History of the Sitcom

What should have been a fun and light hearted look back, with minimal social commentary sadly turned into a cringeworthy and often irrelevant , inaccurate over analysis that took all the air out of the balloon.

Rather too many people attempting to apply their on rather faulty and false social ethics to history that often simply made comedy for what it as, something to laugh at and with.

Many of these people had little or no direct involvement in the actual comedy creation process.

It seems as if CNN management sat round a table with a white board full of all the latest terms and words that had to be included in order to fulfil some false sense of diversity and wokeness.

But in the end, it delivered too much that made the viewer roll eyes, tut and sigh.

I tried so hard to look past the faux commentary and.enjoy reliving some moments from my past but the final straw came when Margaret Cho spoke of cultural appropriation and misogyny, not having a clue what each actually means and with such an airy tone that looked down upon the audience.

It is so ironic that what should be a celebration of comedy was too often used as an excuse to over analyse, make wholly subjective assumptions, presented as fact and completely forget the whole point of the exercise.

One of the frequent contributors was the editor in chief of the A. V. Club, that has a tagline 'Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed'.

Obsessed is correct but sadly, all the obsession has clouded the brain so much that the neurons cannot be seen for the grey matter.

I would love to see a really good history of the sitcom without all the same players. Of course they were vital , but this series brushes over the 50's and naturally spends most of its time on I Love Lucy. So many other shows that could be explored. They drag Norman Lear, Suzanne Somers, Eric McCormick out to expound and naturally we once again visit, Maude, Good Times, Modern Family ad nauseam.

The sitcom is a special art, a half hour format whose style comes from that 2/ minutes of entertainment.

Sex and the City, Fleabag, and others mentioned are not sitcoms. This ruined the whole premise of the show. So far, very bored.

A pathetic, scary footnote for 2021 - So many of these comedians, notably Jerry Seinfeld et al, refuse to perform at any of today's college campuses because the students have lost their sense of humor. With so many social agendas, there are too many people that are sitting on the edge of the seat ready to be offended and attack.

Scary.

Seems like all the 1 star reviews here have one thing in common. They don't appreciate talking about race or class or anything ruffles their perspective of the American situation.

The content of this show is interesting, which is why I rated it as highly as I did. Unfortunately, from the first 5 minutes of episode 1, the series is decidedly hard left, which is so unnecessary. Who wants to hear smug talking heads pontificate on how bad sitcoms were in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, because all the shows were about White people?

The hard left focus was a bit of a surprise to me, as I had seen CNN documentary series in the past, like the ones of the decades (e.g., 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's) as well as their History of Comedy series, and they were all pretty much down-the-middle without an overt political agenda. Why they chose to have such a strong progressive point of view for this series is sad, and shows how much CNN has drank the Kool-Aid.

Episode 2, ostensibly about the evolution of showing sex on sitcoms was instead about 75% about the plight of LGBTQ. In episode 3, "Friends" co-creator Marta Kauffman had to apologize on camera for all the main characters being White.

Normally, I would wait until I had seen the entire series, but now that I've seen six of the eight episodes, my opinion is already baked in. I look forward to watching the final two episodes and learning more about how straight White men are the bane of human existence...and the TV sitcom.