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Let's Talk About Episode Count

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 If you watch a lot of TV, there’s something you’ve probably noticed. Source: looper.com Seasons are getting a lot shorter. It’s not uncommon for shows now to have 6-8 episodes per season, when not long ago it seemed like 20+ episodes was the norm. Granted, episode count has been trending down for a while. The original Twilight Zone, for example, had gargantuan seasons of 39 episodes. Recently, though, the decline has come from the rise of streaming. This change in viewing method has changed the amount of episodes that it makes sense for studios to produce. The traditional television season was built for viewers tuning in at a scheduled time each week. You could expect something new on a regular basis, except for the break in the summer. Watching a new episode was like tuning into Jeopardy or a baseball game. It happened whether you were there or not. If you missed it, you wouldn’t feel the need to go back and watch it. You’d just catch a different episode the next week. The networ...
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The Office as a School Series

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  Spoilers for The Office The Office is the best depiction of school I’ve seen on TV. Source: whatculture.com     People have come up with several different explanations as to why The Office became so popular with young people who’ve never worked in an office. I figured it was because The Office was a good show with well-made characters, and anyone could appreciate that. But an idea crept into my mind that the setting and format of this series really resembled a school. And apparently I’m not the only one. Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin, mentioned that he and writer Michael Schur came to that same conclusion: It’s been a question, why are the kids so into it? Like, why are there twelve year olds coming up to me, and saying all of these lines to me, like why is this happening? And we thought … I think what we truly weren’t thinking about, were the similarities between an unreasonable boss, who makes his employees do unreasonable things, sitting next to people you don’...
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It's Always Sunny: The Sitcom in its Purest Form

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    Spoilers for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia , of course. Mild spoilers for Friends and The Office .     When people talk about It’s Always Sunny , the first things they typically mention are how its characters are terrible people, how it uses dark and offensive humor, or how it’s an “anti-sitcom.” Those are all the show’s main selling points. But what I find most appealing about It’s Always Sunny , that lodges its place in my mind, is that it distills the sitcom format into its purest form.     The easiest way to demonstrate what I mean by that is to point you to Sunny ’s episode-naming convention. Look at the titles of these episodes: Dennis Gets Divorced. Mac and Charlie Write a Movie. Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare. The Gang Buys a Boat. The Gang Texts.     A character performs an action. This is the basic formula behind all sitcoms. Only, most shows have a little more pretense than that. They have series-long arcs and dramatic moments ...
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I Defend The Rise of Skywalker, Because I Can

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    The Rise of Skywalker was not a good movie. But what if it was? What if it was actually a masterful work of art, and we’ve all just been understanding it wrong? That’s probably not the case, but if majoring in English taught me anything, it’s that you can make any argument about something if you find even a little bit of evidence for it.    So, in the interest of being as annoying as possible, I’m going to argue that the most universally-disliked Star Wars movie is actually a work of genius. Not because I actually think that, but just because I can. Because I’ve gone mad with power.   Just like Palpatine.     TROS has a difficult job because it needs to serve as an end to the Star Wars saga – not just the sequels, but the entire thing. TROS has a relatively large amount of allusions to the prequel trilogy. More than The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi did, at least. Commercials for TROS used Duel of the Fates, the de facto theme song of the pre...
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