Friday, April 01, 2005
more sitcom thoughts
I also watched an episode of Life on a Stick on Wednesday. Why, you ask? Because Andy Richter Controls the Universe was the finest live-action sitcom since Newsradio, and Stick is the follow-up from ARCTU’s creator Victor Fresco. The commercials make this show look awful, which isn’t hard to do, because it is, in actuality, awful to the extreme! Maybe not to the extreme, but it is decidedly not good, and thus quite bad, and also horrible and horrific and all that. Much like Andy on Quintuplets, Fresco seems to be pretty much selling out here, cranking out a subpar show with all the hoary old sitcom trappings that no longer serve any purpose in this shiny newfangled millennium. I can understand, after working on an excellent but failed show, trying hard to appease the network and appeal to teenagers, and everything, but it's depressing nonetheless to see two talented people work far below their level. But damn, isn’t about time we moved past laugh-tracks, as a culture, and as a people? We can obliterate countless innocent women and children for absolutely no good reason, but we can’t get a single-camera, laugh-track-less sitcom to last without seasonal salvation from the executive level? Scrubs, a show I respect but never watch, would have been axed years ago if Jeff Zucker or somebody didn’t love it. Fox has been trying to kill Bernie Mac off for years, and ARCTU, The Tick, and Undeclared didn’t even get full seasons. Is it really so hard for our earthly brothers and sisters to laugh at something that doesn’t command you to laugh at every single utterance?
Okay, I’m getting off track. Life on a Stick is bad, yes. Most of the lines are horrible, the acting by Amy Yasbeck and the teenaged leads is distressingly broad and exaggerated, and the younger stepsister character suffers from terminal sass-mouth. And, of course, being a “traditional” Fox sitcom, the laugh-track is set on ultra-mega-murder-kill the whole damn time. It’s quite similar to the execrable That ‘70’s Show, but lacks that show’s sole not-quite-saving grace, the solid performances from Topher Grace and the actors who play his parents. Despite all this, though, you can see where Life on a Stick could improve. There were enough flashes of rightness in the one episode I watched to see that Fresco is straining to make a good show. The stoner / best friend character has a number of genuinely funny, unexpected, and absurd lines; when one character talks about a squirrel who wore a top hat (has Fresco seen The Brian Crews Show?!?!?), this lanky young man says that he hated that squirrel because he was “putting on airs”. Elsewhere he states that a pair of novelty contacts worn by the lead character would look good on a baby, completely appropriate of nothing. The actor who plays this guy occasionally had good delivery, but just as often was alternately stilted or rushed, sometimes spoiling a joke by barking out his line too hurriedly, or waiting just a beat too long. A few other moments, such as the step-sister feeling left out of a conversation because she doesn’t have a “bug-that-was-in-me story”, were good for a laugh or two, but for the most part this show is utter crap.
I also watched an episode of Life on a Stick on Wednesday. Why, you ask? Because Andy Richter Controls the Universe was the finest live-action sitcom since Newsradio, and Stick is the follow-up from ARCTU’s creator Victor Fresco. The commercials make this show look awful, which isn’t hard to do, because it is, in actuality, awful to the extreme! Maybe not to the extreme, but it is decidedly not good, and thus quite bad, and also horrible and horrific and all that. Much like Andy on Quintuplets, Fresco seems to be pretty much selling out here, cranking out a subpar show with all the hoary old sitcom trappings that no longer serve any purpose in this shiny newfangled millennium. I can understand, after working on an excellent but failed show, trying hard to appease the network and appeal to teenagers, and everything, but it's depressing nonetheless to see two talented people work far below their level. But damn, isn’t about time we moved past laugh-tracks, as a culture, and as a people? We can obliterate countless innocent women and children for absolutely no good reason, but we can’t get a single-camera, laugh-track-less sitcom to last without seasonal salvation from the executive level? Scrubs, a show I respect but never watch, would have been axed years ago if Jeff Zucker or somebody didn’t love it. Fox has been trying to kill Bernie Mac off for years, and ARCTU, The Tick, and Undeclared didn’t even get full seasons. Is it really so hard for our earthly brothers and sisters to laugh at something that doesn’t command you to laugh at every single utterance?
Okay, I’m getting off track. Life on a Stick is bad, yes. Most of the lines are horrible, the acting by Amy Yasbeck and the teenaged leads is distressingly broad and exaggerated, and the younger stepsister character suffers from terminal sass-mouth. And, of course, being a “traditional” Fox sitcom, the laugh-track is set on ultra-mega-murder-kill the whole damn time. It’s quite similar to the execrable That ‘70’s Show, but lacks that show’s sole not-quite-saving grace, the solid performances from Topher Grace and the actors who play his parents. Despite all this, though, you can see where Life on a Stick could improve. There were enough flashes of rightness in the one episode I watched to see that Fresco is straining to make a good show. The stoner / best friend character has a number of genuinely funny, unexpected, and absurd lines; when one character talks about a squirrel who wore a top hat (has Fresco seen The Brian Crews Show?!?!?), this lanky young man says that he hated that squirrel because he was “putting on airs”. Elsewhere he states that a pair of novelty contacts worn by the lead character would look good on a baby, completely appropriate of nothing. The actor who plays this guy occasionally had good delivery, but just as often was alternately stilted or rushed, sometimes spoiling a joke by barking out his line too hurriedly, or waiting just a beat too long. A few other moments, such as the step-sister feeling left out of a conversation because she doesn’t have a “bug-that-was-in-me story”, were good for a laugh or two, but for the most part this show is utter crap.
