9 TV Shows Masquerading In the Wrong Genres
Have you ever watched a comedy like Two and a Half Men and thought to yourself, "This is not remotely funny." Or maybe you realized that the tears you felt streaming down your cheeks during an episode of Intervention did not spring from your eyes because of the incredible compassion you feel for the characters onscreen, but because you just heard the most hilarious-sounding cry escape an elderly man ever. Well, Movieline understands and just so happens to be here for you with a complete list of nine series running wild in the wrong genres.
1. Jersey Shore
Alleged Genre: Reality
Actual Genre: Anthropological Study
MTV can try to pass off their mutant Guido cast as impeccably poofed and penne-fed talent, but Movieline knows the secret: The network has isolated a different species entirely and is making money hand over fist-pump because of the public's fascination with their odd lineage. Like taking a trip to the zoo without leaving your couch, viewers tune in to watch these primates cavort around the boardwalk, beating their chests, punching anything that gets in the way of a meal or a free drink, clubbing females over the head and then dragging them back to the community smush room. Jersey Shore castmates fall somewhere between Genus Pan (chimpanzee) and Genus Homo (homo sapiens) in the Tribe Hominini with Ronnie obviously being the least evolved. If you were to replace the pumping techno background beats with tribal sounds, the Jersey Shore would seem completely organic airing on Nat Geo.
2. Hoarders
Alleged Genre: Reality
Actual Genre: Comedy
Listen, I get sad seeing families living in four feet of filth, but A&E pushes the reality envelope by making each living situation explored so comically-over-the-top that maggots in the coffee pot seem like a non-issue. This is especially the case after you've watched a middle-aged woman tearfully sort through her plastic horse collection or a crotchety feline-lover discover over a dozen flattened cat corpses beneath her living room rubble. Trust me, a laugh track would seem more natural in this show (for example, after a morbidly obese hoarder interrupts his intervention to ask for a pickle) than Mike & Molly. Take it from Movieline's Fat Joke Tracker expert.
3. Nurse Jackie
Alleged Genre: Comedy
Actual Genre: Drama
After winning the Emmy this year for Best Leading Actress in a Comedy, Edie Falco declared, "This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened in the history of this awards show. I'm not funny!" It would have been more fitting if she had announced, "My show is not funny." Sure, there are moments of grim humor, but technically, if your series has featured at least two serious overdoses by main characters, copious adultery (and not the black/white kind but the tortured stuff that is just as complex for viewers as the characters subjected and subjecting it), anxiety disorders among children and bizarre sexual tics that do not result in hilarity each episode, you should be disqualified from the comedy category.
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Comments
"Whatever the opposite of comedy is."
Tragedy.
Since I can't get to YouTube from work and I don't watch "Hoarders" regularly, I did not know about the cat corpse story. I didn't think anything in this article could be worse than that until I read that "Sh*t My Dad Says" was renewed for a second season. Blech and double blech.
By the 1950s America was ready to embrace a sitcom about one morbidly obese blue collar worker...
I was thinking the same thing. And wasn't the first big star of a sitcom show overweight? She ran her own studio. Her name and show escape me at the moment.
Lucille Ball was not overweight.
You forgot one that's even more obvious than Nurse Jackie:
Breaking Bad
Alleged genre: Drama
Actual genre: Comedy
OK that does indeed make a lot of sense dude.
web-privacy.edu.tc
Glee
Alleged genre: Musical-Comedy
Actual Genre: Torture Porn.
You forgot LOST as well.
Alleged Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Actual Genre: Soap Opera (with a touch of smoke monster & ghosts)
I would have never pegged The View as a Japanese gameshow until now. The only thing missing is someone being unceremoniously dumped into a pool of water every now and again.
I totally agree with Nurse Jackie. Whoever thought that treating this show like a comedy is a good idea is seriously screwed up.
Did you get the Jersey Shore - Antropological Study idea from Bones?
I would have never pegged The View as a Japanese gameshow until now. The only thing missing is someone being unceremoniously dumped into a pool of water every now and again.
i've never laughed during Hoarders---i would classify it under horror.
Nurse Jackie is funny, but it's very black humor, and it isn't funny often enough to be technically a comedy. Isn't there a genre called "dramedy"? I believe Gilmore Girls was known as a dramedy.
Most current non-theatrically filmed comedies (those aren't "tracks", they're real people laughing, silly ill informed detractors) are incorrectly identified as situation comedies. Most of them, such as Modern Family or Always Sunny are more in that Dramady genre.
Lost never claimed to be a sci-fi thriller. From day one the writers said it was a character drama, that has some sci-fi and action bits in it
Yes, a character-driven thriller/drama - I remember that's how it was described in one of the early interviews I read, but a lot of shows/movies never come out precisely on screen as they are described by the creators in interviews (some of the time they are misleading unintentionally). Also, there's a difference between a soap opera and a character-driven drama, which I'm sure you already know.
Fact is, if you take away the sci-fi/thriller mythology elements - LOST becomes nothing more than an Island-set soap opera (a lot of hardcore fans I know admit this and it's not neccassarily a bad thing either). Throughout the first 4 seasons, we these band of plane crash survivors - who are trying to build this little society and trying to learn to live together, learning to love and care for each other whilst awaiting rescue and dealing with their personal issues, meanwhile, there is all this mysterious supernatural/sci-fi danger around them - doesn't that sound like an Island-set soap opera to you (minus the sci-fi/danger elements)?.
But what made LOST, LOST was the freaky sci-fi/thriller mythology elements, obviously the characters and their inter-relationships were a big part of its appeal and popularity, certainly its initial appeal anyway (and the show and its web of mysteries would have been meangingless without rich characters), but the mysterious mythology elements is what kept LOST as a sustained hit. LOST continued to be a sensation because of the mysteries, everybody wanted to solve them (even my grandmother did lol). Not the soap operatic drama between characters. I doubt the show would have been as globally popular without the mystery thriller elements.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to criticize LOST by calling it a soap opera, like I said, being a soap opera isn't a bad thing. I'm just saying, at the beginning, the show came across as this equally balanced character-driven soap operatic drama & mysterious extraordinary thriller, then descended into a wierd sci-fi/full-blown soap opera show around Season 3 (some would say earlier) because the writers had no end date, so they kept having to pad stuff out and added needless emo/angst/soap operatic elements for the characters. For example, they went tediously overboard with the love triangle and the Jin & Sun story and dragged them out, too much back and forth with the characters which is a thing soap operas do A LOT. There was other stuff too. Just to be clear, Season 3 was for me when it got full-blown soap opera.
That was just my observation from watching the show. To each their own I guess. My sister loved the fact that it got more soap opera-y as it progressed. I didn't mind it to be honest, but I think it applies to this article.
Whoops, left this part out.
The basic point I was trying to make was that the sci-fi thriller/mythology elements was window dressing for the fact it was a soap opera from the description I gave you about the show from the first 4 seasons (in the 2nd paragraph). Even though those elements became the trademark of the show for fans, it didn't try to hide the fact that it was a soap opera at heart about these characters and their issues. But for me, it got too soap operatic as it progressed. That's my point.
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Do you have any tips for first-time blog writers?
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