The Beauty of Sitcoms

One thing I really miss about high school or back when life was easier freshman year is the precious time I had to enjoy watching my favorite sitcoms. Not that I don't have the time anymore, but being all grown-up, I use my time a little bit differently. However, if I am ever feeling sick or down in the dumps and know I have some time to spare, my go-to cure is sitcoms, sitcoms, sitcoms. Whether its That 70s Show, Parks and Recreation or How I Met Your Mother, I know any one of these series is sure to lighten my mood right away.

What I love the most about sitcoms is the unique character personalities. On most shows of this genre, there are usually a group of 5 or more friends or characters within an environment that have very distinct traits. For example, in How I Met Your Mother, Barney is the player, Ted is the hopeless romantic, Marshall is the kind, sentimental one. On That 70s Show, Kelso is the airhead, Jackie is the "popular" girl, Donna is "one of the guys", Hyde is the rebel and Eric is the innocent, nerdy one. It is interesting when such different personalities are put together in these shows because it makes for interesting character interactions and is often the cause of conflict which makes for an entertaining storyline. A specific example that I can think of is in That 70s Show when Jackie and Hyde secretly date behind Kelso's back. Hyde hates Jackie throughout the whole show, but then is suddenly attracted to her one summer. They have conflicting personalities which causes problems at first, but ultimately leads to intimacy.

Another thing I love about sitcoms is the simplistic story lines and the length of the episodes and seasons. Because it is a light-hearted genre, story lines are often resolved within one episode rather than over the course of an entire season as in a drama. It is an easy genre to pick up and watch whenever you feel like, not really requiring much of a commitment. However, I guarantee you usually will get hooked. Sitcoms frequently last for more than 5 seasons (at least the really good ones). Netflix provides a lot of the best options including what I mentioned above and others such as Friends, 30 Rock and The Office. If you're looking for a good show to binge-watch, sitcoms are definitely your go to genre.

Better Late Than Never

Last Saturday night, while everyone was getting ready to go out for their first weekend back at IC, I was sitting in my room, alone, in the dark, eating Chinese food (from Wegmans, because why not?), watching Friends.

I had been told since I was--I don't know--born to watch Friends by many people in my life. My friends reference the show all the time and I play along as if I know what they're talking about. Just last week, Taylor Swift performed in Los Angeles as part of her 1989 World Tour and brought Lisa Kudrow out to perform a song that her character, Phoebe Buffay, wrote on Friends called "Smelly Cat." My roommate Ali freaked out and showed me a video. I didn't really know how to respond.

This weekend I decided to give it a shot and Netflix made it very easy by putting all 10 seasons up (YAY). Also, each episode is only 22 minutes long, so it was very easy for me to get right into the show.

I'm not gonna lie, I didn't like the first episode. It seemed like every other cut was a jump cut, I couldn't see why everyone loooooves Rachel, and it just felt the same as every other sitcom I've ever watched. Then I realized that most of the sitcoms I watched growing up were based off the success of Friends; once I let this fact go, it started getting better.

By the fourth episode, I caught myself laughing out loud (literally) at one of Chandler's lines.  

By the fifth, I was invested in the characters. By the seventh, I remembered something important that one of my professors abroad had said about the show. 

Dr. Richard Weight taught my British Youth Culture class, and he often brought up the reasons why youth culture exists. Basically, young adults suddenly had more time to be young. They were going to school, living and learning with people of the opposite sex, and most importantly, not having children. He always put this into fancy terminology and called it "pre-marital cohabitation" and used Friends as the biggest example of this in the media. 

Friends is not just the sitcom that influenced all other sitcoms--it shows a drastic shift in youth culture. People did not go straight from being children to having children. Young people took their time in life and learned to be independent. In the pilot episode of the show, Rachel moves in with Monica when she runs away from her own wedding.

The show is also culturally important because it is one of the first shows where the characters openly discuss dating, childbirth, sex, and sexual orientation. (And I'm only 10 episodes in). Samantha Allen writes in an article for Arts.Mic that, "There would be no New Girl, no Mindy Project, no Sex in the City without Friends."

After reading her this blog, Ali says that she's "proud of me." I don't know how much more of Friends I'll watch, solely because there are many other TV shows I want to see, but I don't regret a minute of it.

Murphy's Law: A story of a filmmaking attempt, a flood and my rejection from Emerson College.

When I was a senior in high school I was in the midst of my college application process I realized that for Emerson College I needed to submit some material of a film I'd made. Besides claymation I'd never really made a film save a film I made in 8th grade and one at a Boston University film camp that I couldn't use. My high school didn't have any filmmaking classes so I had very minimal experience in the actual process. The film could be no longer than five minutes, something I thought would be initially easy but turned out to be much harder to tell a story in. In the next week or so I churned out a short script. It was about a group of friends who when on a test drive of a futuristic car, become stranded and have a falling out which leads to secrets about them being revealed. After writing the script I gathered a group of friends and flip camera (the only kind I could get access to) and got ready to film. This of course happened right when my town was hit by the worst flood in its' history. As half my town was underwater, this made shooting a little more difficult.

The lower half of Bloomsburg PA

Eventually the waters lowered and I decided it was time to film. We ended up shooting in an area damaged by the flood as I thought it would give a good look to the film, cracked roads, uprooted trees and more. We ended up shooting on a small road just off a creek that have severely flooded. The cast had vastly different times they were free so this made finding times to shoot very hard along with school. We ended up shooting most days after school at 4. Having no lighting equipment, it was a race against the setting sun. Throughout the film the lighting changes vastly in shot to shot. The weather also disobeyed us so extra lines were added to explain the rain and it's absence in later scenes. In the end the film didn't look fantastic but I was proud of what we did. Looking back now the film is pretty terrible and I squirm at lots of things I could have done better. Needless to say I didn't get into Emerson, but I did end up here, so I'm pretty happy about that. Of course one version of the film is embedded at the top of this post for your viewing pleasure. Please be nice.