A couple of years ago someone posted some clips from the POLICE SQUAD! pilot followed by a clip from the M SQUAD episode it was based on. I knew that AIRPLANE! was ZAZ's spoof remake of ZERO HOUR!, but I didn't realize they did the same for this episode. But it's a good technique. They bought the rights to some…

The clever thing about "The Love Boat" (the form, not the writing) is how Spelling and Cramer figured out a way to keep the anthology format viable for an era when audiences had lost interest in anthology shows. Basically it was the same show as "Love, American Style" (plus a little bit of Neil Simon's "Suite" plays…

Magnum is the Rockford for '80s TV, which tended to be much more about rich living. It's sort of Rockford with more wealth and glamour.

There was some postmodernism on the show, especially the two Lance White episodes; the first one even had a visual parody of the kind of close-ups and cutting typical cop shows used. Those episodes would seem really meta even today.

Physical comedy will always be around, it's just better live than canned. Every time a live performer does some physical comedy, it's something that has never been done before and never will be done again, and there's the inherent tension over whether the gag will work as planned. Movies and TV don't have that element…

I prefer the original version for a bunch of reasons, but one of the biggest problems I have with the "restored" version is that it feels fake — no movie falling into the category of TOUCH OF EVIL (a medium-budget Hollywood studio thriller with stars) would have opened like that in 1958. It's wishful thinking about…

It's hard to say what a deeply textured comedy character is (I mean, the form means they have to display the same characteristics over and over again), but I feel like it has something to do with whether the characters have relationships that seem convincing — like you knew why Sam and Diane were attracted to each…

Nobody thinks the history of American TV animation was impressive, but I don't know a lot of people who dismiss it out of hand; "Rocky and Bullwinkle" had a huge following; early Hanna-Barbera shows" were big influences on Ren & Stimpy; people are still watching cheaply-animated Peanuts specials; and so on.

Oh, one other thing that occurred to me: sometimes an immersion in old stuff can help new stuff. "Seinfeld" was full of throwbacks to older comedy, like the Abbott & Costello TV show. Sometimes looking back to the past can give creators ideas for things that current shows are not doing any more.

Also, when Hollywood takes on a big issue or does something unusual, there are always compromises involved (and a little bit of self-congratulation). When the movies/shows come out, that doesn't matter as much because it's so interesting that they're taking the risk at all, but as time goes on, the seams start to show…

The theory is that being familiar with the best of what previous generations had to offer makes your experience more well-rounded. That's the theory, anyway. I sometimes doubt that it applies to film or TV, which are completely fixed and unchanging. A Shakespeare play or a classic piece of music becomes new every time…

An evolving creative medium doesn't get better or worse, it just evolves. Art partakes of technology, but it isn't like technology where we can objectively say things got better (or at least faster). It's not as if silent movies were rendered worthless when sound came in; they were just in a language the new films…

Thackeray's VANITY FAIR, I think. Because Thackeray tells his story with such a snarky tone, half accepting and half deconstructing the morality that Victorian novels take for granted, we're free to read certain things ironically if we want to. Also, George Eliot's MIDDLEMARCH is often considered the most "modern"…

I think TV does, or used to, have an iconic time, and it was the '50s — live New York TV, with original plays, performances, and so on. (To get really simplistic about it, the narrative was that there was "good" TV, the challenging live kind from New York, and "bad" TV, the cheesy filmed sitcoms and Westerns from Los…

Right. To be fair, baseball stats _used_ to be like this, somewhat. Bill James and others would complain that the Elias Bureau was sitting on the really interesting statistics. But baseball fans had ways to collect their own information. It's much harder to figure out who's watching what.

Oh, he's done that all the time. When he did "Lucky Louie" he went off on other sitcoms with only very vague knowledge of what they were like, or completely inaccurate information. (E.g. he kept saying he was using all-real laughter while "Friends" used a fake laugh track, which it did not.) It just didn't get the…

Everything about "Lucky Louie" was his reaction against both regular network multi-cam shows (which he'd done in that disastrous CBS pilot zeppomarxist mentions) and hip single-camera shows, which he also expressed disdain for. He was trying to get back to something really raw and unfiltered, which he couldn't quite…

It does film with a real audience and, being a big hit, it's a very enthusiastic real audience.

The answer seems to be yes. HAPPY ENDINGS is an example: it gets a lot more viewers running after MODERN FAMILY than it did running a half-hour later the previous season.

The one thing I'll say is that the presence of stock character types isn't really a sign of datedness, more of a sign of its being a sitcom. Or maybe just of its being a television show. A guest character, especially, is usually a stock type, and the types you mention can be found on shows (good and bad) today.