THE BUTLER DID IT: THE NERD OFFENSIVE

Good one, but. out of curiosity.. people are actually offended by The Big Bang Theory?

I'm not offended, but from what I've seen, its not funny. That and I think Community is awesome! I guess I'm one of those people.

There are people who are angry that it panders to nerds while (apparently, I've seen like two episodes) feeling like it was written by aging Hollywood types who spent five minutes on Wikipedia to come up with some fill-in-the-blanks references. If true, that does actually bug me in principle, not because my Nerd Honour has been slighted, but because I believe pretty wholeheartedly that if you're going to write about anything, a subculture or whatever, you should actually be familiar with it. Like I say, though, I'm not in a position to judge, I just know that what I saw wasn't very funny.

Actually, that raises an issue that's interesting in relation to the current topic: another reason I'm predisposed not to like BBT is that it's a three-camera laugh-track sitcom. This is a style of show that I utterly despise, especially now when there are better options. In saying this, am I being one of the uptight nerd brigade? I mean, I believe the basic form of this style of show is inherently inferior and limiting. It's not me saying "I hate sitcoms", it's me saying "I believe this particular style of sitcom is problematic". And my problem with it is that it's still popular, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. When you're a fan of Community or whatever (which of course stands as an almost perfect contrast to BBT) and you watch it flounder in the ratings while BBT is a huge smash hit, it's hard not to feel like a certain form is being validated and possibly encouraged over something better.

The culture as it currently exists can seem a bit like a zero sum game. Some of that is nerd overreaction, but there's definitely a bit of truth to the idea that "Crappy X is popular, Brilliant Y is not, so brace yourself for five hundred more Xs, and forget ever seeing anything like Y again." I'm happy to ignore stuff that's popular as long as it isn't seemingly shutting down options for entertainment.

Looking at Twilight, I'm coming from a position of not caring at all one way or another, then being mildly irritated by it when I learned about its horrendous gender politics. But Jeremy's dead on about the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" attitude being a pose. Clearly most of the women who read Twilight don't take it seriously, any more than the nerd dudes who are obsessed with Batman are likely to start dressing up like a vigilante and fighting crime. In fact, if anything, the latter is more likely than Twihards believing that they need to find someone exactly like Edward, and most of the insightful criticisms of Twilight came from women in the first place, nerds just picked up on it as a battle cry (not that there's no crossover between nerds and women.) So it's definitely true that "the nerd offensive" is ridiculous, given the pride of place they currently enjoy in the culture, in much the same way as "where's WHITE history month, huh?" is ridiculous.

But that being said, there's another level to this in which I can see the deleterious effect of Twilight, and things like it, on the culture. I've honestly gotten fed up with the fact that seemingly everything genre related has to be a melodrama featuring a love triangle, much in the same way that SF became hollowly fantastical pulp oriented around the "hero's journey" after Star Wars. It wasn't Lucas's fault, though, any more than the melodrama thing is Stephanie Mayer's (or, probably more accurately, Joss Whedon's). The real problem is the sheer dominance of uncreative, conservative content that seeks to keep feeding us the same crap over and over again, so that anything that takes the culture by storm is likely to get entrenched. THAT is what makes cultural phenomenons legitimately worth dreading, to my eyes.

While I generally think it's small-minded of people to dismiss an entire format as inherently inferior to another, I do agree that the 3 camera sitcom format is inherently inferior to single camera.  It makes for stilted and unnatural dialogue, which isn't the worst thing in the world (as sitcoms don't need to be especially realistic to work), but it also slows the pace, so you just can't fit as much story and jokes into the same 22 minutes as you can with a single camera.  That's bad.

Great article Jeremy, and definitely stuff that us geeks need to keep at the back of our minds. We're all guilty of a bit of culture snobbishness now and again; a couple of weeks back a girl at work was all excited about seeing the new Underworld movie because, as it turns out, she's a bit of an Underworld fanatic. My first thought (Apart from 'Hardcore Underworld fans actually exist?') was: "Couldn't you have picked something better?' 

