For me if I had to pick a good contender it would be the UK version of The Office.
I know many tend to debate how Ricky Gervais really fell off and how he repugnantly acts like a whiny centrist edgelord but me personally IMO I actually don’t think he was ever funny not even a little.
His big break through television was just so painful to sit through it’s so charismatically boring the characters are completely generic at best (notably Tim) or straight up insufferably unlikable at worst (especially the protagonist David FUCKING Brent) and most importantly the humour is just embarrassing.
Always seemed like The Thick Of It but without the nuisance tongue in cheek and charming satire.
A big part of why many of the things in this thread haven’t aged well, is because a lot of what made these shows original and unique was copied to death following the fame of the original.
If you weren’t there for the original release of a piece of media, there’s a good chance you’re not necessarily seeing it in the context where the accolades make sense.
Seinfeld basically invented the 3 camera sitcom and a lot of the key tropes in the format. If you go back today having not watched it before, the vast majority of it just comes across as a boring sitcom, because every sitcom to follow took notes from the way they did Seinfeld.
It’s the same with the UK office, it basically invented the modern mockumentary format as well as the cringe comedy era that followed (and gave us things like peep show). If you look back now without that context, it just looks like a generic combination of both those things.
I believe “I Love Lucy” is credited with inventing or popularizing the three camera sitcom. Not to dampen’s "Seinfeld"s contributions or the point of your comment, but I just wanted to add that small correction.
Just to mention it, this is literally named the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect on TVTropes
I think the bigger issue is that most of the show isn’t that good. Less than half the seasons are good, and the lows from the bad seasons are really low. Watching it on a streaming scenario exposes this a lot more than reruns of the good parts.
I actually still enjoyed it for the most part last time I went through. Jerry’s standup is terrible and I have no clue how he ever got an audience, but the actual show I enjoyed most of, even if nowadays pretty much all the plots would be solved because everyone would have a cell phone.
The Office (US) pretty much killed laugh tracks in US sitcoms.
My aunt Gisela promised to bring me into touch with my father. In reality, she simply darkened the room and, with a lowered voice, gave a bad imitation of my deceased dad. That’s one medium I could do without.
Funny and original comment. Nicely done
The James Cameron Avatar movies.
They’re so bad.
…well the first one was. Didn’t bother with any after that…
Great example of; just because it was a technical masterpiece, that doesn’t make a movie good. The special effects were outstanding for the time, and still hold up very well. That is something I will always praise it for, but it is the only thing worth praising about it. It really is a very polished turd, in that sense.
Yeah I saw it in IMAX 3D and it was certainly a spectacle. The visuals were phenomenal, but the film itself was otherwise completely forgettable.
We will never get along
Big Bang Theory
The worst part is how it’s fans seem to think it’s a love letter to “nerd culture” (whatever the fuck that is) and endlessly bring it up if you dare mention any interest in comics, roleplaying games or anything in that vein. “Oh you’ll love this show, it’s all about that nerdy stuff.”
Yeah I hate fake nerds on TV. Big Bang Theory being the absolute worst.
Obligatory Portlandia Nerd PSA (invidious link)
I grew up with actual nerds in the 89s and 90s. No one was like Big Bang Theory. We were not cool.
Blackface for nerds
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Woah surprised no one mentioned South Park yet, it quite common in discussions like this.
I never really liked South Park (with occasional exceptions where it shone) but I loved the movie.
Honestly one of the best musicals I’ve ever seen.
They absolutely deserved the Oscar for that movie (almost literally any of its songs) over fucking Tarzan
I don’t like it but I cut them some slack for their willingness to tackle some issues publicly and mock people who deserve it.
Dave Matthews band. Also, any “jam” band in general.
Dont forget what they did on the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago.
none of the band members were in the bus at the time
The shit and piss they dumped out of the bus didn’t appear from nowhere. Even if he didn’t dump it himself dave matthews supplied the shit and piss for it to happen.
That is the stuff of legend.
Well, that’s just what the ass-crack bandit would say to throw us off their trail, isn’t it…
Reality TV
Have a few in mind:
Catcher in the Rye. Holden is insufferable and I found it baffling that adults expected me to relate to him as a teen.
Grease aged very poorly and I do not understand the hype (is it because John Travolta is wearing tight pants?)
Family guy. The ship that launched a thousand cringe as fuck “adult animation” shows. Yes, I’m salty as hell about it.
It terrifies me that there are people walking around out there who feel seen by Holden Caulfield.
Just a bunch of phoneys.
IDK, I can see that making sense if you read it as a teen.
As adults? Absolutely. But there are phases we all grow out of (well, most of us).
Catcher in the Rye was always an unforgivable whiney crap-mound of a book. Its notoriety is based on its banning, and the larger issue of whether people should be allowed to read books with swears, misanthropes, and sexual references in them, but there are and were so many better books featuring those things out there.
