Word: sitcomming
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...executive has ever underestimated the power of sex to sell a show. But NBC's new sitcom Grand is a clanging symphony of suggestiveness. Set in the fictional town of Grand, Pa. -- whose chief industry, a piano factory, has fallen on hard times -- the series introduces a clutch of socially diverse - characters and stirs vigorously. Atop the class structure in this small-town version of Upstairs, Downstairs is the piano magnate Harris Weldon (John Randolph), attended by a faithful but acerbic manservant (John Neville). At the bottom is the chain-smoking Janice Pasetti (Pamela Reed), who lives in a trailer...
Mostly it's bad. Though Carsey and Werner are not exactly groundbreakers, their shows have brought a less frenetic, more naturalistic style to the sitcom genre. But Grand (created by Michael Leeson, who wrote The War of the Roses) is packed with plot twists and gag lines, most of them leeringly lame. ("Desmond, have you ever been intimate when the two of you knew you weren't in love?" "I've been intimate when the three of us knew we weren't in love.") The show strives to be a wacky send-up of soap operas, but it lacks...
...Video Education and Rehabilitation). No one, however ascetic, seems immune to this electronic rescrambling of brain cells. A member of the Thanatoids, a Northern California cult enamored of death and resentful at still being alive, notes that his people look at TV religiously: "There'll never be a Thanatoid sitcom, 'cause all they could show'd be scenes of Thanatoids watchin' the Tube...
...characters. But comedy on the American plan can go soft, as Barr proved when she gave her abrasive stand-up-comic persona a sweetie-pie makeover for her hit TV show. She-Devil does the same to Weldon, without substituting much style or attitude. The movie is its own sitcom pilot, and only Streep watchers will be laughing...
Moviegoers love babies, of course. A lame comedy like 3 Men and a Baby earned $168 million by offering little more than Tom Selleck diapering a child. The talking baby is another familiar Hollywood tradition; street-smart infants narrated the film The First Time (1952) and a 1960 sitcom called Happy. Spermatozoa have schmoozed (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex), and in this year's Me and Him even a penis got chatty...