Modified On March 22, 2008
Anyone in the mood for a big pile of dumb? Click here for Brian Lowry’s Variety article, “Why standups are sitting out primetime” in Friday’s online edition.
Lowry speculates on the reason that there are no more sitcoms starring comedians:
Everyone eventually learned that building concepts around standups is trickier than it looks, especially because most acts don’t lend themselves to becoming the template for a weekly series. Many comics were given shows despite slim resumes, and lacked the necessary foundation to survive the transplantation process, chewing through all their best material in a matter of weeks. Hell, it even took multiple tries to capture Cosby’s rumination about the vagaries of parenting, which yielded a payday sizable enough to keep a good-sized country up to its eyeballs in Jell-O pudding.
Ultimately, the lure of TV proved too intoxicating, and the talent pool wasn’t equal to the demand.
This nimrod thinks that when comedians star in a sitcom they “chew through all their best material in a matter of weeks.” Has someone hacked into the Variety site and posted this to embarrass Lowry and his publication?
He also seems to think that the reason there are no comics starring in sitcoms is because the talent pool is shallow. As if Hollywood is efficient! Is he actually this naive? Does he also think that American Idol finds the best singers in America and Last Comic Standing actually finds “the funniest people in the world.”
According to his bio, Lowry “has been a media columnist and chief TV critic at Variety since September 2003” and wrote for seven years for Los Angeles Times.
Yet he thinks:
1. That the networks have exhausted the standup talent pool
2. Tom Arnold, Sinbad, Greg Giraldo, Paul Rodriguez, Lenny Clarke, Kevin Meaney and Paula Poundstone are “second-tier comedians.”
3. When a comedian hosts a primetime, network gameshow (i.e. Howie Mandel, Bob Saget, Dennis Miller, Drew Carey) he has been “relegated” to hosting said gameshow.
4. After a comic has had his shot, he goes “scurrying back to the clubs.”
5. A comic gets only one shot!)
We suppose that, in 1983, Lowry would have regarded Cosby as a second-tier comic who had his one shot and had scurried back to the comedy clubs. After all, it had been 13 years since the cancellation of his two-season, 52-episode The Bill Cosby Show failure.
To be fair, the troubles besetting the sitcom can’t merely be explained by the deficiencies of comedians.
To be fair? To be less than moronic, perhaps.
The “troubles” that the genre is currently experiencing have nothing to do with the “the deficiencies of comedians” or a shallow talent pool, and everything to do with a hopelessly and fatally flawed business model, network executives who display jaw-dropping cowardice and an industry that can’t seem to wean itself from its current reality television addiction.
The pilot fish in the MSM (like our dullard friend Lowry here) watch from the sidelines and dutifully perpetuate ridiculous bromides like “the sitcom is dead.” All the while, broadcast television leaks millions of viewers every year and the antique publications that Lowry and his colleagues work for are helpless to stop their rapid slide toward extinction.
Somebody’s got a credibility problem.