Family Guy is a fascinating case of a crappy show insisting upon itself so hard that it successfully got itself uncancelled and forced into pop culture as a zombie endlessly repeating itself on the level of its inspiration and closest rival The Simpsons.
I also loathe Grease but its general appeal is pretty easy to explain: it came out in the 1970s as a rose-tinted nostalgia piece for white middle-class boomers who grew up in the 1950s and, as so many people of all ages do, idealized their childhood era as when things were so cool and simple. (Spoiler to folks of all eras: things weren’t actually any simpler when you were young, you were just shielded from more of the bullshit than you are now.) It was the same nostalgia that fueled the runaway success of Happy Days on TV in that era, though at least that show managed to be a functional sitcom with more substance to it than the empty-headed misogyny-flavored story of Grease.
Family guy has always been bad, I lived through its peak and it was so painful
I’m curious if you’re from the UK, OP, because I think this colours your perception of the The Office very much. For the record I loathe both, but The Office UK is a typical British comedy of taking the absolute piss of the characters, who are irredeemable fools one and all. You re not supposed to find them funny, or like them. You’re supposed to laugh at them. That’s the usual expectation, with British comedy.
Americans seem to have great difficulty with that concept, and can’t seem to handle a protagonist that is made fun of.
Again, not defending the show itself. Just saying you need to be aware of this approach when you watch British comedy in general. The common language should not make you forget the ocean of cultural differences in between.
Now it makes sense why so few British comedies work in the US. The US only knows how to laugh at the hero’s jokes.
You’re right and you should say it. Ricky Gervais has always been weird and off-putting and the idea that he was ever good has always baffled me. I never enjoyed The Office. When my dad tried to get me into Extras I just found all of Ricky’s parts annoying. When my sister told me how great Derek was, I just found the whole thing simultaneously tasteless and bland, like it couldn’t commit to being offensive but didn’t put the work into being real. His standup is often clever, but always the kind of clever that is let down by a complete lack of emotional intelligence. The man just does not understand people, but thinks he really does.
I think I first encountered Ricky Gervais’ work in those YouTube videos which took clips of his podcast and animated them as cartoons. They were being passed around like the best thing ever for a minute or two back in the day, and I watched a bunch and didn’t get why it was supposed to be funny that two guys were being assholes at a third guy over and over.
Karl Pilkington was the funniest one out of them in my opinion. Derek went down in flames when he left the show.
The hbo animated Ricky Gervais show won me over. I would have agreed with you before that but it is actually hysterical.
https://youtu.be/luL5gdSsaig?is=U4I7KkIGsyqM1ImN
Pure gold lol
I’ve never seen this before, but the way that they make fun of him is quite mean, and like the way they dismiss him out of hand is kinda fuct. His movie idea is ridiculous but it’s kind of interesting too. Like the man with two brains but with lesbian sex, maybe a trans element too. It’s actually a bit like that Robert Heinlein book I will fear no evil.
Sports. I have little tolerance for it because every time a big event is on, people get incredibly obnoxious. They think they know better than the professional players, they keep making so much noise, it polarizes people into arbitrary bands and start talking shit like using that as an excuse to be a homophobic POS, sometimes they’ll even riot because their team lost/won (da fuk), and even kill people over their favorite fucking team, and so much more. If the game is on I’d rather steer clear because it really brings out the worst in people.
That’s mostly referring to football. Kind of generalizing.
Harry Potter, even ignoring how much of a piece of shit the author is the books just aren’t particularly well thought out.
There are so many simple solutions to the problems presented in the books, but JK is too afraid of challenging her own status quo.
I agree. To be fair though the books have A LOT of extra shit that make the movies actually make sense.
They only sold 600 million copies. Hardly anyone even read them.
The US Office is unironically a better show because it understood what path it wanted to take as it went on and stop trying to rely heavily on cringe comedy to focus more on absurdist but still relatable scenarios.
I can’t watch The Office.
My empathy makes me feel super uncomfortable watching people do socially mean or cringe things. I enjoyed most of Parks and Rec, but I didn’t like the way they treated Garry, and almost stopped watching because of that running gag.
Oddly enough, I devoured The Bear. It’s not high anxiety or intensity that turns me off, it’s the banal meanness that some express that I can’t stand. The Bear is intense, but the characters feel genuine and honest
Anything anime. Lots love it, I hate it.
Not liking anime is so isolating as a nerd because people find out I’m into nerdy stuff and all they want to do is recommend anime to me and talk about anime and I have to explain that I don’t like anime and won’t be watching that show they love (insert show here).
What’s wrong with bugs bunny?
Star Wars. I really wanted to like it, I’m a huge nerd, but I just am not into it. I watched 4 and 5 and got maybe an hour into 6 and got up and walked away. I was so bored with the whole thing.
Never watched any star wars movie and at this points I’ve seen so many spoilers through memes that I am not very tempted to do so
Save for most of the original trilogy, Star Wars turned into actual dogshit halfway through Return of the Jedi.
