Ok! If you are sick of my blog because I always write about the same shows, you are in for a treat! In this five-part series, I'm taking a journey through ten iconic comedies from the 90's onward that I have barely, or never, blogged about before. And because I'm not going to watch ten series in their entirety, the best option seemed to be to watch IMDB's top-rated and bottom-rated episodes of each show, in chronological order, and possibly finally answer the question, is TV getting better, or is TV getting worse?
(That link is one of my favorite clips in TV history, so you can see that I have impeccable taste in television, so let's see how my taste compares to the IMDB voters.)
All the shows I'm discussing were iconic in their day, and extremely popular. When a show gets popular, you assume it's because of word of mouth. We all know the feeling of recommending a show to a friend, hoping so much that they like it, and being anxious that they might pick the WRONG episode to start on instead of the RIGHT episode. Can you judge a show based on one episode? Well, I'm gonna try.
I wanted to avoid shows I have a deep connection with and would already know every episode really well, such as Simpsons, Family Guy, and Always Sunny, so that I could try to watch these episodes with "fresh" eyes and wonder if this would hook me or not. I also did not include shows I had no familiarity with at all. And, because I'm reviewing these on an episode-by-episode basis, we're just doing episodic shows, not shows with a continuous storyline (e.g., Arrested Development).
For the purpose of my ratings on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 would be an episode I regret watching so badly that I immediately pour gasoline into my eyes, nose, and throat to purge myself of what I just saw, 5 would be a completely neutral experience such as staring at a plain white wall and feeling neither pleasure nor pain, and 10 would be a friggin' masterpiece that I would put on endless loop if I could and would still laugh every time.
Trust me, while there are some shows on this list I'm looking forward to revisiting, there are some that I'm not at all. Speaking of which
1. Full House (1987 - 1995)
I had to toss a coin (literally) on which cheesy 90's sitcom about a family I was going to include in this: Full House or Home Improvement. When it came up heads for Full House, I was actually glad. Not just because I thought this show might be more watchable than Home Improvement, not just because Full House is the inspiration for the show-within-a-show "Horsin' Around" in my beloved BoJack Horseman, but because I feel like Full House is more emblematic of the "family" comedies of its time. Home Improvement had all the added shenanigans of Tim's TV show and his continued quest to become a functional adult rather than some kind of ape and understand how men and women are different, with the assistance of his faceless, omnipresent neighbor. Full House was just like, "Here's a large family! Can you imagine all these people living under one roof doing normal family things and having funny family moments! This is the most heartwarming show since Cosb- oh, I'm being told that won't age well."
Revisiting Full House, my main takeaway was that this is not a show for families so much as it's a show for kids. Specifically, females between the ages of 4 and 14. And that was a huge market. I remember seeing the Full House book series on the shelves next to the Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins books. Are there adults on the show? Yes. Do these adults talk or function like normal adults would? No, they are giant toddlers. Which is possibly another reason this show appealed so much to kids. You watch this show where the kids and the adults are basically on the same level, and the daddies are just big goofy doofuses, you assume your parents are just big goofy doofuses too.
That might be one reason parents might not like this show, the other reason being that Full House doesn't really have any smart humor. Based on my memory and the two episodes I just watched, it doesn't have any winks to the adult audience. If it had, it could have been a show for the whole family, I guess, but Full House seems to have chosen its audience, its audience being elementary school and junior high girls, and it seemed to know its audience well.
IMDB's Top: Secret Admirer (IMDB 8.5, M 4.5)
The Tanner family is getting ready for a big family picnic that's also going to include Danny's girlfriend and her precocious young son, Rusty! However, while everyone else is working on picnic prep, Rusty types a love letter on a typewriter (this show is old) to play a prank, and the vague love letter about how "I am passionate about you, I love seeing you in the house" just makes its way through everyone's hands somehow and each person in the house thinks it was written for them by some other specific member of the household.
