Sitcom

A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community

Saul Austerlitz, Saul Austerlitz

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613743874
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

A carefully curated tour through TV comedy series, this mixtape of fondly remembered shows surveys the genealogy of the form, the larger trends in its history, the best of what the genre has accomplished, and the most standard of its works. From I Love Lucy, The Phil Silvers Show, and M*A*S*H to Taxi, The Larry Sanders Show, and 30 Rock, this guide presents the sitcom as a capsule version of the 20th-century arts—realism giving way to modernism and then to postmodernism, all between the hours of 8 and 10pm on weeknights. Each chapter springs from an individual representative entity, including The Simpsons' "22 Short Films About Springfield," The Mary Tyler Moore Show's "Chuckles Bites the Dust," Seinfeld's "The Pitch," and Freaks and Geeks' "Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers," where Martin Starr's nerdy Bill takes comfort in—what else—the pleasures of laughing at TV.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 I Love Lucy: “Lucy Does a Tv Commercial”
• 2 The Honeymooners: “Better Living through Tv”
• 3 The Phil Silvers Show: “Doberman’s Sister”
• 4 Leave It to Beaver: “Beaver Gets ‘Spelled”
• 5 The Dick Van Dyke Show: “Forty-Four Tickets”
• 6 Gilligan’sisland: “St. Gilligan and the Dragon”
• 7 The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Chuckles Bites the Dust”
• 8 All in the Family: “the First and Last Supper”
• 9 M*a*S*H: “Yankee Doodle Doctor”
• 10 Taxi: “Latka the Playboy”
• 11 Cheers: “Strange Bedfellows, Pt. 2”
• 12 The Cosby Show: “Pilot”
• 13 Roseanne: “Terms of Estrangement, Part 1”
• 14 The Simpsons: “22 Short Films about Springfield”
• 15 Seinfeld: “the Pitch”
• 16 The Larry Sanders Show: “the Mr. Sharon Stone Show”
• 17 Friends: “the One with the Embryos”
• 18 Sex and the City: “My Motherboard, My Self”
• 19 Freaks and Geeks: “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers”
• 20 Curb Your Enthusiasm: “Seinfeld”
• 21 Arrested Development: “S.O.B.S”
• 22 The Office: “Casino Night”
• 23 30 Rock: “Rosemary’s Baby”
• 24 Community: “Modern Warfare”
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography