People like to think of the ‘war generation’ as being tough as nails. After all, they’d lived through the Blitz, right?
Wrong. Look at this rubbish public information film from 1948. It’s actually funny. How pathetic is that compared to the scary arsed stuff that the 1970s gave us?
It’s time for our regular look at the TV that the BFI is showing, this time in the month of August 2013. This month, the Doctor Who celebrations leap to the ninth Doctor – the eighth Doctor will see his own celebrations in September – with a showing of his last two episodes Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways:
But there’s also a Patrick McGoohan season – when I’m on holiday, of course – as well as a preview of Cillian Murphy’s first major TV role, BBC2’s Peaky Blinders, and an ITV ‘Missing Believed Wiped’.
Usually, there’s a situation in a sitcom. That’s where the word comes from.
Satisfaction laughs at that perfunctory requirement. It doesn’t even bother to explain what its situation is, although you can probably guess by the end of the first episode: hot, young, upwardly mobile couple find their style slightly cramped by the slobby friend/lodger who’s always getting in the way of their couple-y fun.
Yet for all the focus placed on this situation in the pilot episode, it might as well be about the difficulties of keeping meat fresh in the summer, that’s how little interest the premise is to the writers. But stop right there. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in Canadian sitcoms: place too much emphasis on the sit instead of the com and you end up with high-concept shows, such as InSecurity and Seed, with well developed situations that don’t actually make you laugh.
Satisfaction, however, which foregoes not just situation but also much similarity to reality, despite being based on “real life experiences”, does at least pass the critical “five laughs per episode” threshold for a sitcom.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, break open the champagne: we actually have a moderately funny Canadian sitcom on our hands. Here’s a trailer:
In the US: Sundays, 10pm, Showtime. Starts June 30 In the UK: Tuesdays, 10pm, Sky Atlantic. Starts July 16th
There’s presumably rather a lot of sh*t going down in LA, thanks to a combination of huge amounts of money and the number of famous people with personality issues, addictions and secrets they’d rather people didn’t know about them. So equally presumably there’s a group of people whose life it is to help cover up the inevitable colossal cock-ups that result from the collision of these things.
Ray Donovan, created by Southland‘s Ann Biderman, looks at one such man, the eponymous Ray Donovan (Live Schreiber, last seen doing TV work on CSI) – the Mr Wolf of the entertainment business…
…for whom no clean-up job, whether it be a stalker, a dead woman or a ‘straight’ actor who likes to pick up gay, transvestite hookers, is too hard and who’ll stop at nothing, even murder, if he has, too. The only thing he can’t fix? His relationships, particularly when his father (Jon Voight) comes out of prison and starts to put his nose into his family’s affairs. Here’s a trailer, and if you’re in the US, the entire first episode for you to enjoy.
