On Sitcoms and Sensitivity…
I have been thinking about my perspective and overall disinterest in sitcoms today. I am feeling a heightened sense of overwhelm and upset that has been brought on by imagining my life as the life of a member of a typical sitcom. I have a sick feeling in the left side of my body. I looked up what internal organ is in that exact spot and found the source of this feeling is my left adrenal gland.
So, thinking about the characters in a typical sitcom has activated my adrenal gland and this nervousness (fight/flight response) I am feeling comes from feeling trapped in a world that is completely false and materialistic and which endlessly repeats itself.
Here is what is bothering me: the characters in modern sitcoms are very 2D. They do not have flaws or failures that cannot be laughed away. They don’t work on changing themselves into better humans because they have no reason to change. Their idea of “finding themselves” is having sex with 200 people, drinking every day, going to work to climb the corporate ladder, and sitting around talking with their friends.
It makes me want to tear my hair out and utter a growling scream of frustration and disgust.
If I had less control over my faculties, I would probably be sitting under my desk – wailing and rocking back and forth while pulling my hair and intermittently punching the wall. This is what I feel like doing. These are the urges I have when I am feeling overwhelmed. I want to destroy, I want to make myself feel pain so that I can be distracted from the trapped feeling. I want to burst through walls like The Hulk and run off into the wilds while roaring and raging and bleeding and destroying.
It’s such an overreaction.
Television is fake. I know this.
Truthfully, it is the extremely shallow nature of my society that bothers me.
I am very sensitive to excessive materialism and the idea that humans are disposable commodities.
Sitcoms bring this materialism to the forefront in a concentrated way that brings 30 minutes of mindlessness to anyone who watches. They are a mimicry of real life, and THAT is what bothers me so much. The way that the characters cannot have ideas or relationships that aren’t related to “the group”, the way the members of the group are so homogenous that they are really just slightly varied versions of each other… these things bother me.
I don’t know what it feels like to be in a tightly knit group, where everyone wants to do everything together, but it feels suffocating to me to imagine that. I don’t like the feeling of “having” to do the same things as everyone else so that I can maintain friendships. That’s not a friendship, that’s a routine. I don’t like to be hemmed in by other people’s routines.
Don’t get me wrong, I truly do enjoy funny television shows. I love to laugh, and I love shows that have an off-center humor. But, the part I can’t handle is when a character has no depth beyond the stereotype s/he portrays. When this happens, the character remains essentially the same for 5 or 10 years, only changing hairstyles, fashion, and romantic partners but doing the same thing episode after episode and complaining about it.
Now, maybe it’s just poor writing that causes the characters appear to be inert, but I can’t help wonder HOW the show can remain popular for an extended run without people actually identifying with the characters?
People must identify with the characters – be able to imagine themselves in that life, or have a similar life to the one portrayed on the screen.
I have an extremely hard time identifying with characters on popular television shows. I generally cannot watch any of these shows more than a couple of times before I lose interest and mentally fling them away, never to be thought of again. Incidentally, most of my “favorite” series are either sci-fi, fantasy, or they were very short-lived comedy series’ that were canceled in one or two seasons. Not so coincidentally, all of these shows were filmed 10 or more years ago.
The one sitcom I have always enjoyed is Seinfeld. What is it about that show that sets it apart from other “single people in the city” sitcoms in my mind? Why is that one different to me? I realized that it’s because I can identify with the characters and their way of dealing with their world.
- Each of the characters has problems sourced in youth.
- The romantic relationships are not all identical and are frequently used as a comedic prop – not as the entire storyline.
- The characters get embarrassed, perplexed, worried, disgusted, disgraced, excited, overzealous, indignant and so on – the emotional range actually varies.
- All of the characters have at least one major personality flaw that is acknowledged yet not disregarded.
- The shows aren’t serialized to the point of missing major details if watched out of order.
- The humor isn’t limited, and everyday situations are discussed in funny ways.
- They are a bunch of shiftless losers who are just stumbling around trying to make the world bend to their wills.
I guess what I identify with is that they are dysfunctional yet still able to laugh at themselves. They meet up to eat sometimes, but people come/go throughout the meal to contribute to the scene. Not all of the characters are required to be “at the meeting place” when they hang out. Various characters do different things, and they get their own episodes and plots – each character has a life and story outside of the other characters. It doesn’t seem as staged as most modern shows. The situations the characters get into are preposterous (not just lovingly quirky) and often end in disaster.
I guess I think it’s more realistic than other shows like this. I get the humor, and the banter between characters has a feeling of authenticity – many of the key points of an episode have to do with facial expression or unthinking reaction.
The conversations about ‘nothing’ make sense to me. My mind is all over the place throughout a day – not focused on one small incident of the day or week, and certainly not on one unchanging ideal. The characters are neurotic people who have no clue what they’re doing but they try to find a balance anyway.
I’m over my upset. I feel like I should go watch some Seinfeld now to have some mindless laughs about nothing.