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My hat is off to these folks. This is by far the funniest sitcom I have seen. Obviously, humor is idiosyncratic; not everybody is tickled the same way. But this one works for me. I mean I love Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I love Seinfeld, and MadTV, and loved Upright Citizen's Brigade, Monty Python, Second City, and others, but I have a special feeling for IASIP.
I'm not going to go into details about the characters and what I like or don't like. Others here have done that well already and I agree with most. What I want to cite is the extraordinary attention to detail that actually goes into this show which often looks like impromptu mayhem: there is a video which shows how Rob went to pitch a request to Danny Devito to come on board, and Devito agreed------ but he could only schedule filming with the cast for 20 days. So they wrote every screenplay for the entire second season: every change of nuance of character, costuming, makeup, set, other characters in the scenes----ALL of it, some 450 pages of scripts for the entire second season's 10 shows----and filmed in that 20 days with Devito all of his scenes. They did this, and thanked him, and then had to go back and shoot every other continuous scene for each of the shows, all the costuming, and lighting, and character changes and retain consistency for dovetailing into Devito's scenes. It is amazing that they pulled this off so well! It is seamless. You would never suspect that they had pooled their energies so collaboratively, so faultlessly. It is remarkable too that the references to events in preceding shows are also consistently maintained throughout this season, so that the jokes feed off scenarios form earlier shows. They decided to change this format in the third season so that every show stands alone, maybe partly because of an unwillingness to exert as much effort as they had to that second season and to not re-experience that marathon of holding everything together... I don't know. It was a Herculean effort to do that second season.
What I do know is that this show works so well! The cast complements one another. They all work as an unselfish ensemble. There is hope for TV humor after all. It is interesting that they went with FX----who offered them freer rein artistically than the other networks----and may not be able to work quite as blue as they could've on HBO. I can only imagine the number of times the F-bomb would be used!! They'd probably devote an entire show to it in which every other word in the dialog would be f_ _ _! Or the sex scenes which would put the ultimate 'X' back into 'sex.'
They're that kind of group. They take their humor to a madcap level, misfit psychopaths out to destroy anything that interferes with personal ambitions, mutually colluding and abetting to tear down whenever any of them seems to be on the verge of success while the others aren't. Racist, sexist, misanthropic, misogynistic, narcissistic backstabbing at the highest level....! I love them!
score 10/10
bobcolganrac 13 November 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1974871/ |
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22-11-2019 06:27:13
29-11-2020 18:57:56