Word: sitcomming
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...episode of HBO's new sitcom 1st & Ten opens with a shot of two comely lasses soaping themselves in a locker-room shower. Their endowments are on full display and duly noted by two football jocks ogling them from the doorway. The casual nudity may be startling to some viewers, especially since it has nothing to do with anything that follows. But for veteran watchers of cable TV series, such obligatory "skin scenes" are old hat. Their purpose is not so much titillation as information. The message: This is cable, folks, not network...
More and more, that is the only way to tell. As cable fights for viewers in the competitive TV marketplace, it is turning increasingly to sitcoms and other network-style series. 1st & Ten, which debuted in August, follows the fortunes of a struggling pro football team owned by a sexy divorcee. Showtime's newest entry is Washingtoon, a sitcom about a naive freshman Senator. The Disney Channel last season scored with Still the Beaver, an update of the old network comedy Leave It to Beaver, and this month introduced Danger Bay, an adventure series about a family that saves animals...
...telecasts reruns of such defunct network series as United States and Breaking Away. Nickelodeon, the children's channel, is trying to attract older viewers at night with reruns of chestnuts like The Donna Reed Show and Route 66. Even MTV now interrupts its playlist of rock videos with a sitcom on Sunday nights, an import from Britain called The Young Ones...
...misty glimpse of the sweet by-and-by. The future is not dramatized because the elements of drama no longer exist. Instead, the narrator tells us about 1986, the year humanity took its first step down the evolutionary ladder. The tale is a burlesque that mixes natural history, sitcom humor and the Old Testament. For the Flood there is conflict, economic disaster and pollution; the part of Noah's Ark is played by the Bahia de Darwin, a cruise ship that shuttles tourists from Ecuador to the Galapagos. There are baggy-pants characters including a Midwestern con man, a widowed...
Aaron's direction is so unimaginative and deliberate that one gets the feeling that Maxie is a television sitcom. In fact, there are awkward pauses after many jokes, as if Aaron was expecting a laugh track to be put in. Even the soundtrack sounds like something from TV, resembling the Mary Tyler Moore theme when the mood is happy, and the MASH theme when it is bittersweet...