For the last week we’ve been taking a look at NBC’s Thursday night comedies, but with Kristen Wiig’s sendoff on ‘SNL’ this past weekend we decided to add her departure to the conversation.
It’s not worth going into detail about how the season finale of SNL - and the season as a whole – was middling. The Mick Jagger-hosted episode was a hit-or-miss mixed bag which typifies nearly every episode and every season. As we’ve learned from several seasons of recaps and now over a decade-and-a-half of religious viewing, that’s the show. It will never be too far up or too far down, so just try to enjoy it. What is worth discussing, as all of the internet has been doing for the past two days, is the exit of Kristen Wiig after seven stellar seasons, leaving behind a body of work that positions her as arguably the strongest female cast member of all-time.
In our discussion last week about Community‘s upcoming move to Friday nights we confidently predicted that, despite swirling rumors, we saw no reason why Dan Harmon would not return as Community showrunner. Perhaps we should have been more precise with our diction. What we meant was that we saw no reason why Harmon would choose not to return. The idea that NBC/Sony would not bring him back never crossed our minds. So while we still stand by what we wrote last week we were shocked and dismayed (like everyone else) when we learned over the weekend that Harmon was replaced as showrunner and essentially fired from his own show (however, unlike everyone else, we read the news on our phone during a bachelor party in Chicago, after sleeping off the night before).
This week we’re checking in on NBC’s Thursday night comedies as they finish their respective seasons. Today: ‘Parks and Recreation.’
Perhaps the greatest compliment you can offer Parks and Recreation is that it’s no longer referred to as the quasi-Office spin-off (ignore the fact that we just did that in the first sentence). We’re now multiple seasons into an excellent run where Parks and Recreation has cast off the chains of its origins, found its own voice, become its own show, and surpassed its progenitor by all metrics save for Neislen ratings. We still maintain that Community is the best show of the night, but Parks and Rec has not been behind by much, outpacing The Office during its second season.
At the end of Parks and Rec‘s brief, unimpressive first season, we laid out a plan for how the show could not only improve but excel, and we revisited this primer just prior to the start of the show’s brilliant third season. We also presented three more key points as the show moved forward and they were as follows:
Yesterday Zap2It wondered if CBS’s new fall sitcom Partners is actually a reboot of the 1995 Fox comedy of the same name. However, the bigger question for us is if ABC’s new Friday night show The Neighbors is actually a spin-off of CBS’s short-lived 1997 Bronson Pinchot vehicle Meego. The tale of the tape:
The Neighbors: The series, set in New Jersey, revolves around a gated townhouse community called “Hidden Hills.” This is where the Weavers (Lenny Venito & Jami Gertz), a normal average family, have decided to move to. But upon their relocation to this community they discover that this place is populated by residents who are actually from another planet, using names of sports athletes, where men can become pregnant, receive nourishment through their eyes and mind by reading books rather than eating, and cries out green goo from their ears. Not only that, it appears that these aliens have been stuck on Earth for 10 years, still awaiting for a distress signal to return home.
Meego: Meego (Pinchot) is a 9,000-year-old shape-shifting alien from the planet Marmazon 4.0. After his spaceship crashes, he is discovered by three children; Trip, Maggie, and Alex Parker (Will Estes, Michelle Trachtenberg AND Jonathan Lipnicki) . They live with their single father, Dr. Edward Parker (Ed Begley, Jr.!) and pass Meego off as human (he tells people he is from Canada). Although he plans to go home as soon as his ship is repaired, he becomes attached to the children and decides to remain on Earth to care for them.
The latter show was specifically created for the CBS Block Party, their attempt to topple ABC’s TGIF after picking up both Family Matters and Step by Step from the Disney network. Pinchot himself was coming off of a short stint on Step by Step as beautician Jean-Luc Rieupeyroux, which followed, of course, his long run as Balki Bartokomous on original TGIF member Perfect Strangers. While The Neighbors will air on Wednesday nights, not Fridays, it could have easily fit on that popular comedy lineup, and perhaps that’s where it will eventually end up, considering the statement from ABC Entertainment President Paul Lee that ““It’s time for Friday night to be a destination again for broad family entertainment.” May not be long until The Neighbors slides into Meego‘s old Friday at 8:30pm time slot.
Is it possible that residents of Hidden Hills are from the plant Marmazon 4.0? Why not? They all seem to have things coming out of their ears.
(and, yes, we realize that Meego is basically Mr. Belevedere with an alien. Or Free Spiritwith an alien. Or Who’s the Boss? with an alien. Or countless other shows with an alien).
This week we’re looking back on the just completed/completing seasons of NBC’s Thursday night comedies. Today we check in the senior member of the team, ‘The Office.’
For quite some time we were religious with our Office recaps, but then two things happened 1) we were working a paid job more than full-time and 2) the show became, well, inessential. We hoped to check-in during Steve Carell’s final season, but analyses was few and far between. But even though we weren’t providing regular reviews, the series was still required viewing. We might not follow-up the next morning with our thoughts, but we were still going out of our way to watch it Thursday night, as much out of habit as desire. But this season, with Carell’s Michael Scott off to Colorado, the show became the least appealing, least critical member of the lineup. Wait til Friday to watch Community? We’d rather not. Skip an episode of Parks and Rec? No way. But go a week without watching the latest The Office? Sure. View an episode of Robert California’s Dunder Mifflin out-of-order? Fine. We just didn’t care that much anymore.
But a funny thing happened at the end of The Office’s eighth season. We were actually invested. We almost felt things, things that just nearly came close to approximating the real emotions that the show’s best seasons elicited. For the first time all year, the series seemed to find its voice.
Doing our due diligence we’ve been watching the trailers for the new series picked up by the big four networks for their respective fall seasons. Some have been promising, some dead on arrival, and others just somewhere in between. But there was one – NBC’s new JJ Abrams sci-fi thriller Revolution - that particularly caught our eye. However, it wasn’t the premise or the cast or the special effects that piqued our interest. No, it was the last few seconds of the trailer, an insert of the title over a grand wide shot of earth from outer space that stuck with us. We couldn’t shake the feeling that we’ve seen this before on NBC. In fact, it appears that this is a well that NBC has been returning to for decades. You hear a lot these days about how there are no new ideas, but this is a little excessive.
We’d suggest that there’s some kind of corporate conspiracy, or at least mandate, owing to NBC’s ties with Universal (the gold standard in spinning globes), but they didn’t merge under the same umbrella until 2004, so perhaps it is just a lack of imagination.
There’s basically been one item – neigh, one person – who has been dominating our top search terms for the last few weeks. Today is no different, with the list reading as follows: “chelsea survivor, survivor chelsea, survivor one world chelsea, chelsea survivor 2012.” So, you know what, we’re beyond being clever these days. We’re just going to give you what you want (and this was one of the few days that did not also include the word “boobs” in that group).
Also, this is our 700th post!!! Yes, we’ve continuously fallen short of our goals and quotas, but it’s still nice to reach that, ahem, round number, and what better way to celebrate than with something that everyone (who is male and/or likes oiled up, surgically enhanced bodies) can enjoy. We were going to have special novelty glasses made up for the occasion, but they would have been asymmetrical and that totally would have bothered us, so you’ll just have to wait til our 1001th post.
Thanks for memories! (you two, Chelsea. And no, that was not a typo).
In our discussion 
