Maybe it’s just because I hate traveling so much but this ignoring the realities of travel also really bothers me in globe trotting shows like Alias and Covert Affairs. No way does somebody look that good and stay that fit when they travel the world a few times a week (commerical to boot). It’s really hard to suspend disbelief seeing “I’m in LA, now I’m in Berlin, now I’m in Tunisia, now I’m in Shanghai, now back to LA a couple days after it all began and boy do I look and feel great!”
Don’t get me started on the whole “everybody is a polyglot that fluently speaks 15 different languages” trope.
I started watching Girl Meets World out of nostalgia. But I just had to stop. Every episode was the same plotline. I don’t mind cheesy but I was getting a toothache from it. Was Boy Meets World this bad?
Agree also with the Rachel Maddow but I would also add Bill O’Reilly and FOX News. Don’t really like extremists on either site except to understand people’s perspectives. Prefer something that really is “fair and balanced”
I lived in Wilmington, NC, home to the largest studio outside of Hollywood. Dawson’s Creek was shot there and many times I would pass by the creek that was “Dawson’s Creek” late at night when they were shooting. My closest brush with the production was when I took my daughter to the aquarium for a day with the fishes and they were shooting a scene there. Later we caught the episode and it was supposed to be an aquarium in Chicago or something. Another time they had a location on the beach which was supposed to be the Pacific. We also did a studio tour and saw the set where they shot the interiors and that was really a mindfuck experience. The sets that seem so realistic on TV were just the worst paint jobs and not at all believable in person. It ruined TV for about a week for me as I could no longer buy into the illusion.
I am not sure if it simulates that experience very well, or maybe the few bits of theatre I have experienced had more reserved audiences. When I am in front of a stage I try to be quiet.
One thing I find peculiar is that this format on television seems exclusive to comedies, yet theatre covers a lot more ground. How about mysteries, gothic horror, surrealism, or adaptations of classics of 20th century theatre? It just seems so weirdly specific.
This week I finally watched the first few episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman which was multi-camera shot on stage, but apparently without an audience. I thought that the “dry” presentation gave me more space to appreciate the writing and performances.
Indeed it does to me. This reminds me of how when I was growing up in the 1970s much of my family loved to put movie musicals on at holiday gatherings, and I could hardly tolerate them for even a minute. It was a deep, visceral aversion. But paradoxically perhaps I got into music and dance of more modern, avant-garde varieties which come off as being even more artificial to many people.
Do you not feel comfortable laughing at, say, a solid performance of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor? Or a particularly lively production of The Producers or Book of Mormon? Laughing at theatrical farce has been sort of its point since before audiences roared at the “speartip” poking out of the Spartan herald’s tunic in Lysistrata. The actors actually want that response. The multicam sitcom is no more than a technological evolution of the stage farce and commedia dell’arte.
Netflix started autoplaying Riverdale on me. First they showed the “Sheriff’s Office” and my brain said “Oh HELL no, that’s the post office.” Then the drive-in and it was “well, River is at least technically correct, since you’ve got to cross it then drive about another 45 minutes to two towns away”. It’s so very hard when you see things you’ve known since you were a kid. And yes, I have given away where I used to live.
HD has been hell on set and prop builders, not to mention makeup artists. No one in production is in a hurry for 4k. I worked on a film in Wilmington, nice place. It was out of season so we could rent a house in Wrightsville Beach.
The pilot of Fringe takes place, partially, in a hospital that I used to walk/drive/cycle by on a regular basis (they built a replacement hospital, and between that time and when it was torn down, it was used for things like, apparently, filming TV pilots).
It was weird. I mean, sure seeing Toronto City Hall in Raccoon City is one thing (and watching it explode is oddly satisfying), but seeing a place that I’ve spend so much time in and near as something other than what it really was just invoked a feeling of…
After looking, of course there’s a German word for it: Verfremdungseffekt.