So then of course at the picnic, the tensions are so high (Jesse thinks Danny is trying to steal Becky! Danny's girlfriend thinks Joey is trying to steal her!) that everything eventually erupts into one of those argument scenes where every character just says indistinguishable things to another character until Rusty finally confesses he wrote the letter as a gag. Then, everyone else says, "Let's get 'im" and they proceed to chase Rusty around the yard in a single-file, evenly spaced, slow-motion running line. So many questions here. What are they going to do if they "get" this maybe 7- or 8- year-old boy? Will they catch him? Is this the last we will see of Rusty? Considering that the entire family was hunting him down with a fervor I have not seen outside of Yellowjackets except like if the girls in Yellowjackets drank 10 bottles of NyQuil prior to the hunt, I can only assume that this show ends in them tearing Rusty to pieces and eating his corpse in place of the picnic that had already been laid out, turning it into a ritualistic blood ceremony, and that's why Rusty and his mom are no longer in the picture in the second episode of Full House I watched a few years later.
Is this a good episode of television? No. I mean, it's not, offensive or anything. There's some entertainment value (Who is going to get that letter next? How will this mad series of misunderstandings end?), and, you know, it's cute, it's nice, but it's sloppy. The love letter is so vague, and when the characters try to confront their suspected secret admirers, the language they use is so vague that it's stupid, referencing things like "Sometimes a person has feelings for another person and it's not right" and "We need to control our burning passions," leading to even more confusion. I mean, if you thought your brother-in-law had typewritten a love letter to you out of nowhere and left it on the couch, which is a normal thing any sane person would immediately accept as truth, would you say "Sometimes a person likes a person even though it might be wrong" or would you say "Dude! Did you write this letter for me?" But then, the show couldn't happen.
Overall, this episode has the feel of something that would be written for children to perform for younger children, like maybe at summer camp or something, and the performances live up to that. There's no chemistry between the characters on Full House. They don't have conversations so much as each character delivers a one-liner and then pauses to wait for the laugh before the next person chimes in.
Danny: Jesse, you don't have to go to the pickle store. I just found out they deliver.
* Laughter *
Joey: Delivery in 30 minutes or your pickles are free.
*Laughter*
This would have been a solid 5 as I felt neither pleasure nor pain watching this episode, but I'm going to dock it a little bit just for how infantilized the adult characters are. Well, Full House, if this is the best you got, that's not great, but let's check out the worst!
IMDB's Bottom: Is It True About Stephanie? (IMDB 5.8, M 5)
Middle child Stephanie just got asked out to the club by the cute new guy! But the mean girl in her grade is jealous, so she puts up a sign on Stephanie's locker that says she pays $20 for people to date her! Stephanie's social life is ruined, until she puts up a sign on the mean girl's locker that exposes her grades, which are straight F's! Now mean girl's life is ruined, and the fakest tears in the history of television appear on her face as Stephanie feels bad. So they all go to the club, and Stephanie says she's sorry, and they become friends and dance together.
There's a B-plot, and it involves Danny rearranging everything in the house because he's not over his breakup with Vicky. Vicky is not Rusty's mom. I'm assuming Danny and Rusty's mom broke up after sacrificing Rusty in a blood orgy at the end of "Secret Admirer." Danny apparently has had another girlfriend and lost her since then. Did that breakup also involve child sacrifice? I could look that up, but I don't care enough.
So, my main question about this episode is, how old is Stephanie supposed to be? I could look that up too, but I do not care enough, but it's mentioned that she is in junior high, and the actress would have been 10 or 11. What kind of club are these kids going to? It's apparently "Smash Club," which Uncle Jesse owns. And it involves a bunch of junior high kids alternating between sitting in booths drinking coffees (?) and getting up to pulsate awkwardly, as if having involuntary muscle spasms, to the lyric-less music playing.
So, this episode, in addition to making 10-year-old girls feel like slut-shaming and clubbing should be a part of their everyday lives and also they should drink coffee, infantilizes the adult characters by depicting Danny as a mindless blob who doesn't realize that he's putting things in weird places in the house because he's not over Vicky until his family confronts him and he realizes that that's the answer and everything is better. And that's a great example of why, as ... simplistic as it was, this show could be a security blanket. Every problem is easy to identify and easy to fix in less than half an hour.
