{"id":1360,"date":"2007-09-27T13:05:56","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T18:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1360"},"modified":"2020-09-20T21:38:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T02:38:34","slug":"tickling-the-shark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1360","title":{"rendered":"Tickling the Shark"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never liked Happy Days<\/em> much; I very, very rarely watched it.\u00a0 But to the extent that I ever did<\/em> watch it, I tuned out\u00a0even faster<\/em>\u00a0when it got to the point when every major character would walk on camera, the in-studio audience would erupt in\u00a0pro forma<\/em>\u00a0applause; when Fonzie would go “‘eeeey”, the house would practically come down, as if Henry Winkler repeating “‘eeeeey” for the ten thousandth time was…well, worth applauding.<\/p>\n

Drove me nuts.<\/p>\n

I used to love MASH.\u00a0 The first bunch of seasons were good stuff – even though after the first six seasons Alan Alda started taking over as the show’s driving creative force (with the commensurate increase in political preachiness), it pretty much kept its “snap” about it…<\/p>\n

…until about the the eighth of its eleven seasons.\u00a0 It was about the time Gary Burghoff left the show that the wheels seemed to come off.\u00a0 I don’t think it was Burghoff’s departure itself, but some shuffling among the writing staff that scuppered the show.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whatever; for the first three or four seasons, the show was brilliant; seasons five through seven, uniformly excellent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eight through eleven?<\/p>\n

It was like the cast stopped playing a couple of sarcastic pacifist doctors, a conservative brahmin blueblood, a crusty old regular army guy, a neurotic nurse, a mild-mannered priest and a grumpy but ingenious draftee; they all became one-liner machines<\/em> that lived like doppelgangers within the bodies the “the” <\/em>stock surgeons, colonel, nurse and ex-transvestite characters, serving only the message and the writers; you could almost predict every line:<\/p>\n

UNSYMPATHETIC OFFICER CHARACTER: “If we stop trying to take back North Korea, what’ll we have?”<\/p>\n

HONEYCUTT: “Peace?”<\/p>\n

UNSYMPATHETIC OFFICER CHARACTER: “What are you?\u00a0 Some kind of comsymp?”<\/p>\n

HAWKEYE: “Well, compsymple pleasures are the best…”<\/p>\n

COL. POTTER: “Captain Pierce, I suggest you stop trying to kill<\/em> the major with comedy before you kill<\/em> your patients!<\/p>\n

KLINGER:\u00a0 “Habibi!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I write this, mostly, to set up some background for the most depressing thing that’s hit me all week.<\/p>\n

I saw an episode from the newest seasons of Scrubs<\/em> – by far my favorite new TV discovery – the other day.\u00a0 Now,\u00a0Scrubs<\/em> has been for five seasons one of the most crisply written and inventive shows ever, and a show that did “side-splittingly hilarious” (pick\u00a0 your episode) and “mind-warpingly poignant” (the “Waiting For My Real Life To Begin<\/a>” dream musical sequence with the heart-transplant patient stands out, and totally kills me) with equal, sometimes dazzling facility.\u00a0 And everyting you really<\/em>\u00a0 need to know about parenting, you can learn from Perry Cox.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the episode I saw the other evening reminded me of one of those episodes of MASH I hated so much back in ’81; where instead of the fanciful-yet-believeable ensemble that made the show such a standout, we got “a metrosexual, a black doctor and his bossy Latina wife, the neurotic rich girl and the arrogant jerk with a heart of gold” mouthing lines that might have been written for “Happy Days”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’m hoping they pull out of it soon…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never liked Happy Days much; I very, very rarely watched it.\u00a0 But to the extent that I ever did watch it, I tuned out\u00a0even faster\u00a0when it got to the point when every major character would walk on camera, the in-studio audience would erupt in\u00a0pro forma\u00a0applause; when Fonzie would go “‘eeeey”, the house would practically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[213],"class_list":["post-1360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","tag-winkler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75391,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions\/75391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}