Word: sitcomic
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Wendy Wasserstein, whose very name is a deadpan joke on Jewish assimilation into the cheerleader values of Middle America, writes about Jews and Wasps without a tincture of sitcom condescension, finding poignant similarities in perpendicular lives, giving just about every character equal time and a fair number of laughs. Director Gerald Gutierrez has mined the big, handsome virtues in this deceptively modest play, putting a shine on everything from the show tunes and rock standards to the voices on Janie's telephone-answering machine (including the desperate plaints of Meryl Streep, in her best and most hilarious performance...
...Sitcom zaps boardroom bozos
economy, Empire Industries is make-believe. The company's boardroom bozos, behaving like rejects from In Search of Excellence, cavort in a sitcom that CBS unveiled 3 last week. The show premieres...
...Readers in 1923 had never heard a movie actor talk, never imagined a television screen. Technology kept bringing new transformations: long-playing records, high-speed cameras, videotape equipment. Not only arts changed but audiences as well. Local orchestras, opera, ballet and theater companies proliferated. So did the electronic babel (sitcom disc-jockey disco-rock singing commercial) that now seems an inescapable fact of life. In the age of the mass audience, more people could watch a Shakespeare play on TV than had ever seen it in all previous performances; more still watch network fare like Three's Company...
Movies and pay cable may brandish their R-rated license, but none of the saltier four-letter words has yet passed the lips of a prime-time hero. No sitcom vixen has bared so much as a nipple. In the new shows one can detect a struggling within the mass-media straitjacket of language and sex. Prime time is like a twelve-year-old tentatively imitating his big bad brother: sneaking a cigarette, practicing a curse word, miming an open-mouthed kiss. Sex can only be suggested, of course, but it may also be suggestive; one smoldering glance can steam...