonel Potter. They both bring something completely different to the role of CO, and in the end, I love both of them equally. nate fisher fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 14:50
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Just finished the first episode of the new season of Patriot and god drat I’m glad this show is back
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Nov 12, 2018 23:21
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