For as long as there has been TV, there has been the genre known as the sitcom.
In the early days (I LOVE LUCY) there was a laugh track. Now there isn't.
Otherwise nothing has changed.
The sitcoms are full of quirky people you could never possibly meet in real life. They get into odd situations and they always say the cleverest possible thing when talking to each other. And they always say it with a straight face, because one of the rules of sitcom is you cannot laugh at your own dialog, that would make the audience redundant.
So how would you do an anti-sitcom? You would write a drama full of people who look and act like people you know. In other words, real people, people with issues.
And you would script it so they talk like people you know. Regular dialog. Regular conversation.
And no one would have to worry about reacting to their own lines because it seemed they did not care whether you (the viewer) was watching or not.
Not easy to do. But, again, of the hundreds of shows I have seen, and the hundreds of IMDb reviews I have written, this show remains consistently engrossing while giving you the impression you may be watching a documentary.
Extraordinary.
In the early days (I LOVE LUCY) there was a laugh track. Now there isn't.
Otherwise nothing has changed.
The sitcoms are full of quirky people you could never possibly meet in real life. They get into odd situations and they always say the cleverest possible thing when talking to each other. And they always say it with a straight face, because one of the rules of sitcom is you cannot laugh at your own dialog, that would make the audience redundant.
So how would you do an anti-sitcom? You would write a drama full of people who look and act like people you know. In other words, real people, people with issues.
And you would script it so they talk like people you know. Regular dialog. Regular conversation.
And no one would have to worry about reacting to their own lines because it seemed they did not care whether you (the viewer) was watching or not.
Not easy to do. But, again, of the hundreds of shows I have seen, and the hundreds of IMDb reviews I have written, this show remains consistently engrossing while giving you the impression you may be watching a documentary.
Extraordinary.