Was this rational? No. But it was me, with my cultural knowledge generally far exceeding the average Joe's, pulling up all the things I knew of that were similar to Underworld but better and lamenting that  this girl had latched onto such an inferior version of the vampire/werewolf mythology. We're all so wrapped up in our knowledge of these things, we think it makes us more tasteful. Personally, I've come to believe that that's only half true, the rest being embellished by ego. Sure, Underworld isn't very good, but why question it if it resonates with someone? Isn't geek culture itself built around people who have a love for things that are impenetrable to the mainstream and in many cases are, when viewed in harshly critical/theoretical terms, not very 'good'?

It's why I laugh when, in any guilty pleasure-themed thread, you'll inevitably get someone pipe in with 'BAD TASTE THREAD!!' As geeks, our meat and potatoes is stuff that you can look at a critical eye and utterly eviscerate, but we love anyway. Case in point: Bruce Campbell. He's not really that good an actor, if you look at it in purely analytical terms. He's a ham. but we as geeks love his hammishness, love the properties he's associated with, and that's good for us. I fucking love the guy, but I wouldn't expect a non-geek to get it; hell, even an arthouse snob who isn't into genre stuff is probably going to cringe their way through one of his performances.

And that is completely okay. You're always going to see bad stuff capture the mainstream, because the blander something is, the wider base of appeal it'll have, especially with demographics who love entertainment but don't obsess over the details as much as we do. Of course, the fact that we do get so involved with these things is a wonderful thing in and of itself, and does give us a more in-depth knowledge of them. But while we may know more and have much wider tastes as a result, I think we sometimes flatter ourselves by self-appointing ourselves as authorities and taste-makers - or at least, taste-makers who NOBODY LISTENS TO, DAMMIT!!

That's the other thing: I wish the internet as a whole would drop the whole 'passion for melodrama' thing. It'd be nice to have a disagreement, or discuss a property/film that is unpopular or disappointing, without everyone invariably sounding like they're in a Spanish soap opera. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Prankster 

The culture as it currently exists can seem a bit like a zero sum game. Some of that is nerd overreaction, but there's definitely a bit of truth to the idea that "Crappy X is popular, Brilliant Y is not, so brace yourself for five hundred more Xs, and forget ever seeing anything like Y again." I'm happy to ignore stuff that's popular as long as it isn't seemingly shutting down options for entertainment.

Ah and there's the thing that, while I understand on a conceptual level (and used to believe in as well), just can't get on board with anymore.  Especially the "forget every seeing anything like Y again" part.  When every film critic on the web can fill out a SOLID Top 15 (with several more solid honorable mentions) every single year then I just can't see complaining about a lack of options.  The dudes we love keep making movies, new people explode on to the scene every single year and since when was the studio system ever the first place we looked for the stuff we really want as film nerds anyway?

Also - I appreciate you guys' reading!

This piece so completely suits the awesomeness and decency of its author!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Schwartz 

While I generally think it's small-minded of people to dismiss an entire format as inherently inferior to another, I do agree that the 3 camera sitcom format is inherently inferior to single camera.  It makes for stilted and unnatural dialogue, which isn't the worst thing in the world (as sitcoms don't need to be especially realistic to work), but it also slows the pace, so you just can't fit as much story and jokes into the same 22 minutes as you can with a single camera.  That's bad.

Three camera sitcoms are out of fashion now, and that's fine, but I'd need an impressive list of single camera sitcoms to convince me that the format is on the whole superior to the one that gave us The Honeymooners, All In The Family, Cheers, and Seinfeld.

30 Rock and Parks & Rec and Community and such all owe a debt to Ricky Gervais and Edgar Wright and Bakersfield, PD, but to me the 3 camera shows don't automatically suck just because they owe even older pioneers. There's a formalism to shows that do it now which I actually kind of like.

It's also interesting that many/most of the single camera sitcoms in the 60s and 70s (I'm thinking of The Partridge Family, Gilligan's Island, and The Love Boat) were pretty bad.

