Cruel TV

It's interesting (to me at least) is that my tastes in tv have definitely shifted.  I mean I really never watched all that much TV, at least after leaving the dorm in my second year of university.  And indeed there are many classic shows that I haven't watched at all, including Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost (at least the early seasons), Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, etc.  Odds are if it aired after the 80s I probably haven't watched it and certainly didn't follow it with the exception of Blackadder (technically an 80s show except for the Back and Forth Special), Northern Exposure, Red Dwarf, Futurama, Firefly (hmm, sensing a theme here), The Simpsons (though I finally threw in the towel and stopped watching in 2014 or so), Father Ted, Black Books, Arrested Development, The IT Crowd, Malcolm in the Middle, My Name is Earl, Extras, The PJs (with Eddie Murphy as a claymation superintendent) or the animated version of Corner Gas.  To be honest, I don't think I've missed that much, though one day I'll probably watch Breaking Bad and maybe Better Call Saul.*

Maybe it is an extremely naive view of television comedies, but it seems to me they can be organized along a spectrum of how cruel are the characters to each other (all in the name of "fun" of course).  Is one character always the butt of jokes or is this distributed around more equally (as was arguably the case with Friends)?  Or in fact is it a more gentle comedy where humour arises from misunderstandings that can be put right by the end of the episode (say in The Cosby Show or The Vicar of Dibley)? Conversely is there one focal point for the negative energy of the show (the "heel" in wrestling parlance) or are all the characters basically jerks, cynical or not?  So for instance in Taxi, Louie (the character played by Danny DeVito) was the heel, whereas almost everyone is terrible in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (also with DeVito) or The Trailer Park Boys.

Really good comedies can run right up to the line of it just being too much (Arrested Development and Black Books), but it is a fine line  I'm finding that John Cleese as Basil Fawlty is just too brittle and high-strung for me and his wife is just uniformly awful to him.  I'm sure I liked this much more when younger, but it is making me cringe now and not in a good way (and indeed I couldn't bear one of Cleese's favourite sketches from At Last the 1948 Show where he amps up the frustrated hostility far too early for my tastes).

No question I think there is just a higher undercurrent of hostility in British comedy than US comedy, which generally does pull its punches more.  And maybe because I haven't been as exposed to it for a while, I find it too much right now.  Or because I am so unhappy about the state of the world, I can't really enjoy the claustrophobic nature of Fawlty Towers and how everyone except for Polly is so grating (and indeed clearly has so much contempt for everyone else, which truly is shocking to American sensitivities).  I'll get a few more episodes in, but if it is still just winding me up and it isn't enjoyable, then I'll bail.  (I'm pretty sure that my son won't appreciate The Young Ones for all kinds of reasons, and at any rate I'm leaving that for last, even after Max Headroom!)  Perhaps it is something about the manic energy combined with the cruelty that is setting me off.  Blackadder himself is fairly cruel as a person and the show embodies a fairly misanthropic outlook, but I enjoyed it as much as ever, though it is fair to say that the overall pace is more measured than Fawlty Towers or The Young Ones for that matter, and also it is only Blackadder as the cruel one with generally two foils -- Baldrick and Percy or the Prince or George -- though of course Queen Elizabeth had her special brand of whimsical cruelty and Captain Darling was a bit of a bastard.

Anyway, those are my disjointed musings on the topic.  No question I've gone a lot softer and don't really enjoy gratuitous cruelty anymore, which is also why I stopped watching Ricky Gervais projects...

 

* To be completely honest, though I would never have tuned in on my own, I have watched a few random episodes of X-Files, 30 Rock, Community, Parks and Rec, Monk, Will and Grace, SNL and Scrubs, and back when I was still doing business travel I would sometimes watch whatever Adult Swim was showing at the time, if the hotel had Cartoon Network.  And I've caught flashes of Friends, Chuck, The Office and The Blacklist, though I don't think I even sat down and watched a full episode.  There used to be all kinds of tv shows running at the gym, but I don't think it counts if I don't have the sound playing, do you?