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.

HIMYIM...in the 1960's

This summer I finally watched How I Met Your Mother (and in a span of 3 weeks). And let me tell you, it was one hell of an emotional roller coaster. It is set in Manhattan in both present day, and many years in the future when Ted Moseby is talking to his kids about how he met their mother. The show has everything from comedy to drama, and keeps you entertained every second of the episode. HIMYM has six main characters: Ted Moseby, a single architect looking for his soulmate; Marshall Erikson, an aspiring lawyer from Minnesota; Lily Aldrin, a kindergarten teacher and aspiring artist; Robin Scherbatsky, a career oriented journalist who Ted is in love with, and Barney Stinson, an extreme playboy who has a mysterious position at a bank. All of them always hang out at this bar named McClaren's, a sort of similar situation to Friends' Central Perk cafe.

So when it came to choosing a show to set in a different time period for my Production Design Independent Study project, my first thought was OH LORDY I NEED TO DO THIS ON HOW I MET YOU MOTHER. The professor running my study also thought it was a good idea, and told me to run with it. After much deliberation between different time periods (including the 1970's, 1990's, and even the ~future~) I decided to go with the 1960's, because it was a very prominent decade in terms of social issues, pop culture, in addition to the very distinct design style.

Part of the project is to take two characters and design their houses/costumes in that time period. To do so, I'll have to print out a script from an episode and do a character breakdown based on that. This will take the form of a COW sheet (what the characters say, what others say, what the writers say). My plan is to redesign Robin & Barney as characters from 60's, including their costumes and rooms. This will be especially cool since Robin is a reporter, so I can base a lot of her style off of reporters from the 60's (i.e. Jessica Savitch). Then Barney will be one of those high up business moguls (I am particularly excited to design his room because he always has the latest gadgets).

For period piece research, I will be using old Life magazines (on file on googlebooks) in addition to other periodicals that are at the Ithaca College Library! The library also has various large books telling of the cultural events of the 60's, which I will definitely be delving into.

I am super amped to get started on this project because I think it will be very enriching experience, in addition to building a hella cool portfolio of my own designs.

The Writer's Struggle: Finale Edition

Warning: How I Met Your Mother finale spoilers ahead. 

Nowadays, it's a rarity for a television series finale to be seen by the masses as well done. Every devoted fan feels that they know these characters better than the writers and it's unfortunately become the norm for fans to feel betrayed by a show's finale. "They didn't stay true to the characters," "There's still matters left unanswered," and "Well there goes countless hours of my life that I'll never get back," are just a few of the things that will hit the internet seconds after the episode airs. Come to think of it, I don't even know what the last finale was that didn't receive backlash. But I can tell which has received backlash (to put it super gently): How I Met Your Mother.

 
And here come the spoilers. That thing you've been waiting for all season, Barney and Robin's wedding, finally happens. After being married for approximately 3 minutes of the episode, it is revealed that they end up getting a divorce. If that didn't make you cry, they decided to kill the mom, who in retrospect was so insignificant to the story that I can't even remember her name. Then, jump to the narrator's timeline where Father Ted Mosby is telling kids how he met their mother, his children encourage him to go to Robin's house and start things up again. So he does. And they reunite. And the story of how he met their mother was no longer all that important. Cue the backlash.

It's easy to see how anyone who has watched all nine seasons and 200+ episodes of the sitcom can be upset about this. Let's be real, the finale was specifically designed in a way that people who watched every episode would hate the ever-loving crap out of it. They were compelled to care far too deeply about major plot points that ultimately didn't matter, and about couples who ultimately did not end up together. They had the rug pulled out from under them in the last five minutes with a gut-wrenching bait and switch. No one likes to be made a fool. I mean, the show ended up being about the very thing the producers insisted it was not in the beginning. "Ted will not end up with Robin," they said. We were fools to believe them. HIMYM fan or not, we've all been there. We've all felt the emptiness of an unsatisfying finale. We've all felt betrayed by a finale. But let's take a step back and look at it from an artistic standpoint. These aren't your characters. These are the characters of the creators and writers. And at the end of the day, they're just trying to tell you the story they set out to tell.

So who's to blame? The network. While the finale is garbage to dedicated viewers, it's actually a beautiful ending if you skip over all the meandering plot lines that caused you to care about bullshit that didn't matter at all to the story they intended to tell. I can tell you this confidently, because I speak from experience. This summer, I watched the very first episode and the very last episode to discover that the writers were onto something brilliant if only network television didn't feel the need to drag out every show they can. I like to call it the curse of American network television. It's a nasty cycle that goes like this: show has success, network milks it for every last morsel of ad-revenue-generating programming (domestically and overseas), the brilliant creative vision the writers began with gets lost in the bullshit, viewers get screwed over and turn into angry haters, writers go down in history for having failed their fans. But how does the network get the writers and actors to sell their soul? Come on, it's the entertainment industry. It's no secret the HIMYM actors were receiving a pretty large check by the last season.

But back to the brilliance of the HIMYM creators' concept: In the very first episode, nine years ago, we saw a guy meet a girl, feel an instant connection, and then decide they couldn't be together because he wanted kids and she didn't. She wanted to travel the world. Remember how long we rooted for Ted and Robin to be together? Well (here comes the brilliance) ultimately they got everything they had wanted in that very first episode. He got his time to have kids. She got her time to travel. And in the end, they got to be together. Also, it's kind of a cool message that you can have more than one great love (one being the mother, another being Robin). It's a beautiful story. And as a fellow writer, I respect (but disagree with) their decision to stay true to the story their initially set out to tell.

So I'm not asking you to let go of your anger and hatred for the show's finale. Your anger and hatred is justified after getting invested in multiple story lines that meant nothing. Just maybe consider re-placing your anger where it actually belongs: at the network, and away from the writers.