I'm not ragging on "Justified," which is great, but there's often this attitude with a show - among watchers and, probably more importantly, writers - of "when are they going to stop the standalones and get to the serious business?" But standalone episodes often have important things to say that would be wasted in an…

I dunno if it made episodic TV seem obsolete, though I think it made it less popular (I doubt HBO would do a drama now that is as episodic as even "Six Feet Under" was at times). But serialized drama writing can be pretty lazy — it's essentially soap opera format, after all, and great writing within an economical,…

No, I don't think coolness is inversely proportional to popularity - "Modern Family" is not as good (in my opinion) as some of the failed multi-camera shows one of its creator did, but it does have some cool cred and it is extremely popular.

I'd pretty much doubt that they'd get the I-Hate-Laugh-Tracks people on board. Louis CK and Amy Sherman-Palladino both got savaged for doing multi-camera sitcoms (irrespective of the quality of the work, which was pretty terrible in the case of "The Return of Jezebel James"; it was the format that got the word…

I sometimes wonder if we went back and removed the laugh track from single-camera shows like Gilligan's Island if they'd have higher reputations. Probably not (it's not like Outsourced is considered great).

We say the same thing about election polls, but in the end the old-fashioned, landline-heavy polls are still fairly accurate (I guess it helps that old people vote in the biggest numbers). The Nielsen polls, since that's what they sort of are, may not tell us exactly how many people watched in a given week but over…

Randy Rogel
Not only wrote Batman two-parters, he was the head songwriter for Animaniacs (the "nations of the world" and "state capitols" songs are his). Versatile guy.

I think there was arguably a logical progression toward something like "The Rye," where the characters had spent so many years following stupid social rules to extreme conclusions, that the show was bound to take them into sociopathic/crazy territory. It didn't have the feeling of being sort of realistic that the…

"Yeah, I know Sims has talked up Larry Charles, but the episodes he wrote are usually my least favorite in the series."

There was a staff shake-up after season 5: Larry Charles, the most important writer on the show after David and Seinfeld, left to run "Mad About You," so they had to add a bunch of new writers in season 6. And Tom Cherones, who had directed most of the episodes from seasons 1 to 5, left as the director, to be…

David Chase made the same point; I can't find the quote, but he said while he loved writing for the show, he got tired of the fact that nothing ever changed and nothing that happened to Jim would ever affect him.

Mad About You was pretty good sometimes. Larry Charles left Seinfeld to run MAY for two seasons, and he did some interesting episodes. He left after they had the baby and then everything went to hell as I recall.

Schindler
I remember at the time how nobody dared to make jokes about the film; it was essentially considered impossible to parody because of the subject matter. (At the Oscars, Whoopi Goldberg mentioned that she couldn't do a Billy Crystal type routine making fun of the nominees because one of the nominees was…

I'm not sure TBBT would be better if it aimed higher, given that "aiming higher" often consists of turning subtext into text. It's a light comedy with some darker themes below the surface, which is fine, and maybe sometimes preferable to one that pushes its themes harder.

As I recall at the time, what happened was more that some viewers/critics thought "Lucky Louie" was a satire of traditional sitcoms because the sets looked fake and the show looked cheap compared to all other HBO shows. As CK explained, all of that was simply his heartfelt tribute to "The Honeymooners" and its small,…

The volume issue makes sense. It's why shows with laugh tracks (like M*A*S*H or latter-day How I Met Your Mother) get fewer complaints about the laughter than shows that are performed for audiences. Fake laughter is background noise; real laughter is loud and unpredictable in rhythm.

The latter. It's known for the I-knew-them-when writing staff, with people like Charlie Kaufman and Dino Stamatopoulos (who wrote a "Lucky Louie" for CK) among others.

Buck Stagg - Just curious (not being critical, just curious) - is there any reason why audience laughter after jokes is more bothersome there than in, say, a video of LCK's stand-up act? Pretty much the same thing.

Videotape
The choice of videotape was so right for this show it still amazes me that, even with its failure, other people haven't done it. The live episode of 30 Rock also showed how much more natural the live audience feels with that video/live look. Because it looks classier, almost every new three-camera sitcom…

When the CW was getting rid of all its half-hour comedies, Akil actually suggested to them that they turn "The Game" into an hour-long drama. They'd already ditched the studio audience and put in more single-camera scenes, so along with the drama/soap elements it wouldn't have had far to go. But since BET has been…