Situation Normal

Back at the beginning of Blaugust I posted a list of TV shows I was in the middle of watching. To recap, the shows were:

• Good Omens 2
• Two Broke Girls
• Edens Zero
• Young Sheldon
• The Owl House

I have now finished all of them except for Young Sheldon, although in this context "finishing" Edens Zero meant getting to the end of Season One. I want to watch Season Two but I clearly don't want to watch it that much because the very low bar of swapping over to Crunchyroll has so far proven too high for me.

 

As for The Owl House, until someone green-lights another series, which will happen one day, I think I've probably said all I want to say about show for now. There are four Owl House episodes of the Disney series Chibi Tiny Tales I haven't yet seen, though... 

 

  Two Broke Girls

I do have something more to add to my earlier observations on Two Broke Girls. The show remained admirably consistent  throughout. It started with a ridiculous premise and a complete abnegation of any kind of logic or reason and kept up those stellar standards for the whole six seasons. Every time anything threatened the "sit", like the girls actually making enough money to stop being broke, the "com" asserted its authority and reset things to where they needed to be. I found that adhesion to the ur-concept in the face of all attempts to insert the least element of realism into the show to be one of its greatest strengths.

It's also a show that relies to the heaviest degree on repetition. Most of the humor comes from internal references and running gags. One of the tropes of the show that I particularly liked is the cash register that pops up at the end of every episode to show exactly how much money the girls have saved. 

 

In Season One, Caroline sets a target of $250k as the sum required to turn Max's Homemade Cupcakes into a viable business. At the time it seems like an unlikely goal but thanks to the sale of Caroline's backstory to Hollywood (Probably the most realistic and believable plot in the entire six seasons.) there is a point at which the cash register dings up a quarter of a million dollars. Which, of course, disappears as fast as it arrived. 

 

The girls both have significant relationships, the show being sporadically and in some small part a romcom, all of which are, inevitably and for sound plot reasons, doomed to failure. Perhaps the one fortuitous outcome of the unexpected cancellation of the series is that the final episode closes with Max engaged to be married to her wealthy lawyer lover and Caroline in a firmly committed relationship with her working-class, Italian-American boyfriend.

 

It's absolutely guaranteed that, had the series continued, neither of those relationships would have neatly folded away into happy-ever-after but because the series ends where it does it's entirely possible to imagine that's what happened next. It makes for an oddly satisfying ending. I came away content.

 

Good Omens 2

This is an interesting one. I should probably issue a trigger warning for fans of the show before I get started.

 

That does make it sound like I must have hated it but that's far from the case. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I just didn't think it came anywhere close to being either as funny or as compelling as the first season.

I remember Season One as being quite complex. It had a lot of characters and a number of sub-plots, all of which were fairly coherently coaxed together into a finale that made some kind of sense of and brought some kind of resolution to all of them. It felt quite novelistic, with its long-form heritage making itself evident throughout. If anything, it might have been a bit baggy. It certainly never felt like it was in any kind of a hurry.

Season Two, by comparison, felt short, rushed and incomplete. I found it quite unsatisfying at times, particularly during the zombie episode, which made some sense emotionally but just seemed to be quite badly done. I don't like zombies at the best of times but comedy nazi zombies are really too much to take for a whole episode.

The core of the show is, of course, the relationship between the two central characters, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, as portrayed so deliciously by Michael Sheen and David Tennant. In the first season the performances of the two stars are exemplary but in the follow-up I never felt quite the same chemistry between them. In narrative terms, the relationship only becomes more complex but on the screen it seemed just very slightly flat. 

 

The cast as a whole is very good, with Jon Hamm appearing to enjoy himself perhaps even more than he should as the memory-wiped archangel, Gabriel. All the newly-introduced characters are interesting and/or endearing, my particular favorite being Muriel, a somewhat naive, not to say dim, angel played to perfection by Quelin Sepulveda. 

The problem from my perspective wasn't really with the quality, for once, but the quantity. As I started watching the fifth and final episode I literally had to pause the stream and check it was the last one. It seemed the whole thing had barely gotten started before it was over. 

And yet, rushed as it felt, it also seemed as though too few ideas had been stretched too thin. It was a very odd sensation, to be left wanting more but not being able to say more of what. 

 

I have a suspicion Good Omens 2 is one of those shows that might make a stronger impression on a second watch than a first. I suspect much of my dissatisfaction stems from expectations created by my fuzzy recollections of Season One. I don't think the two seasons are as consistent in tone as I would have anticipated. Season Two would probably benefit from being judged separately rather than in comparison. 

Whether I will ever watch it again is another matter. I can readily imagine re-visiting Season One but I think it's going to be a good while before I regenerate any enthusiasm for another sit-down with the sequel.

 

Which just leaves...

 

 

Young Sheldon

Young Sheldon is, of course, a sitcom based on the character played by Jim Parsons in The Big Bang Theory. There's a lot I could say about the show already but I'll hold back on most of it until I've finished the run. I do have a few notes, though...

