As we move on to our final chapter of my chronological journey through the best and worst rated episodes of 10 iconic shows, a premise explained in part 1, let's see how far TV has come over the years. We'll start by talking about a show where a group of guys are friends and then, oh no, who's this moving into the building? Well, she's a g-g-g-girl and she's pretty and stupid and adorkable! They don't understand her female whimsies and don't know how to react when she cries and when she gets her period they all have complete emotional meltdowns!
And no, I'm not talking about New Girl, I'm talking about a show with pretty much the same premise but that also is supposed to make you feel smart.
9. The Big Bang Theory (2007 - 2019)
I have some familiarity with this show because my brother dated a girl who was really into it and it was often on in our house. It rubbed me the wrong way a little bit because of the kind of hateful trope the you cannot simultaneously be both academically smart and socially smart, and you cannot be both academically smart and attractive. This is a trope that has always bugged me because in my youth I got very good grades but was not attractive, was shy, and had no social skills, and people always assumed things about me that turned me into a one-dimensional stereotype. Like that I was blissfully unaware of my lack of social skills, that I was kind of half computer, and that I would only have any kind of attraction to equally socially awkward, nerdy guys. None of those things were true.
There's also the "nice guy" trope as, as soon as Leonard sees how hot Penny is, he knows that she is destined to be his, if he just stays around and is nice long enough. It doesn't work the other way around in TV or movies, gender-wise. The nice, nerdy guy can ALWAYS have the hottest girl in school or at work or whatever, but the nerdy girl will NEVER get the guy unless she gets a makeover that proves she was smoking hot the entire time. (Oh, she just needed to take off her glasses and wear lower-cut shirts? You don't say! Well, now she's surely win Quarterback McGee's heart.)
Let's face it, this show is pretty consistently misogynistic, in addition to being fairly racist, occasionally homophobic, and being criticized for playing autism for laughs. The men start out the show as being incompetent, would-be womanizers, I think there's even some stalking going on for a while.
Another thing that bothers me about this show is that it is a very dumb run-of-the-mill sitcom that masquerades as a smart show. I remember people who were into this show bragging about how the thing that makes them feel best about watching it is there are all these smart jokes that go over "normal" people's heads. The thing is, while I haven't seen a LOT of this show, I don't recall any plots that were actually intelligent, and as for jokes, it's more like:
Sheldon: Penny, that is my chosen chair and I would like to sit in it
(laughter)
Penny: I'm kooky and I want to sit in this chair!
(laughter)
Sheldon: But that is the only chair in the room where based on the angle and the time of day the sunlight hits it in the exact manner that (says some big words)
(laughter)
Sheldon's "smart" jokes are just him rattling a lot of big words off, not saying anything clever, and even if you feel gratified by knowing what the big words mean, when you listen to what he's saying, it's not a joke, the joke is just that he is Sheldon and he talks different from how you talk.
I guess people could say the same thing about fans of Rick and Morty who pat themselves on the back for being smart. But the thing is, there's no real science in Rick and Morty, it's not trying to be smart as far as that goes. How Rick and Morty is smart is its actually smart humor and complex, intelligent plot lines.
How do we know The Big Bang Theory is funny? Because it has a laugh track. Much like in the Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode where Dennis starts secretly videotaping Charlie and Mac's moms' interactions and putting a laugh track over it, they start commenting, "You see, nothing funny just happened, but there's a laugh track, so that lets me know I'm supposed to laugh."
Here is a scene from The Big Bang Theory with the laugh track removed.
But, as low as my opinion is of this show, I did once turn to it when I was in Europe for work and homesick for America. I wanted to watch a familiar, stupid sitcom even if I was expecting it to be bad. I was not let down. This was the episode where Penny gets drunk and gives Raj a hand job, and the rest of the episode is the remainder of the characters teasing them with sexist and racist jokes.
Ah, Big Bang Theory. Let's see the supposed best and worst you have to offer, shall we.
IMDB's Top: The Stockholm Syndrome (IMDB 9.5, M 5.1)
Second show in a row where the finale was the top-rated episode of the series.