Fun fact: German cinematographer Karl Freund, who was the DP on Metropolis and Dracula, invented the lighting system that put the three camera sitcom format into wide use (on I Love Lucy).

That's what she said.

Good article! Looking forward to more.

Reading Bossypants, I learned that Fey originally envisioned 30 Rock to follow her favorite classic sitcoms and go with the multi-camera approach.  It ended up being single-cam simply because NBC simply wasn't doing that at the time.  I simply couldn't fathom that considering how fast paced the show is, but after going through The Big Bang Theory, I suppose it could've worked.

My hatred towards the format leans a bit towards the irrational, but I've come to accept that a good show is a good show is a good show (with the help of views put forth by Mr. Butler and Phil).

Though I do wonder how much we'd love Community now if it were multi-cam with a laugh track.

A laugh track wouldn't work because even a laugh track is meant to mimic a large audience, who are only going to respond to a certain "size" joke. A live audience would be lost at a Community episode. And too much of Community's humor is cinematic; making it stagebound - the thing that lets you buy into a laugh track- wouldn't work.

Regarding sitcom formats. People who dismiss the traditional format in favor of the single camera one only do so by ignoring TV history. I personally do prefer the single camera one. I have been de-programmed from laugh tracks to point of cringing when hearing one. In a new show. And it would be fun to peculate as to what the Cheers crew at the height of their powers could do in a single camera show. But their format detracts nothing form my enjoyment. Big Bang Theory can go choke on a cow turd, though. Or not. I don't care either way.

Otherwise I have to agree with Prankster. Commercialized pop culture is indeed a zero sum game. Not so much on the creative side. There will always be people ready to write the next Books Of Blood, or World War Z. But in terms of access to them. Especially to those of us who live away from the pop culture centers of the world. When the shelve space space in my bookstores that is marked for sci-fi and horror gets taken over by romance novels about vampires and werewolves and zombies and fucking chupacabras, you know what happens? The books I'm looking for end up on two tables, multiple titles tacked on top of each other making me play Jenga to get at them. While the other nonsense gets displayed and lit and remains largely unsold. So yeah, when the industry tells me who has spent multiple thousands of euros on it "Fuck of, I'll bend over backwards to sell a couple of books to someone who will never spend another dime until the next flash-in-the-pan franchise comes next decade" I bitch and moan. And play book Jenga and scour cinema listings and play treasure hunt at multiple video stores

I think the exact thing we need to give the world, is a book about a passive teenage girl who longs to fuck the sparkles off a Chupacabra. 

'"I can't stand the pain any longer" said Bella, as she tenderly stroked the fur of the brooding dog/hyena/Gollum-thing's chest. Despite his attempts to appear impassive, his rising passion was betrayed by the way the sparkles cascaded ever brighter from the tips of his tattered, rat-like ears.

"I can't live without having you", Bella persisted, lips quivering for his taste. "I am your goat. Suck me!"

After what felt like an eternity wrapped in aeon, Eduardo finally looked at her. "No, my love" he intoned in that Banderas-esque tenor that never failed to drench her womanhood like the oceans drenched Atlantis. "Ees wrong!"'

I mean, look at that. Just fuckin' look at it. We're all gonna be rich.

Having no cable and over-the-air access to channels like MeTV, I've had the chance to watch a lot of older sitcoms lately like All in the Family and Maude, and the thing that strikes me -- aside from how goddamned LOUD so many of them are -- is how many times, each half of the show is just one long scene.  They really come across more like little two-act plays that happened to be filmed.  Then I compare it to the episode of Friends I saw yesterday, where it's a scene with four or five lines and joke, cut to another quick scene in a different location, then another, then another.  And for some reason, I find myself preferring the theatricality of those older shows.  It feels like it takes more talent -- both in front of and behind the camera -- to pull that off than to shoot a series of two or three minute scenes.

EDIT:  Excepting, of course, shows like Community, whose cinematic style is inherent to their success.

