1) Show your working out.

Now this was encouraged in maths exams, but less so in TV shows. It’s the point at which the writing begins to point out the conceits of the show and the mechanics of earlier scripts. It’s all very fun and meta, and often the episodes that do this are really great. But once you’ve let the genie out the bottle it’s pretty hard to get it back in again.

The most famous is probably the “Homer’s Enemy” episode of The Simpsons. As I recall, before the site sadly disappeared from the internet, this was a big vote getter on Jump The Shark Dot Com’s list of when The Simpsons jumped the shark. People vehemently hated it. Personally, I find it funny, but it did mark a point where they started to point out the conceits of the show and you started see the foundations that had made it great for 8 seasons get undermined, leading to bad ideas like a sober Barney and cartoon violence with no consequences.

Community flied dangerously close, dangerously early, last season with “Paradigms of Human Memory”, their fake clip show. Admittedly, it flies close to the wind most episodes due to the Abed character, but by constructing chunks of shows that did not exist, yet making them believable as real episodes, you could see a little too much of how an episode is written. Again though, it was a great episode.

It’s a general flaw with the Dr Who revival too, with too many writers who grew up with Doctor Who using the show to explore their own fandom of the character rather than writing straight forward Dr Who episodes. At this point I think we get the conceits inherent to the Doctor/companion relationship and it probably doesn’t need to be explored that much more. They’ve made for some good episodes, but it’s getting tired.

2) Forget what made you good and focus on what made you popular

Aka “listening to the fans”.

Two examples spring to mind, the first is Psych. It started as a great little detective show, and as great as the chemistry between its leads was, more importantly it had good mysteries to solve each episode. Unlike Monk, which had drifted far from being a whodunnit show, the mysteries were the focus early on and they worked. The technique of showing the viewer Shawn’s zooming in on clues allowed you to play along as couch detective.

However, that wasn’t the element that the fans loved. They liked the 80s pop culture references and the Shawn/Juliet non-romance romance. So by season 5 it was now bogged down in 80s pop culture and the non-romance turned into a romance. All to the detriment of the mysteries as they often got sidelined by stunt guest stars and an uneffective ongoing love triangle plot.

The other example is Hetalia.

What is great about Hetalia is the ludicrously specific historical gags. What the fans love though is gay innuendo. First TV series has the right balance, the second does not and it all becomes rather tiresome. Thankfully they seemed to realise this and the third appears to readdress the balance, helped in part by increased focus on other “countries”.

3) Getting bored of the characters you are writing

Sometimes shows get too popular and are making too much money to be cancelled. Again The Simpsons falls under this category. They even mention on early season commentaries that there were characters the current writers were bored of, like Mr Burns. Of course the advantage with the Simpsons is that it has a large cast and if they want to make it larger they can just draw new characters. A bigger problem is in live action comedies.

Like Friends.

Now I don’t know for sure that writers were bored with the Friends lead characters, and I don’t even like the show that much, but I ask you to compare the characters at the start of the show and the end of the show. Have they not turned into grotesque caricatures by the end? If you need a further contrast, look at Paul Rudd’s character. He seems like he’s come from a perfectly normal, rational sitcom and accidentally walked into a world occupied by screeching idiot monsters.

Are there other reoccuring problems you see in TV shows where they appear to be inadvertantly suiciding themselves?

Do you have other examples?

I apologise, because you if you like to laugh, you should be watching it. You’ll need to be an American or able to convince the internet you are one to watch it, but it’s a great show that seems to find a happy medium between the three camera and single camera sitcoms.

Technically, it’s a single camera sitcom, but unlike most single camera shows of the last decade, it lacks decadence and is written with the economy of a three camera sitcom.

As great as Arrested Development was, the reason it failed was because it was too expensive per episode. The massive cast, the various locations and numerous outside shoots all added up. Same with My Name Is Earl. Better Off Ted feels like it’s learnt from those mistakes (and not just because Portia Rossi’s in the show too).

It’s a comedy about production development centred around a company called Veridian Dynamic who make anything and everything. Its level of absurdity calls to mind The I.T. Crowd and Dilbert somewhat, though the RPG nerds among you will probably see it as the rightful heir of the R&D gags from Paranoia.

The economy of the writing lies in that they tend to use only a few regular sets per episode (two offices, a meeting room and a lab), few-to-none outside scenes, and there are only 5-6 characters (the daughter doesn’t appear every episode).

Something else I’ve noted is that while they’ll use the 21st century’s favourite gag of “You remember the time…” they’ll tend to let the dialogue do the lifting on the gag, rather than cut away to flashback. And having seen cutaway gags far too often in the last 10-20 years, it’s refreshing to let the dialogue do the work.

Which is not to say it’s all dialogue heavy, there’s plenty of physical and prop gags, but they are in service of episode or character, rather than throwaway stuff put in to pad an unfunny story.

Merry Chimpy Week!

I’d missed this last year, so let’s open with the chimpiest song to haunt my days and nights over the last year.

Following the return of the show on the BBC last week, I went back and watched the first series again. The first thing that strikes you is how much more straight it’s played compared to what follows. Of course at the time it still seemed pretty out of the ordinary, but the questions are much more sensible than they ended up, and the sketch show element isn’t present yet.

The big changing point feels like the Christmas episode, with the incredibly over the top musical opening that felt like Big Night Out, but with a Two Ronnies budget, Vic and Bob’s bizarre variety dreams made flesh. Then we get the clip round, where we see a clip from the “Roswell Incident”, a skit acted by Vic and Bob, rather than the archive footage they’d been using for the round up to this point.

The change is reflected in the credits, up until the Xmas episode, the show had a question researcher. With the Xmas episode’s new direction of just utter nonsense, that’s no longer needed. Also missing in the credits is Simon Ross (Jonathan’s brother) as “Format Consultant”. It’s now the show everyone remembers, pure Vic and Bob, guided by the hand of the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson as script supervisor.

Having a day off post-Ayacon so naturally I’m watching kids comedy shows on BBC2. Particularly struck by the sketch comedy version the popular Horrible Histories books. The episode that just aired closed with this skit, in which George I, George II, George III and George IV are portrayed as a boy band.

Between this and “Sorry, I’ve Got No Head” that I caught some of over Xmas, kids sketch comedy is probably much better right now than what passes for adult sketch comedy (Mitchell & Webb excluded, and that shares writers/performers with both these kids shows anyway).

Harenchi Gakuen Movie titles (1970)

Pro-Wres no Hoshi Aztecaser titles (1976)

Harenchi Gakuen TV titles (1971)

Ever since parody subs emerged a few years back I’d been hoping that Marvel would get round to doing something with this property. While I’d been hoping for a dub, with Stan Lee as narrator, it’s great to see it subtitled, and available for streaming on Marvel.com starting this week. New episode every Thursday. Presumably if it’s popular enough we might get a DVD/downloadable release.