So, a lot had apparently happened since the last time I saw Big Bang Theory. Sheldon and Amy are married, and the whole gang is getting ready to travel to Stockholm to see them accept a Nobel Prize in physics. Their first misadventure is they can't figure out how to fit all of them and their luggage on the elevator at the same time! So they humorously mash each other and the luggage into the elevator and after several tries they can't close the door. These are doctors of physics. They cannot come with the solution of making multiple elevator trips, so they just end up sending the luggage down by itself and they take the stairs.
This is already insulting my intelligence, but when they get on the plane the shenanigans really begin. Penny is pregnant but hasn't told anyone yet, and has morning sickness, leading Sheldon to believe she is sick and will destroy his big day by getting him sick. When he points at her screaming "unclean, unclean" and the only funny exchange in the episode happens.
Leonard: You can't catch what Penny has.
Penny: Should we just tell him?
Leonard: If we don't, he will jump off the plane.
Penny: That doesn't answer my question.
Leonard is upset when rather than congratulating them, Sheldon just responds, "Oh, good, I can't catch that." Sheldon has a similarly unsympathetic reaction when he finds out his other friend's kid is sick and they're thinking of going home. So everyone is bailing on the ceremony and even Sheldon's own wife is mad and calling him out on his selfishness.
But, then they randomly decide they're going to the ceremony after all, and when Sheldon gets up to give his acceptance speech, he has a change of heart and does a whole "My friends, you bow to no one" moment where he asks them to turn the spotlight on his friends in the audience and have them stand up so he can introduce them and ramble about stuff having nothing to do with the award, especially how he remembers when Leonard and Penny first started dating and now look, they're going to have a baby. Then we cut to a scene where they're all sitting around eating food as the theme song comes back on, except it's one of those hideously sloppy eating and talking scenes where no one actually says anything, like their mouths don't form words, its just a lot of pointing at each other and nodding and giving knowing smiles while enthusiastically chewing. It's a bad closing scene, but it's not as jarring as the junior high students having very awkward spasms at the end of "Is It True About Stephanie," so there's that.
Sheldon making the awards show about his friends is a total fan service ending, as the show's central conceit has always been Sheldon's selfishness and inability to read social cues. In this episode, his selfish responses seem to surprise everyone, even though the show has been on the air for 12 years. I'm guessing that because the show has been on for 12 years, Sheldon has learned this lesson, or something similar, a multitude of times. And I, for one, was just cringing through the whole Nobel Prize scene. I was like, "No, this is not something anyone would actually do, that's not how awards shows work." But, if Sheldon finally wins his Nobel Prize and decides to use the moment to apologize for being a jerk to his friends the past two days, that's totally on him, and I guess character growth etc.
IMDB's Bottom: The Athenaeum Allocation (IMDB 6.8, M 5.05)
This is another late-series episode, so rather than the guys running around doing their stalker antics that are ok because they don't know any better, the characters have largely settled down and it's more about caring about these characters' development and the new families they are building than being a hilarious "they're so different, but they're neighbors! Penny don't know none of them big words" ... wait, was that hilarious? I don't know, it was trying to be, but let's move on to this very boring episode.
Howard and Bernadette just had a baby and they are adjusting by having petty arguments about taking care of the baby like the kind of arguments two actual babies would have, not two adults in a mature relationship. And Sheldon and Amy are working on wedding planning.
Here's another issue I have with this show. While there's three pairings that happen over the course of the show, none of these relationships have ANY chemistry. This isn't like some kind of experiment where if you trap six people in the same room they'll eventually pair off. The stilted lines, bad acting, and really contrived storylines make it worse, and even in these happily-ever-after last couple seasons, it seems none of the women are really happy with their dorky husbands, but they put up with them because, oh, nerds, they just don't know any better. Amy, for example, tells Sheldon sometimes the only reason she tolerates him is that she knows he doesn't understand other people's emotions so when he ****s up it's just because he doesn't know any better. And here's part of the argument Howard and Bernadette have over their children:
Howard: Don't get me wrong, I will take a bullet for this baby, but I'd let myself get severely mutilated for you.