Good column.

Yeah, I always thought the problem with the Sagan/Snooki meme is that Sagan hasn't been on TV in years (having been dead since 1996). It's possible for a reasonably smart young person to know who Sagan was but not know what he looked like. As one of the comments says, he was inescapable in the '80s, though.

I've never minded Twilight. It's essentially its generation's Tristan and Isolde, dressed up in (barely) supernatural garb, with a side order of fascinating Mormon repression. The fanboy response to it boils down to "Gurls like it. Gurls suck." Or you'll get the ones trying to seem sensitive, who seem to want to save teenage girls from their own terrible taste. Course, I may run with a rarefied crowd (or not hang out with many teenage girls), but the few I've talked to tend to be like "BWAHAHAHA no" when it comes to Twilight, and "The Hunger Games, more like it, in its better moments."

Might be helpful to take the long view and perhaps dabble in some generalities:

- Most teenagers (regardless of gender), like most people (regardless of gender or age), have shitty taste.

- This has always been true.

- This of course excludes you and your friends.

- The stuff you liked as a teenager was better than the stuff teenagers like now.

- The stuff you liked as a teenager was worse than the stuff your parents liked as teenagers.

- The stuff teenagers like now will be better than the stuff their future teenage kids like.

- Stuff isn't getting worse. Teenage taste is a constant. Constantly shitty.

- Stuff isn't getting worse but there's a greater volume of shitty stuff catering to shitty teenage taste because that's where the studios have been at for the past 50 years or so. If the 50-75 demographic were important to studios we'd be getting Murder She Wrote: The Movie.

- It's probably healthier to try to find something to like (or at least find interesting, or appreciate in an intellectual sense, i.e. "This isn't for me, but I can see how it'd appeal to others") in inane teen pop culture than to be all like "Get off my lawn." I just read Stephen Bissette, not a young dude (geek alert: he drew Swamp Thing in the '80s), having a hilariously mixed response to Breaking Dawn. He seemed to dig it for what it was and for what it didn't seem to know it was.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil 

Three camera sitcoms are out of fashion now, and that's fine, but I'd need an impressive list of single camera sitcoms to convince me that the format is on the whole superior to the one that gave us The Honeymooners, All In The Family, Cheers, and Seinfeld.

Yes, but would those shows suddenly not work if they were done one-camera? I can *maybe* give you Seinfeld--that show was fucking magical at being able to use its format in a way that wasn't overly broad, at its peak at least--and yes, I do like the "hangout" vibe of some of the best classic sitcoms, like Cheers. But as well as they wrote to their format, there's still, as Phil noted, the limitation to a certain "size" joke, and as I'm a guy who likes subtle, throwaway humour and absolutely despises mugging, the laugh track is my mortal enemy. It really can't die fast enough, and shows like BBT are keeping it alive. Hence, irritation directed at it. Not "hate", but irritation. 

Laugh tracks irritate me mostly when they're an obvious attempt to make unfunny shows seem funny, as in BBT. But still, everything has its place. Fawlty Towers, for example, one of the funniest shows in history, would have been nowhere near as great without it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JGButler 

Ah and there's the thing that, while I understand on a conceptual level (and used to believe in as well), just can't get on board with anymore.  Especially the "forget every seeing anything like Y again" part.  When every film critic on the web can fill out a SOLID Top 15 (with several more solid honorable mentions) every single year then I just can't see complaining about a lack of options.  The dudes we love keep making movies, new people explode on to the scene every single year and since when was the studio system ever the first place we looked for the stuff we really want as film nerds anyway?

 

Also - I appreciate you guys' reading!

It really is a great column and I agree with it to an extent. But I think this misses the point a bit. You can say "well, there's always great stuff out there," and there is, but certain KINDS of stuff are going to fall out of fashion, and other kinds of stuff are going to be warped to fit expectations. And while it's fair to say that crappy filmmakers are always going to make crap and good filmmakers are going to make good movies, I think the cultural context can make a big difference.

