Travel: Sense and Sensibilities [Day XLIX]

Wherein I give network TV a fighting chance.

My sister Miriam is a huge Friends fan.

She has all the box DVDs and can faithfully quote Phoebe and Chandler's most rambling monologues.  Watching the show can pull her out of a slump - if I come downstairs and hear Jennifer Aniston's voice and a laugh track coming from the basement I know she needs to be on her own for a bit.  She knows the characters and how they'll behave in a given situation;  I think she sees the Friends as, well, friends.  Recently, she's shifted from a coffee shop to a neighbourhood bar, following another group of thirty-somethings in How I Met Your Mother, still running in its eighth season.

Conversely, I never really 'got' most scripted sitcoms.  I love TV, love the medium and what it offers in terms of character opportunities and chances for prolonged serial plotting, but the 'group of adult friends hang out wacky-style for twenty-two minutes' never really appealed.  Even Frasier, which does make me laugh when I've seen it in hotel rooms and airports, never caught on for me beyond the occasional rerun.  The shows I love try to build epic worlds only to die a painful, limping Death of a Thousand Nielsen boxes in their first couple seasons.  A few times, Miri has watched one of 'my shows' with me - she found the characters I adored unlikeable or unrealistic and the premises far-fetched.  Right or wrong, she's my barometer for public taste in television.

I think she will really enjoy Ben & Kate.  

And that's not a slur on Miri, and it's not a slur on the show.

I haven't talked much about the show itself in these entries because it seemed largely irrelevant, but today we had a table read* and the actors came in.  Hearing them bring so much energy to the lines, seeing the excitement on Dana and the other writers' faces as their show coalesced... I really felt a collection of people imagining something special together.

And it is hard for me to be objective now, even on the fringes of production, but the scripts make me laugh.  The actors - particularly Nat Faxon, whose last gig was as a screenwriter for the Descendants (he and his cowriters won the Oscar for it) - make me laugh.  The jokes make me laugh.  There's no question that Ben & Kate is situational comedy.  In some ways it's safe as houses.

But I'm going to watch it when I get home in the fall, even if I don't have a Nielsen box.

Notes from the 14 bus.

Wonderful Los Angeles.  A teenage boy got on the bus today with skate sneakers, low-riding baggy jeans, an unzipped hoodie that said Thug Lyfe on the back... and a pair of tzizit sticking out from under his t-shirt.

Cheers

Julia

* It's a meeting where the writers, producers and the main actors all get scripts and the producer reads through the entire script, with the actors running their dialogue while seated.  A regular table read of a half-hour show takes about fifteen minutes.