Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Everybody Should Love Raymond
A typical sitcom is written for an MTV attention span. Scenes are maybe 4-5 minutes, with multiple characters wandering around the house and people going in and out of doors non-stop. You have to keep the viewers' eyeballs constantly moving, right? On last night's Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray and his brother Robert sat in a parked car and argued about who would have to care for their mother. I went back and checked the TiVo timer; it was a 13-minute scene. 13 minutes of two guys sitting in a parked car, and it was hysterical.
A sitcom is a SITuation COMedy. Television would be a whole lot better if we had more charcoms. CHARacter COMedies. If you have well-written characters, you don't need to rely on short, fast-paced scenes to be funny. You can spend 13 minutes in a parked car.
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A typical sitcom is written for an MTV attention span. Scenes are maybe 4-5 minutes, with multiple characters wandering around the house and people going in and out of doors non-stop. You have to keep the viewers' eyeballs constantly moving, right? On last night's Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray and his brother Robert sat in a parked car and argued about who would have to care for their mother. I went back and checked the TiVo timer; it was a 13-minute scene. 13 minutes of two guys sitting in a parked car, and it was hysterical.
A sitcom is a SITuation COMedy. Television would be a whole lot better if we had more charcoms. CHARacter COMedies. If you have well-written characters, you don't need to rely on short, fast-paced scenes to be funny. You can spend 13 minutes in a parked car.
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