I'm rating this episode a little higher than "Secret Admirer" because, I mean, it's a better episode. It's not GOOD, but it's funnier than "Secret Admirer," Michelle is old enough in this episode that she's actually acting and using her trademark sarcasm, and it really leans into the preteen girl audience that they should have accepted is their target audience from the beginning. I think the reason this rated so much lower than "Secret Admirer" is that it was in season 7 while "Secret Admirer" was in season 4, and people tend to cling to the earlier episodes of a show and accept it as the flawless classic age and then be increasingly derisive as the show advances in years, saying things like, "Well back in MY day Stephanie didn't go to clubs and also Marge and Homer are the same age as the Beatles and I wore an onion in my belt as was the style of the times."
Oops I digress. But I am honestly curious about whether any of these shows have highest rated episodes that came out AFTER their lowest rated episodes. Let's investigate that as we move on to our next entry.
2. Seinfeld (1989 - 1998)
I know Seinfeld better than any of the other shows on this list, due to catching many a rerun after The Simpsons reruns throughout my childhood. While Full House presents a world where adults and children have identical intelligence and they can work through all their problems by being nice, Seinfeld is a show for cynical adults about cynical adults who manage to make their problems worse any time they try to work through them. So, huge tone shift.
While watching Full House as a child taught me that grown-ups are just big kids that need to use their nice words to talk about their feelings, watching Seinfeld as a child taught me that having a job means carrying a briefcase and having a "file" that I need to "work" on, and also that grown-ups are hideously unstable and have no control over whether or not they cave to any impulse.
IMDB's Top: The Contest (IMDB 9.5, M 7)
Alright. I'm going to take the high road, because I have a classy blog, and if Seinfeld can take the high road, I can, too. So, this episode is about the four main characters getting into a contest on who can hold out the longest without doing "that." They never use the word; they artfully dodge it by using the euphemism of "that." And so I shall as well. But, yes, that's the premise of the episode.
Is this my favorite Seinfeld episode? Not by a long shot, but it became one of the show's most iconic. "Master of your domain" wouldn't match the popularity of catch phrases like "yada yada yada" or "no soup for you" but it's gotta be in the top ten or something.
This is an enjoyable episode. Unlike Full House, Seinfeld knows how to make conversation seem natural, even with the laugh track. The chemistry between the characters is great. We get a glimpse of George's ineffectual rage, and Elaine also shines. She's initially dismissed when she says she wants to enter the contest, but proves she can hang with the boys. She is, after all, the forerunner for Dee in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a female character who proves she can be just as funny and just as deranged as the boys and doesn't have to be a love interest for any of them in order to be a part of the gang.
So, why rank this episode only a 7? Well, for one thing, Seinfeld has done a lot funnier. For another thing, it's kind of ... weird that you would be open enough with your friends that you'd use the honor system on something like this ... like, who wants to think about their friends doing ... that? If Seinfeld did a reboot and redid this episode in the age of smartphones, the implications would be, well, horrific.
IMDB's Bottom: The Apology (IMDB 6.8, M 6)
George is mad because a friend who is going through the 12 steps for AA will not apologize to him for a comment he made about George having a fat neck. Kramer is learning that he needs to live in the shower. And Jerry is dating a nudist but realizes he is turned off when she does certain things, like brushing her teeth or bending over, in the nude.
I was really surprised this was the bottom episode. Seinfeld has done so much worse. There are some uncomfortably bad episodes in the early seasons that focus just on uncomfortable conflicts without enough relatable humor. There's the very uncomfortable episode when Elaine needs to use pepper spray to escape her assaulter. And there are a few episodes that really don't hold up due to being offensively racist or homophobic.
This is just your run-of-the-mill Seinfeld episode, and it's not bad, it's not side-splitting, but it's fine. George's effete rage is again pretty hilarious and nudges this over the 5 mark, but the apology A-plot (?) is pretty weak and forgettable. As is Kramer living in the shower. And what's up with Jerry's complete 180 on female nudity since the episode "The Contest?" It goes from "men are obsessed with female nudity in any form" to "oh, even though you are a gorgeous woman, I just realized you have a muscle that flexes in exactly that way while you are brushing your teeth and that disgusts me and I am no longer attracted to you." But, this entire show is based on the four main characters' tendencies to dump perfectly cromulent love interests due to obsessing over a minor perceived flaw.
So, it's a mediocre episode of a good show. Why did this rate so much lower than "The Contest?" Possibly because this came out in season 9, as opposed to season 4, and nostalgia etc etc. Let's see if that trend continues in our third and fourth shows!
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