For instance: I'm of the firm belief that the "new golden age" of the 70s wasn't simply a matter of a bunch of great filmmakers maturing all at the same time by coincidence. It was about a community of creative people working together. A culture of film that raised the bar extremely high, and that encouraged experimentation. Sure, a few geniuses blew the doors off, but everyone who was coming up at the same time was eager to join their ranks. And that even trickled down to the less reputable cult or geek filmmakers. In the 60s, you had horror and SF films that had been sometimes interesting but rarely really exemplary, but once Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and The Godfather and 2001 hit, suddenly there was a rising tide raising all boats. And I think this continued through to the great geek boom of the 80s. As much as we associate films like Star Wars, ALIEN, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Exorcist, and so on as mainstream touchstones, they were, for their time, pretty daringly experimental movies. They've been copied endlessly, but the templates had to be established first. Star Wars in particular is, if you think about it, MUCH weirder and asks far more of its audience than any original SF movie made nowadays would. Likewise, I think there are a number of journeyman directors who made good or great or at least interesting movies because they were working back then, in an atmosphere of creative challenge. Whereas if they were just starting out nowadays they'd probably be making solid, forgettable movies or Paul W. S. Anderson style derivative pap.

By the same token, look at the state of SF. I already mentioned the "melodrama" aspect that's bugging me--as great as it was, I think this eventually drove Battlestar Galactica off the rails, and if it had come along even a few years earlier this might not have been the case. Of course, that's probably a bad comparison, because if it had come along a few years earlier it would have been an entirely different show anyway. Or look at Star Trek--as entertaining as JJ Abrams' film is, it's hollow, shiny spectacle, whereas the original, as cheap and cheesy as it was, was striving to be about ideas. Abrams is actually a great example of a filmmaker and TV producer who, if he'd been around in the 80s, might have been knocking out masterpieces. But he's around nowadays, in a film and TV culture that applauds callbacks and touchstones over even an original sense of style, let alone substance.

I just think huge successes, nowadays, tend to codify certain modes of filmmaking that don't necessarily serve the material. I think we got a crappy Watchmen film because there's a "certain way" to do superhero movies. I think every movie about aliens depicts them as cookie-cutter drool-monsters in big machines that go boom, because there's a "certain way" to do SF movies. The big successes are just being endlessly recycled in the mainstream. The weird, quirky, high-quality art movies can be great, but, this past year at least, they were intersecting less and less with mainstream entertainment, and I think a healthy film culture requires mainstream entertainment to be at a certain level of quality.

Geh, maybe I'm drifting a little from the main topic, but the point is, it seems like there's less and less room for variety in any given genre. It's getting so we get one horror movie, one action movie, one comedy, one romance, recycled over and over again, and whatever it is is whatever the recent huge success was. That makes it hard not to get a little irked by it.

Originally Posted by The Prankster 

 

Yes, but would those shows suddenly not work if they were done one-camera?

Boom.

Laugh tracks only exist in the first place because the people originally making television didn't quite understand what they had on their hands. They weren't thinking cinematically, they were just putting cameras in a theater. Studio audiences and laugh tracks are a holdover from when television hadn't yet blossomed as an art, and yeah, I'll call it harmful. What does a laugh track add? Nothing. It can only detract, if for no other reason than cutting time for jokes and plot out of the show. Yes, there are many great sitcoms filmed in that format, but does that format really have anything to do with what made them great? No. You could remove the audience laughter from those shows and it wouldn't hurt them at all (well, there may be a few awkward pauses).

Explain.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Whiteboy Jones 

 

 What does a laugh track add? Nothing. It can only detract, if for no other reason than cutting time for jokes and plot out of the show. Yes, there are many great sitcoms filmed in that format, but does that format really have anything to do with what made them great? No. You could remove the audience laughter from those shows and it wouldn't hurt them at all (well, there may be a few awkward pauses).

