Fox's Free Ride re-invents sitcom!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 1st, 2006

The folks in Hollywood are at it again.

Barry Garron, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, on Fox’s Free Ride:

Searching for a different approach to the traditional sitcom, Rob Roy Thomas, a veteran commercial director, came up with a series in which actors rely on a story outline and their own improv skills. After piecing together the best takes, the result was sensational. Sadly, Significant Others lasted only two seasons on Bravo.

Yes. How very, very sad.

The sitcom, don’t you know, is dead.

The truly funny sitcoms– the ones that will carry us into the next Golden Era of Television– won’t need writers. Brave souls like Rob Roy Thomas will re-invent the form and skilled actors will merely improv their way into the Television Hall of Fame. No writers need apply. (Those pesky writers were getting in the way!)

Why do they insist on this fantasy? What is so utterly horrifying to these nitwits about taking an idea for a sitcom, hiring accomplished writers to concoct truly humorous situations and dialogue, then hiring talented actors with a flair for comedy? Why all these wistful daydreams about a world in which we don’t need writers, the actors are all triple threats and the genre that brought us The Honeymooners, Mary Tyler Moore and Seinfeld is a flawed model tossed unceremoniously on the scrapheap of television history?

How long before AFTRA insists on writers’ pay for the actors? How long before they insist that all actors on these “Improv-coms” join the Writers Guild? Can you imagine being a writer on one of these shows? Oh, sure, you get that fat paycheck for 13 weeks or so, but then you pick up the trade paper and see “Writers Unnecessary!” (And, how utterly unimaginative on the part of the publicists– highly paid publicists!– at these networks! Can’t they figure out any other way of making their sitcom seem noteworthy?

And why is it that the producers of dramas never claim that their product is improv-ed? (Well, with the exception of Henry Jaglom. Has anyone, not doing acid, ever made it more than 12 minutes into a Henry Jaglom movie? Oh, and Woody Allen. Has anyone enjoyed any of the “largely improvised” Woody pics lately? I think some of them were supposed to be humorous… it was hard to tell, though.)

It’s good to see Allan Havey in a series– for that fact alone, Free Ride was worth noting on this website. But it would be so nice if they abandoned this moronic “re-inventing the sitcom” story line.

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