Tweet Originally posted at Tubefilter In last week’s 30 Rock sixth season premiere, Liz “Cranky Sue” Lemon was, all of a sudden, happy! Fans saw her skipping with animated birds and smooching on a mystery man (James Marsden). It was about time. Sitcoms about cranks have two options: cling relentlessly to the joke or allow characters [...]
Posts Tagged ‘comedy’
‘Jack in a Box’ Creator On His WGA Nomination and Writing Jack “Happy”
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 18th, 2012
Is Liz Lemon Bad At Her Job?
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on January 11th, 2012
Tweet Previewing the new (hit) Showtime series House of Lies, New York‘s Kera Bolonik offered a brief but pithy aside: Is anyone on TV bad at their jobs these days? Not if it’s a high-status gig. But feel free to be a bad waitress, or a crappy paper salesman or receptionist, or an ennui-ridden local-government intern, [...]
Web Series Spotlight: ‘Whole Day Down’ Enlists Willie Garson and Patrick Breen for the Artpocalypse
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on December 2nd, 2011
Tweet Willie and Patrick had an idea — and it was not for a web series. “We should open a gallery…. I have an art history degree. Fuck pilot season. I’m sensing a whole new direction for me….for, ugh, us,” Willie says. “And I can wipe my father-in-law’s face in the excrement of his own [...]
Web Series Spotlight: ‘It Gets Betterish’ Hates Lady Gaga
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on November 17th, 2011
Tweet Your friend sets you up on a blind date. So you head over to your local, non-profit, organic, trans-friendly laundromat and pick up a black shirt for the occasion. You meet the mystery man at a unpretentiously chic New York bar only to find out: he’s a Republican! What do you say? “I hope [...]
Fan Production as Industrial Response in ‘Transformative Works & Cultures’
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on November 15th, 2011
Tweet Some of you may remember the web series The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else, a satirical show about Rasha, a Lebanese lesbian forced to date men to finance her book project. The series got a lot of coverage last year, from NPR to Jezebel, and a host of lesbian-focused blogs and websites. Super-syndicated across [...]
Posted in uncategorized 
Tags: academic, comedy, gay, gender, independent film, race, research, web series 
No Comments »Is ‘Enlightened’ Enlightened? The Strange, Quiet Brilliance of HBO’s Dark Comedy
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on November 8th, 2011
Tweet I recently texted a friend to complain about how overwhelmed I was by my lengthy to-do list — which included, incidentally, writing this blog post. Me: “My to-do list is never ending bleh.” Friend: “It always has been Marps. I’ve never met you when you told me ‘oh I’m so chill I got nothing [...]
Web Series Spotlight: ’12 Steps’ Creator on Financing, Producing Independent Black Stories
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on October 12th, 2011
Tweet Thanks to Racialicious for linking! If you pay attention to web shows by and about people of color, you probably have come across 12 Steps to Recovery, a romantic comedy series about Parrish Diaz, a jingle composer and actor dealing with a hard break-up. In the show, Parrish’s friends decide the only way he’ll get [...]
NYTVF Dispatch: Doctors, Detectives and Bears, Oh My!
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on September 25th, 2011
Tweet Confession: I prefer my TV comedies packed with more jokes than plot points. 30 Rock is really the only network sitcom I watch religiously, and my favorite comedies of the past ten years include Will & Grace and Sex and the City, which are really more collections of jokes and puns with characters thrown in to [...]
NYTVF Dispatch: Dude, Today Is Not Your Day
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on September 25th, 2011
Tweet At the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum at this year’s NYTVF, Phil Rosenthal (Everybody Loves Raymond) told new writers one of the most common notes he got from executives was to make his characters “likable.” We all know broadcast TV loves likable leads, but the cable revolution showed us how some unlikability makes things more interesting [...]
TV’s Sci-Fi Queen Jane Espenson Returns to Comedy with ‘Husbands’
Posted by Aymar Jean Christian on September 12th, 2011
Tweet If you’re a sci-fi fan, you probably know Jane Espenson, who has written and produced some of the most ambitious television of the last ten years including Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the sadly cancelled Caprica. With over 40,000 followers, Espenson is among Hollywood’s few prominent female TV producers. This week [...]
