Category: Television

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Laughing Matters: “Saturday Night Live” Bush campaign ad, 1988

Dan Seeger

Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter matters, too. Lorne Michaels smartly maintains that everyone’s favorite Saturday Night Live cast is the one that was in place while they were in high school. The creator and longtime producer (with only a brief interruption in the early nineteen-eighties) of the venerable late night sketch comedy program is certainly correct in identifying the perception bias that compromises any individual attempt to identify one era’s superiority over … Continue reading Laughing Matters: “Saturday Night Live” Bush campaign ad, 1988

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That Championship Season: Parks and Recreation, Season Three

Dan Seeger

The Bob Newhart Show never won an Emmy. In fact, the seminal sitcom was almost a non-presence at the annual awards ceremony meant to identify and honor the best of the best of broadcast television. Across six seasons, The Bob Newhart Show earned a mere four nominations, and one of those was in the category of “Outstanding Film Editing in a Comedy Series.” It’s easy to attribute that to the series built around a certain button-down mind existing at the same as some of the most important, groundbreaking sitcoms in the history of television, such as All in the Family … Continue reading That Championship Season: Parks and Recreation, Season Three

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It keeps me company when nobody else is around and I’m all by myself

Dan Seeger

As per tradition (see below), the eve of the Emmy Award nominations brings me to my own humble assertion of the best of the past year in television, using the same traditional network season timespan that the awards-giving body still prefers. As usual, plenty of caveats apply. I’m pretty well-viewed when it comes to television, but there are plenty of acclaimed series that I don’t watch. Someday, when I finally catch up on some of them, I might regret that I posted these lists without, say, Mad Men on the tally (I should’ve celebrated Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake a … Continue reading It keeps me company when nobody else is around and I’m all by myself

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That Championship Season: Justified, Season Two

Dan Seeger

By now, there are enough smart, fitting adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s work to the screen — big and small — that it obscures the long, problematic history the prolific writer had when turning his work over to Hollywood. And it wasn’t from lack of trying. According to some sources, there have been over two dozen whacks at transforming Leonard’s fiction, which is lean enough to sometimes read as if it’s a script treatment, into film or television. Even though it seemed the curse was broken with 1995’s Get Shorty, a story fittingly inspired by Leonard’s dismal encounters with Hollywood studios, there … Continue reading That Championship Season: Justified, Season Two

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More fun than humans should be allowed to have

Dan Seeger

I was just about the ideal age for Late Night with David Letterman. The program was there for me throughout my teenaged years, providing absurdist, anarchic, highly ironic comedy at the exact point that my swarming hormones made me inclined to reject staid sincerity and childish silliness. Letterman operated his show with a thin undercoating of hostility for the very showbiz conventions he was charged with upholding, and yet his jagged view of the proceedings was tempered by a Midwestern decency that was very familiar to me as I watched in my small town Wisconsin home. It was this latter quality that his bookers … Continue reading More fun than humans should be allowed to have

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That Championship Season: Seinfeld, Season Four

Dan Seeger

Aside from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” perhaps no other sitcom has such a clear single-episode high-water mark as Seinfeld. Airing right in the middle of the show’s fourth season, “The Contest” find the four main characters engaged in a wager inspired by one of them, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), recently suffering the humiliation of being caught by his mother while he was masturbating with a copy of Glamour magazine. Each of the quartet puts up a hundred dollars that says they can go the longest without engaging in that particular activity. Actually, Elaine … Continue reading That Championship Season: Seinfeld, Season Four

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The Sound of Oscars

Dan Seeger

Those with whom I watch the Academy Awards, both virtually and sharing the same couch, were a little worried about me last night. My praise for the remarkable achievement of Boyhood has evidently been effusive enough that there were nationwide predictions of dire thoughts overtaking me when it became clear the night was turning against Richard Linklater’s film. But I like Birdman, too. (There are some critics out there this morning undoubtedly feeling far angrier about this outcome.) If it had been a night about venerating the dreadful The Imitation Game, exactly the sort of prestige pablum the Academy might have … Continue reading The Sound of Oscars

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Robin Williams, 1951-2014

Dan Seeger

I remember watching Happy Days on the first night that an episode entitled “My Favorite Orkan” aired. I didn’t know that was the title of the episode. I only knew it was like nothing I’d ever seen on the nostalgia-driven sitcom. It was remarkable enough that the program focused on a space alien who visits the Cunningham home, but the actor playing that extra-terrestrial was an absolutely astounding force of nature, bending off oddball jokes at a rate that raced ahead of the speed of thought. I was seven years old, and I was prepared to tell everyone it was … Continue reading Robin Williams, 1951-2014

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Why go into the outside world at all? It’s such a fright!

Dan Seeger

So this is now a thing I do around Emmy nomination announcement time. As usual, plenty of caveats apply, mostly around the acclaimed television series that I don’t happen to follow or haven’t yet caught up on. Still, I’m a fairly well-viewed fellow. I know the Emmys will do what they must, including continue to lavish praise on the increasingly intolerable Modern Family, but I have my own views on what constitutes the top achievements in television. Roughly using the same span of eligibility that the Emmys adopts, here are my picks for the ten best shows of the past … Continue reading Why go into the outside world at all? It’s such a fright!