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[TV] is short for TeleVision
Poorochondriac
Ah, manAh, jeezRegistered User regular
Ah, manAh, jeezRegistered User regular
Which is probably why so many people watch it on their phones
Anyway here is a thread for discussing the boob tube, the idiot box, the telly, et cetera.
Here's a trailer for an upcoming thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2bnYkvjdD0
I can't tell if this looks actually good, or if I'm just kinda excited that somebody else, somewhere, seems to remember The Joe Schmo Show
Anyway here is a thread for discussing the boob tube, the idiot box, the telly, et cetera.
Here's a trailer for an upcoming thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2bnYkvjdD0I can't tell if this looks actually good, or if I'm just kinda excited that somebody else, somewhere, seems to remember The Joe Schmo Show
DJ Eebs on
+8
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
Why do you lie to us, Will? What soulless joy does this bring you?
Oh my god you're right this is a disaster
I won't stop hyping up Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur because it's so fucking good and then I also found this older article which talks about other reasons why it's so awsome.
For reference of names in this quote:
Pilar Flynn - Producer
Rodney Clouden - Supervising Producer
you can just @The Lovely Bastard
We've already texted about it, not to worry
Uncle Brownie fuckin' rules so hard.
Steam
I was literally talking to Zonugal about Joe Schmo 2 yesterday.
It's excellent. Expressive animation, cool musical sequences, funny gags. It can get a bit schmaltzy and didactic, but nothing out of line for a kids' show.
And I realized we both have the same complaint about a lot of shows. How does Barry Allen afford a luxury penthouse condo on a CSI tech’s salary? How did any of the Friends afford those Manhattan apartments. Or even just stuff like “why are they always eating out when they have no money and no jobs? Where’s the ramen? And I think the root of it is because we both grew up extremely poor and were both working from about 15 years old. We both, by necessity, have always had to know exactly how much money we had, how much was coming in, when the rent was due, what bills we could push because they had the lowest late fees, etc.
Thankfully we’re much better off these days, but it’s always still a thing that gets glossed over that takes us both immediately out of a tv show when our first thought it “no way this guy can afford to make rent here on that job.” Now it’s just a weird pet peeve we both seem to be stuck with for the rest of our lives. Thanks, poverty.
Man, okay, let's GET INTO IT.
One big problem is that a lot of professional writers have been too rich for too long, and genuinely have no idea how money works. Not every writer, probably not even "most," but a lot, and the problem becomes more pronounced with higher-level writers. And like any career in the arts, a fair amount of the people in this jawn already came from money - one fun side effect of America not funding the arts and not having much/any social safety net, it's very cool and good.
So this leads to shit like me pitching a story where a crime is committed for an object costing around $500, and a millionaire looking me in the eyes and telling me he doesn't think anyone would commit a crime for $500. People get stabbed every day for $20, I had to patiently explain to a man who drove to work in a Tesla. He said, "Oh, I'm not talking about addicts or homeless people, I'm talking about normal people."
Another facet of the problem is that executives at most networks (couple of notable exceptions) have this deep, deep, deep, reflexive, pathological desire for TV to be "aspirational." A lot of times they use that word, sometimes they hide it in a note like "We want this world to be a place we want to visit," or "We want this workplace to feel like a place we want to hang out." Acknowledging reality too much is seen as a violation of this Sacred Principle.
If it is not clear, this all drives me fucking insane.
And buddy, poverty is a thing that doesn’t ever really leave you.
At least short of becoming a millionaire movie star.
Oh God.
I'll get the Tums.
Let he who hasn't chugged a beer, huffed glue, and eaten cat food to fall into a deep enough sleep to ignore fifty yowling cats and no heating throw the first stone
I don't want to say it's an all-time great at it, but they would definitely do bits like, "this is the stick we use to fight the garbage disposal we can't have fixed because the landlord is a maniac" and "I've parked my car under an underpass a mile away from the apartment and covered it with cardboard so it won't get towed and it absolutely will not start." It does feel like you have to make it a feature of the show to get it through, though, like how Abbott Elementary does. Meanwhile, you look at something like 30 Rock and how they talk about poor people, and anyone who didn't grow up wealthy might as well be an alien species
AKIRA SLIDE ON MOON GIRL
That is all
Please someone give Marc Ecko money to make a Getting Up show/movie starring Hal Cooper and Sweat Pea from Riverdale.
FX has made space for a lot of shows that aren't about rich people, from Rez Dogs to Fargo to Justified, etc etc. HBO has some room (Mare of Easttown, basically anything from David Simon), balanced out by the mega-glitz of Euphoria and Succession and so on.
But pretty much anywhere else, yeah, I'm with you. There are occasional outliers, but they feel rare indeed
Or even if the show is about people struggling with money they still kind of have a stable life and nice stuff and don't have to worry about where they live even though the way they're living shouldn't be possible.
{Twitter, Everybody's doing it. }{Writing and Story Blog}
Man, what a great show.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
The difficult question of what to do when the nerdy daughter's actress comes back a year after filming the last episode of season 4, which canonically takes place mere days before the first episode of season 5, and is suddenly super hot.
They are lying about who lives there in order to maintain the rent control on the apartment.
But unlike real life, a sitcom usually only deals with the “maintain the rent control” plot like once.
This is actually the thing that always weirds me out
Like, if people are just inexplicably rich I might give the show a bit of shit over it, but y'know, whatever, it's television and I love suspending my disbelief
But when they address it the one time and have an episode about how it's unsustainable or whatever, and then the next episode immediately goes back to the status quo? Now you've broken my suspension of disbelief and not given me any tools to repair it with
Crazy Ex Girlfriend is the number one offender I think of on this count, but it's a fairly frequent concern
Of course, Ross having a PhD and a museum job before turning 26 may have been the one thing I could never quite accept.
I always assumed they were so big because they were missing walls and were sets