I'm going to say up front that I really like The Big Bang Theory. I know that's a controversial stance to take in many quarters. I've read a number of blog posts and web articles about why and how the show is disrespectful to the various communities who see themselves stereotyped and ridiculed by its characters and storylines and I don't fundementally disagree with some of those interpretations and reactions.

The thing, I think, that almost all of those analyses omit to recognize is that most sitcoms are reliant on stereotypes, which they ridicule. It underpins the whole genre to some considerable degree. 

 

I suspect the issues some have with this particular sitcom stem from an unfamiliarity with the form as a whole. As I was reading some of the commentary, it was noticeable how often the alalysis was prefaced by an assertion that the writer didn't usually watch sitcoms, or not sitcoms like this, successful, popular, mainstream, network half-hour shows. I also suspect that being confronted with a stereotype someone feels might be applied to themself makes that person less amenable to finding said stereotype amusing.  Few people appreciate being seen as the butt of a joke. 

 

What good sitcoms do, however -  and I would argue The Big Bang Theory is a good sitcom - is to make stereotypes feel more nuanced over time. Good writing and especially sympathetic or complex performance can cause a general audience to warm to personalities they would otherwise shun, simply by allowing viewers to get to know the characters as individuals, not just as representatives of a type. 

 

I'm considerably more inclined to listen to the arguments of those who seek to explain why the writing or acting in TBBT fails to open up the stereotypes it plays upon, thereby revealing the human beings inside, rather than those of the faction that thinks the show fails out of the gate just by trading in stereotypes in the first place. There's a very supportable case to be made that the writing and acting across the long run of the show is inconsistent, self-indulgent and sometimes lazy. Not every episode is good, let alone great.

 

Even though I very much enjoyed the parent show, however, I did not immediately warm to the idea of a spin-off featuring its most obviously annoying character as a ten-year old. It seemed to me that the kind of manic self-absorption exhibited by the adult Sheldon Cooper, manifesting primarily as it often does as a collection of tics and tropes, while it might be humourous in an adult character, would most likely be just disturbing and uncomfortable in a child.

For that and other reasons I didn't rush to find out if the writers managed somehow to avoid the very obvious pitfalls of the concept. It was only a combination of a gap in my sitcom dance card and a news item that said the show was - astonishingly - starting its sixth season that got me take it out of my watchlist and actually start watching it.

Honestly, it was the six seasons thing that did it. I just couldn't believe it had lasted that long. We all know how mercilessly fast shows get canned these days. For any show to get that far had to mean there was something there worth checking out.

There is and it's very simple. Like Two Broke Girls, Young Sheldon is just a plain, old-fashioned classic sitcom. There's nothing remotely fancy or clever about it. It relies wholly on sound charecterisation, consistent writing and some very solid acting by a strong, ensemble cast.

As with many of the best sitcoms, there's an extended family at the center. The set-up is instantly recognizeable no matter that most of the viewers will never have set foot in East Texas. All the storylines revolve around the usual quotidian concerns of growing up, going to school, making friends, working and getting along with the neighbors. 

The two things that most suprised me about the show, of which I have now seen the first two seasons, were firstly how unfocused on the titular character it is and secondly on how quickly it foregrounds Sheldon's meemaw, superbly played by the wonderful Annie Potts. If I didn't know the provenance of the show, I might have assumed she was the well-known character from a previous success, around whom a spin-off had been built.

 

Two seasons in, no-one appears to have aged. I am curious to see how that changes. One of the big problems all successful sitcoms starring child actors face is how to keep the storylines cute as the actors grow less so.

 

It's a particularly pointed issue in this show because Sheldon is already running well ahead of the usual  developmental markers. He's a ten year-old in high school, being courted by Universities. There's already been a storyline concerning the difference between his intellectual and emotional maturity and how it predicates against him moving away from home to take up the opportunities already coming his way. That's not going to work so well when he's fourteen, which I assume he will be by Season Six. 

Or maybe the whole thing doesn't unfold in real time. I can't say I've been keeping track. Maybe he'll be ten until the show ends and we'll just have to look at him like we look at the adult actors playing high school kids in Grease; with wilful suspension of disbelief.

It's not something I need to think about just yet. I have four more seasons to watch before I get there. I'll keep whatever observations I may have on what I see along the way for another time. For now, I'll just say it's another good sitcom. I'm enjoying it.

 

Glancing ahead, my current viewing slate looks like this:

• Young Sheldon
• Arrested Development
• Carole and Tuesday
• Captain Fall
• Riverdale

Where last time everything was on Amazon Prime, this time it's all on Netflix. Again, I don't think that means anything, other than that obviously one streaming channel isn't enough any more.

I'll get to my thoughts on those shows when I get there. I also have a post I've been wanting to do for weeks now about Cannon Busters, a show I finished watching a good while back. I'm not sure I ever even mentioned it until now. 

So many shows; so much to say about them all; so little time to get it done.