Gloating? Not us.

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on April 12th, 2006

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Also shaky was the performance of another midseason series, the ABC comedy Sons & Daughters (3.2 million, 1.2/3), which pushed ABC to a historic low in the Tuesday 9-10 p.m. period.

We commented a couple weeks back on the infuriating way in which executives and the MSM fawns over “improvised sitcoms.”

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?

Sons & Daughters (See dismal ratings stats above) was one such atrocity– the Lorne Michaels-created sitcom was frequently cited as a largely improvised, edgy, experimental, ground-breaking, wickedly funny, watershed, blah, blah, blah.

From an interviw with the show’s creator, Fred Goss, on blogcritics.org:

What’s innovative, though not entirely unique, about the show is its use of improvisation to create naturalistic dialogue. “I wanted to do a show where we used improvisation more like an Altman approach, where we use improvisation as our creative process, but we don’t necessarily need you to know that it’s improvised,” Goss said.

ABC made sure viewers did know, however, by beginning the show with a verbal and written message that the dialogue was partially improvised– a “warning” Goss wasn’t fond of. “It either looks like an apology or bragging,” he laughed.

It’s bragging, all right.

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