(laughter)
Bernadette: If you get severely mutilated, I'm leaving you
(laughter)
Howard:I don't blame you. I am no prize even when I'm unmutilated
(laughter)
But that's okay, because ultimately Penny, Amy, and Bernadette are happy to settle for their big ol' doofs of husbands, knowing they'll always have the upper hand, and at the end of the day/series, they're always going to get over their squabbles and enjoy smiling and nodding at each other while pretending to eat food. And that's all we need at the end of the day, right? A fictional loving home we know we can always return to and it will always be there for us. Or, a family spread out across multiple loving fictional homes, like in my final entry.
10. Modern Family (2009 - 2020)
We started with Full House, and now we're ending with another family comedy that premiered over two decades later. And, oh, what a journey it's been. I have the least familiarity with this show out of any of the list, so will probably have the least to say about it, but this was a refreshingly funny note to go out on.
The premise of the show is that we have, well, a very modern family. The patriarch is the somewhat crotchety Jay, and then he has his two uptight, type-A grown children, Claire and Mitchell. And all three of them have partners who are so type B they might as well be type C. Jay's much-younger second wife is an over-the-top Colombian bombshell, Mitchell's partner is flamboyantly gay, and Claire's husband is the dorkiest beta dad this side of Jerry from Rick and Morty. And, they all have kids.
That's a lot to swallow, but I feel like for this show, it kind of works. I feel like you could dive in during the middle of the show's run and still get an idea of how all of the characters are related. Unlike a show I decided not to include, Arrested Development. That show also features a large three-generation family getting into shenanigans, but not only do you have to keep all the characters straight, you also have to remember everything that happened in the last episode and know every ongoing joke the show has ever had. I've tried to introduce people to Arrested Development and it hasn't gone well. Modern Family is much more accessible.
What makes this family so modern? Well, it's not like there's anything too shocking, unless you are offended by the fact that Jay and Gloria's son Manny (Gloria's child from her prior marriage) means we have a mixed-race family and Manny is the same age as his step-nieces and nephews, and Mitchell and Cam are a gay couple with an adopted Vietnamese daughter. I'd hope no one is scandalized by things like that, but I guess this shows how far we've come along between All In the Family and Modern Family.
And we've also come a long way since Full House. This is not a show written for children, for one thing, it's a show for pretty much anyone. Its plots are clever, the characters are well-realized rather than being walking catch phrases waiting for laughs, and not every episode ends with a lesson sappily learned and everyone hugging. There are some huggy resolutions, but the show's sometimes cynical and sometimes just utterly ridiculous humor reminds me a little bit more of Seinfeld than Full House. I guess on the sap-meter it might fall somewhere between the two.
So, I guess the good news is ... TV has overall gotten BETTER over the past couple decades! (Come fight me.) Anyway, let's see how these two episodes rank.
IMDB's Top: Connection Lost (IMDB 9.5, M 7.6)
The entire episode takes place on Claire's iPad. She's at the airport coming home from a work trip, dropped her phone in a toilet, and is desperately trying to get hold of anyone who knows where her oldest daughter Haley is. Haley had stormed out of the house after having a fight with her mom about how she was trying to talk about something important and all Claire cared about was that Haley hadn't done the dishes, and Haley is just over this because she doesn't feel good and why don't they have any peanut butter or pickles.
The rest of the episode is Claire Facebook stalking and video chatting with all the other characters trying to track Haley down, and, there's the typical sitcom trope where a series of misunderstandings leads to Claire believing that Haley is pregnant and eloping in Vegas. Are some of the misunderstandings a little weak? Yes, but it's done at least 10 trillion times better than the same trope used in Full House's "Secret Admirer." Also, there are a lot of small jokes you might catch on the corner of Claire's screen, and all the actors really get to showcase their characters' individual quirks.
IMDB's Bottom: All Things Being Equal (IMDB 6.4, M 6.9)
Jay is attempting to get along as work partners with Claire's husband Phil, and, like so many a Rick-from-Rick-and-Morty after him, he doesn't have much respect for his son-in-law. Meanwhile, the girls (Gloria, Claire and her two daughters, and Mitchell's daughter Lily) are on their way to a women's rights march to give little Lily her first lesson in feminism. But, Gloria gets a flat tire on the way there.
The women are torn between whether to call for help or to try to fix the tire on their own. While, on the one hand, they're not setting a good example for Lily if women need to call for help, on the other hand, they don't know what they're doing. Gloria (played by Sofia Vergara) does not have a manual in her glove compartment because she needed the space for her emergency makeup. But when all seems lost, a beautiful, mysterious woman comes out of nowhere, says cars run in her blood because her grandmother was a mechanic, and offers to help them. They realize that they can all do this together as women. Haley initially doesn't want to get her hands dirty, but then becomes empowered when she realizes she can actually do this, and then it seems like it's going to be a ham-fisted special episode until
The woman who helped them promptly speeds off with Gloria's car right after fixing the tire. Gloria is not as upset about the car theft as about the fact that her makeup was not insured.
And that's the kind of stinger ending that you just gotta love, and makes me feel like this show might be way closer to Seinfeld than to Full House, vibe-wise.
I mean, does this episode have its flaws? You might say that the women's march plot trivializes female rights, but I feel like the show is pretty unapologetic about how non-progressive some of the female characters are. Gloria is practically a cartoon character.
Gloria: Usually when I have a car accident I just put on my emergency makeup and stare out the window and soon I have a whole crew coming to help me.
Claire: Okay. Well, let's just drop you off back in 1950 and then we can figure out what to do next.
And, there were some pretty funny jokes in this episode. Overall good show! I'll have to check out more of it.
And now, the moment we've all been waiting for:
Final Rankings
IMDB
- The Finale (The Office) - 9.9
- The One Where Everyone Finds Out (Friends) - 9.7
- Scott Tenorman Must Die (South Park) - 9.6
- The Contest (Seinfeld) - 9.5 TIED with Jurassic Bark (Futurama) - 9.5 TIED with The Stockholm Syndrome (The Big Bang Theory) - 9.5 TIED with Connection Lost (Modern Family) - 9.5
- Ham Radio (Frasier) - 9.4
- Secret Admirer (Full House) - 8.5 TIED with Dial M for Dick (3rd Rock from the Sun) - 8.5
- The One with the Fake Monica (Friends) - 7.6
- My Mother, My Dick (3rd Rock from the Sun) - 7.3
- Some Assembly Required (Frasier) - 7.0
- The Apology (Seinfeld) - 6.8 TIED with The Athenaeum Allocation (The Big Bang Theory) - 6.8
- Futurama's Holiday Spectacular (Futurama) - 6.4 TIED with All Things Being Equal (Modern Family) - 6.4
- Get the Girl (The Office) - 6.3
- Is It True About Stephanie? (Full House) - 5.8
- The Jackovasaurs (South Park) - 3.9
M
- Scott Tenorman Must Die (South Park) - 7.7
- Connection Lost (Modern Family) - 7.6
- Ham Radio (Frasier) - 7.5
- The One Where Everyone Finds Out (Friends) - 7.25
- Dial M for Dick (3rd Rock from the Sun) - 7.1
- The Contest (Seinfeld) - 7.0
- All Things Being Equal (Modern Family) - 6.9
- Some Assembly Required (Frasier) - 6.8
- The Apology (Seinfeld) - 6.0
- My Mother, My Dick (3rd Rock from the Sun) - 5.5
- The Stockholm Syndrome (The Big Bang Theory) - 5.1
- The Athenaeum Allocation (The Big Bang Theory) - 5.05
- Is It True About Stephanie? (Full House) - 5.0
- Secret Admirer (Full House) - 4.5
- The Finale (The Office) - 4.2
- The Jackovasaurs (South Park) - 4
- Jurassic Bark (Futurama) - 3.9
- The Futurama Holiday Spectacular (Futurama) - 3.8
- Get the Girl (The Office) - 3.7
- The One with the Fake Monica (Friends) - 3.5
Anyway, I've learned nothing from this, and I am not proud of myself, and I think I should probably go outside or something. And probably delete this blog.
Anyway, screw Flanders.
No comments:
Post a Comment