Name That Theme
The opening to 30 Rock again--done differently.
And here's a classic:
posted by LAGuy @ 12:16 AM
Pajama Guy
"You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at ‘60 Minutes’] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”
-Jonathan Klein, former CBS Executive
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Saturday, January 24, 2009
And here's a classic:
4 Comments:
Once upon a time, TV shows were about policemen and doctors and lawyers and military. The best explanation I have heard is that everyone has had experiences with these people -- often brief, but always emotional and memorable.
But now the big comedy shows are about television shows: 30 Rock, Curb Your Enthusiasm. And yet, even having lived in LA most of my life, the world of television creation is utterly foreign to me. Why do these shows appeal to large audiences? Or do they really only appeal to "insiders"?
First, they're not necessarily that popular--neither 30 Rock nor Curb Your Enthusiasm get big audiences, and Studio 60 was canceled a couple years back.
Really, it's a case of writing what you know. Cowboys, cops, soldiers, lawyers and doctors all lend themselves to dramatic stories. But for comedies, it's just about the everyday problems we all have. It can be about a bus driver or a TV star, as long as their problems are reasonably relatable. (And some people enjoy the "inside" feeling, as well as finding show biz glamorous.)
And there's one thing all TV people know--TV. So they've often had TV people or entertainers in general on their shows (which also allowed for them to do their act on occasion). Lucy was married to a nightclub bandleader and always wanted in on the act; Danny Williams was a nightclub comedian; Rob Petrie wrote for a variety show loosely based on Sid Caesar's; Ann Marie was an aspiring actress; Mary Richards worked for a local news station; Murphy Brown was a national news reporter; Jerry Seinfeld essentially played himself (not always convincingly), a comedian; Tim Taylor had a local TV show; Frasier Crane had a call-in radio show; and so on. The comedy plots weren't that different from other shows--it's just the milieu was familiar to the producers. You see a lot of movies about the movies, too.
The comedies often write about office life -- which we all know -- in the context of a TV show -- which the writers know. They manage to combine the mundane with the glamorous.
One of the fascinating things about Seinfeld is it seems clear that neither Seinfeld nor Larry David had much of a feeling for what going to an office every day is like.
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