 

Canned laugh tracks are a different story, but the legitimately great sitcoms that were performed in front of a live audience would require a completely different energy, and writing and acting style, to succeed as single-camera sitcoms without laugh tracks. The format completely dictated the content, or at least the way that content was delivered.

That's an interesting point.

Also, I kind of jumped in without acknowledging what a good piece this was, Jeremy.

The snarky "art Republican" digs undermine the article's message a bit, no?

 Zealous opinion and delusions of superiority and self-righteousness are bi-partisan.

Nice read though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Whiteboy Jones 

 

Explain.

The laugh track adds a certain energy and feeling of theatricality that works brilliantly with farce.

Wasn't Fawlty Towers like Python in that it was filmed without an audience but later shown to one whose reactions were recorded?  I know All in the Family did the same thing for a while.

I agree, great article.  

Reading all the comments, I must say that first I don't see all the hatred toward BBT.  I agree, I enjoyed community much more, and that community was a movie lovers sitcom.  That being said, I don't think I am any less of a film nerd than anyone else on this site.  We may not always agree, and even in the nerd herd, there are many disputes as to what is good, great or worthy of the all important ignore.  

There is something very simple to notice, if you didn't have something in common with most of the opinions of the people that run CHUD, you wouldn't have been here in the first place.  You don't have to like everything each person says, or agree with every top 15 list they put out there.  You come here because there is some sort of opinion you really like or dislike.

Twilight fans also have the sites they like.  They go to them, and unless they are open enough to enjoy film the way most on here do, then they don't frequent the site, just as if you are not a twilight fan, you don't go to www.iluvtwilight.com.  

The hard thing for most of us though, is when someone says they love twilight, we chase them away.   It doesn't mean this person does not like Near Dark, Dracula, An American Werewolf in London or True Blood.   

I personally can't see how anyone would like Twilight, but so be it.  I saw the first movie (Not knowing too much about it) with my Wife, and we both hated it.  Haven't seen any since, but I have relatives who love it.  Good for them.  We just don't talk about it.  We have plenty of other things that we do agree on, and I always know I have movies that I can recommend that I believe have to be better, I just don't phrase it that way.

The pro of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is that all the sketches seem energized by the live fan response in a way they weren't on Flying Circus, where they were being performed for the first time and there wasn't that appreciative wave of laughter that greeted the beginning of, say, "Dead Parrot."

The con is that I've always felt they sort of vulgarized some of the bits for a young American audience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil 

Three camera sitcoms are out of fashion now, and that's fine, but I'd need an impressive list of single camera sitcoms to convince me that the format is on the whole superior to the one that gave us The Honeymooners, All In The Family, Cheers, and Seinfeld.

 

30 Rock and Parks & Rec and Community and such all owe a debt to Ricky Gervais and Edgar Wright and Bakersfield, PD, but to me the 3 camera shows don't automatically suck just because they owe even older pioneers. There's a formalism to shows that do it now which I actually kind of like.

I'm not saying that there haven't been great multi-camera shows, just that the format requires a certain amount of padding that makes it impossible to accomplish the same amount of things in the same amount of time, and that's a negative to me.  It's hard to express this without sounding sweepingly ignorant about a huge portion of TV history, but I have a hard time thinking of a multi-camera sitcom that I wouldn't prefer to see a streamlined version with room for 10% more jokes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Blank 

The pro of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is that all the sketches seem energized by the live fan response in a way they weren't on Flying Circus, where they were being performed for the first time and there wasn't that appreciative wave of laughter that greeted the beginning of, say, "Dead Parrot."

But that doesn't really apply to mutli-camera sitcoms either, where the material is always new. You're not going to have people cheering a new "bit" like that. Maybe you'll get cheers for a catchphrase or a recurring character, but that tends to be pretty obnoxious.

I can see the value of a live audience to some extent, but unless you're hitting the heights of Seinfeld in terms of audience synchronicity--and basically, nothing else has--I'd argue that the drawbacks outweigh the possibilities. If I want audience reaction, I'll get it from a variety, sketch comedy, or talk show. And even there it sometimes gets annoying.