Exactly, to Michael, they were a sitcom-style “workplace family”, to everyone else it was just their fucking job. It was also a brilliant move that, aside from Jim and Pam, the rest of the office really had nothing in common with each other. They mostly didn’t particularly mind being around each other, but these…

It’s one of the things The Office did really well in its earliest (best) seasons, the long standing gag of Michael believing his co-workers were his family and friends, but the Dunder Mifflin employees barely tolerated him and, most of the time, each other outside of a couple of exceptions.

Honestly, that story WOULD make for an amazing comedic beat if you play it all extremely straight and then reveal the movie she returned to be something extremely dumb or shameful. I’m picturing it being done well by Scrubs.

Hello, I used to work for Blockbuster back in high school (which thankfully means I have absolutely no nostalgia for the company, it deserves everything that happened to it) and I have a story.

I really don’t get why they didn’t go whole-hog and make this a 90s set show. You want to mine nostalgia for Blockbuster, just fucking go for it and set it in a time and place where Blockbuster was ubiquitous. Plus . . . I fucking hate the whole “we’re such a family here” workplace sitcom dynamic. There’s nothing…

30 Rock was smart enough to stick with No They Won’t

The show should have been based in 2002, right before its peak. You could have had the store be successful for a few seasons then made jokes about his newcomer ‘Netflix’ coming in and hurting business, and then that could have been a rivalry for a couple seasons.

I didn’t pay that much attention to the promotional stuff early on, so I assumed this was going to be a set in the 90s thing about working at Blockbuster.

The second picture is the biggest lie this show tells because I had a lot of friends that worked at Blockbuster and there was never four employees in a store at the same time.  They were the kind of operation that ran really lean.  You were lucky if the store had two employees in it at any one time

I’ll still check this out because of the CV of the cast. It’s a shame when a show is stacked full of talent and comes out mediocre (add Space Force to the list of Netflix sitcoms that did this.) That being said, some all-time classic sitcoms have had so-so first seasons before finding their stride in the second.

It’s funny to see the nostalgia for Blockbuster—even I’m guilty of it!—when at the time Blockbuster was huge THEY were the big bad guy for running the little Mom and Pop video stores out of business.

Well, that’s just it. They are saying there aren’t enough laughs. Comedy usually works better when there are laughs involved.

Yeah, whatever happened to predictability?

The thing about shows like this and Reservation Dogs - there’s levels & layers for everyone. If you’re a black lifelong Atlanta resident, you’re gonna be watching this from a different layer than a white suburban New England viewer, but all the layers are good. There’s a lot of specificity to the character experiences,…

Mine? Yours? The funny thing is that you can literally make up the craziest shit and you’ll find a family member who has lived it. It’s no accident that ‘families’ are featured in every genre of film and tv - Succession, Orphan Black, even Guardians of the Galaxy.

Friend, most everyone has family and family problems are the most universal form of suffering on Earth. Watch the episode; you’ll be fine (and there’s no brown paper-bag test for Glover’s audiences).

The writing around here has fallen off, so this review was particularly enjoyable. You clearly bring experience to this subject and it’s nice to read something that isn’t laden with snark, for a change. I already see a lot of my own family disfunction, and maybe that’s why this episode will succeed so easily. I don’t…

That episode felt so lived in and real that I swear it has to be based on someone’s actual family.

That long break between seasons 2 and 3 really killed the hype for this show.

The Blank Check podcast frequently mentions Disney’s obsession with THE BOYS, as in “we need to develop a boy-focused series to lock in little male eyeballs—STAT!” This seems ... like that.