A few months ago, Becky and I started making our way through our complete Friends box set from the beginning (don't judge—our tv only gets one channel now, so it's often been either this or Wipeout, which I still can't believe is a prime time show...on a major network...on Thursdays). We're up to season 9 out of 10 now. It's funny! (Aside from the occasional ever-so-slightly-homophobic joke that thankfully wouldn't pass these days.)
A friend of mine once said that Conan O'Brien was a genius because he was able to do the same jokes over and over every night. By that measure, Friends is Mensa. The cast consists of 4 great comic performers and 2 who really try but just can't act. I won't mention who the two are, suffice it to say that they were originally supposed to be featured as the show's main draws, that one actually has a catch phrase and the other often resorts to shouting her lines, and that their characters' names rhyme with Shmoey and Shmonica. The craziest thing is to observe the radical evolutions in Matthew Perry's voice, physical appearance, and personality. That guy must have been on some heavy drugs!
One of the characters, Ross, is a professor at NYU in the "Paleontology Department" (of course no such department exists at NYU...or at any other school as far as I know...?). I'm always fascinated by how academia gets portrayed in sitcoms. I remember one episode of How I Met Your Mother where Ted can't hack it as an architect in the real world, so he "settles" for being a professor at NYU—a job he doesn't even apply for, they just offer it to him. Nice!
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