It’s Friday – the official day in the blogosphere when you don’t have to apologize for posting about frivolous stuff (Friday “cat blogging” comes to mind), even on supposedly “serious” blogs. To help SITD keep up with that glorious tradition, here is a post that has nothing to do with politics, elections, the economy, or geo-politics. This post is about the media equivalent of junk-food – television sit-coms!

I’m not the world’s biggest television junkie. In fact I go through long periods when I hardly watch the thing. However with the advent of online television show viewing I’ve actually been able to keep up with a few of this season’s shows. Here’s my mid-season report on some current sit-coms I’ve been following. Follow along if you care.

Show: Community
Network: NBC
Notable Stars: Joel McHale as “Jeff Winger,” Chevy Chase as “Pierce Hawthorne.”
Potential Breakout Star: Danny Pudi, as “Abed.”

As little as I watch television, one of my guilty pleasures for years has been Joel McHale’s reality show mocking weekly, “The Soup.” Armed with no more information than “Joel McHale makes me laugh,” I tuned into Community when it started this season not expecting much.

McHale plays the lead role, Jeff Winger, a smooth-talking, ambulance chasing, amoral lawyer forced, by a strange and plot-generating circumstance, to enroll in his local community college. He’s snarky. He doesn’t care. He can talk his way out of anything. He’s an expert at cheating the system. I was pretty sure I’d seen this all before and then…

There’s really only two ways shows like this normally go… either Winger learns the error of his ways teaching the viewers an important lesson about playing by the rules and living honestly; or Winger’s world-weary ways are proven correct and the moralists on the show lose out to the clever & snarky Winger time and again proving what an ironic and post-modern age we live in. Which way did this show go? Refreshingly the answer is neither. Or sometimes both. Or either, but not consistently. The point is there is neither heavy handed moralizing nor a post-modern ironic sneer going on here – even as different characters on the show are seemingly set up each week to make such points. It’s a really strange balance to pull off, but so far this season the show’s writers have managed to do it really well. All the while a quirky and not as formulaic as you are originally lead to believe cast of students and teachers keep things interesting and funny. This is probably my favorite new show of the season.

Show: Modern Family
Network: ABC
Notable Stars: Ed O’Neill as “Jay Pritchett,” Julie Bowen as “Claire Dunphy”
Potential Breakout Star: Ty Burrell as “Phil Dunphy.”

ABC advertised the snot out of this show leading into the season, otherwise I never would have even noticed it. I more than half thought it would be a corporate-driven disaster and tuned in to watch the same way I turn to look at car accidents as I pass by. The premise is to make the same kind of faux-reality mockumentary as The Office, only set around an extended family at home instead of workers in an office. So far, so meh. But here’s the kicker… it’s a “modern” family so there’s (of course) a gay couple, the patriarch has divorced his wife and remarried a sexy younger Columbian woman, that sort of thing. “Modern” families are weird, get it?!

Well I thought I got it, but apparently I didn’t as the writers of this show also far exceeded my expectations. This show has a lot drier wit than the premise lead me to believe. The “weird” nature of the family itself is not called out at all – if anything quite the opposite as neither the family members themselves nor any of the characters they encounter seem to find their family unit terribly unusual. Ty Burrell, probably at least part by design, captures the kind of straight-faced, non-self-aware clownery as Steve Carrell brings to The Office. Ed O’Neill successfully channels his old Al Bundy persona into a more plausible real-world character while retaining the best elements that made it funny in the first place. But the cast doesn’t revolve around any one person. It’s an ensemble in the best sense, with even the kids (especially Rico Rodriguez as “Manny Delgado”) keeping things interesting and witty and just offbeat enough to be funny without taking it over the top. Another truly good new show.

Show: The Office
Network: NBC
Notable Stars: Steve Carrell as “Michael Scott,” John Krasinski as “Jim Halpert,” Jenna Fischer as “Pam Beesly,” Rainn Wilson as “Dwight Schrute”
Potential Breakout Star: They’ve already broken out.

The Office is a series which has been showing its age in recent seasons. I thought the show was tanking for good two seasons ago, but it recovered nicely until, with the “Michael Scott Paper Company” subplot last season, I thought it had finally and fully recaptured its mojo.

But sadly I think the show is beginning to founder again. This seasons’ big storyline thus far has been Pam and Jim finally getting married, fully retiring the flirtatious tension that formed the bedrock of the series’ early success. Relationship-based comedy has always been a big part of this show, but it’s “office” kind of relationship stuff. Jim and Pam’s flirtation worked for so long because neither one acknowledged that it meant anything in a very plausible fashion, considering they were coworkers. Supplementing that was the at first implausible then increasingly bizarre relationship between Michael Scott and his boss, Jan Levinson, playing up the office-based tabboo about such relationships to great comedic effect. There has been nothing to replace the relationship humor as each of those storylines came to an end, and there appears to be little attempt to recreate it.

Increasingly the writing seems to be based around Michael Scott acting bizarrely, straining against the faux-reality element in which a Michael Scott type character might just reflect something funny about your own boss, or at least one you’ve heard about. Steve Carrell is funny enough to carry many a scene despite the decreasing attention to preserving plausibility, but the series suffers for it.

Still a funny show, but it’s mostly coasting on past success at this point.

Show: Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Network: Fx
Notable Stars: Danny DeVito as “Frank Reynolds.”
Potential Breakout Stars: Charlie Day as “Charlie Kelly,” Glenn Howerton as “Dennis Reynolds,” Rob McElhenney as “Mac,” Kaitlyn Olson as “Dee Reynolds”

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it until it’s no longer true: This is the funniest show on television with the only possible exception of South Park. Season Five is upon us and the writing isn’t showing any signs of slipping at all (though I find it hard to imagine how they’ll ever top Season Four’s finale, “The Nightman Cometh”).

There are plenty of comedies that find humor in challenging social conventions and manners. These things tend to be delicately plotted and full of wry wit and social observation. Frasier comes to mind as a very successful and memorable example of this. Always Sunny is kind of like Frasier in that way… except where Frasier’s writers applied humor like an artist deftly crafting an oil painting, Always Sunny applies humor like a psycopath armed with explosives and bent on destroying the entire art studio. If the show’s writers (who also happen to be its lead actors) held back even slightly this particular comedy of manners in which cutlery and double entendre is replaced with chainsaws and pure Id wouldn’t work at all. But they don’t hold back. If anything they surprise by how completely they’re able to push past any expected boundaries show after show, season after season.

Don’t misunderstand, this show is not about simple “shock value.” This is an all out assault on manners and conventions so extensive you may not even realize they exist until you see this show violate them in manners that strike one as SO wrong and therefore so ridiculous at once. That’s its humor, and the only thing quite like it on television today is the aforementioned South Park.

That’s all for the review for now. Feel free to chime in with the usual agreements, disagreements, additions, and insults in the comments.