I think I probably missed the entire first season of the original myself. I might have still been grieving the cancellation of Barney Miller, even though it had ended over a year earlier.
Yeah, Dan at first was not the character we grew to know. Larroquette and the writers hadn't yet figured out where to take him.
"It was rough" does not mean "it wasn't improving." The first season did quite well in creating chemistry between the characters, even as they developed. I don't recall the clunkiness, aside from some brief scenes, usually the outros. And I just finished up Season 1 so...
Not as strong as last week's episode, but it had its moments. I was surprised that Abby didn't get the apartment Gurgs showed her; I assumed that since they went to the trouble of building the set, it must be intended to be a standing set from now on. But apparently it was a one-shot, which is surprising.
Looking back in my mind at the one apartment scene, it was pretty generic, though. Entirely possible they just pulled a few flats out of a warehouse and threw them together. Or even just redressed something leftover from an entirely different production. I think even the Ladies' Room and Abandoned Office from the B-plot of "Dan v. Dating" had more character. And the original series didn't exactly have a lot of standing sets, either. More than Barney Miller, to be sure, but not like Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, or M*A*S*H. Or even Quark.
This one was a solid episode. Abby *finally* letting out some of her frustrations, and rightfully so, and Dan being a somewhat corrupted mentor (with something in it for himself, of course) is great. Gurgs of course, is awesome. She is comfortable in her own shoes, and knows who she is, and it's a lot of fun to watch her bounce from being excited about being called up to the bench, and also using the death statistics office as a way to score recently vacated apartments. She has multiple beaus at any given time, and she has no problem weighing a moral issue and considering it irrelevant if it works to her benefit. She cracks me up, and I see her personality as someone who both goes with the flow, and also bends things to her needs when she feels like it. I'm still having trouble with both Neil and Olivia. They both play as insecure, sarcastic and witty, but as a performance, not as a personality. It doesn't feel like I'm seeing them, but cheap imitations of them. I really want to like Neil and Olivia, and I do to an extent, but I'm not comfortable with them as characters yet. They're still too "archetypes written for a comedy" and not people who happen to also possess the traits of someone who is funny. To put it another way: Abby, Dan, and Gurgs are defined enough that I see them as who they are: the actors and the roles fit well enough that they're identifiable people. For Neil and Olivia, I could see almost any actor filling those spots and it would be the same viewing experience for me.
I hope Olivia develops enough as a character so she's the "new Dan." So far she's a cynical and snarky prosecutor and incredibly self-centered but she doesn't have much of a personality other than "what's in this for me," and Larroquette's performance n the original series quickly grew far above and beyond just Dan's selfishness and love for the comforts of life. She has potential but so far she's the least impressive lead character.
Yeah, I suppose the studio has a bunch of such things stockpiled. And having it be unfurnished made it easier. I thought of that, but I wondered if that would work for a sitcom with a studio audience. It's one thing if, say, Mission: Impossible popped over to film some scenes on The Brady Bunch's living room set, but here you'd have to build it in front of the audience, or move the audience to whatever other sitcom stage the set is on. Unless it was filmed without an audience and then shown to the studio audience on a screen or dubbed with a laugh track. Is it a bad sign if we're more interested in talking about the production than the story? Although I'm always interested in the production, so that doesn't really count.
Then again, how does the punchline of that scene in Abby's chambers (at the end of "The Aparment") work in front of a live audience? Are we sure this is even 3-camera, much less 3-camera-with-studio-audience?
In the case of scenes that couldn't be done live, they might be prerecorded and shown to the audience on a video screen. At least that's how British shows like Red Dwarf do it. Indeed, I think the normal practice for sitcoms is to do two recordings, one with and one without an audience, and then cut together the best takes from the two, either adding a laugh track to the non-audience scenes or dubbing in the audience reactions from the other session (I assume they're miked in such a way that the laughter can be isolated from the actors' lines).
I had confirmed myself that it claims to be shot in front of a live audience by the time I saw the reply from "fireproof78." One of the reasons I had my doubts was that it's 3-camera in front of a live audience is that Barney Miller (which has family connections) had abandoned 3-camera after about the first or second season because they would typically be doing multiple reshoots to tweak the comedy. "3-camera" is a generic term for multi-camera production for television, because that's the most common number of cameras used. Obviously that was used for live broadcasts as soon as such things as external synchronization and the production switcher were invented. The technique is also used in film, for scenes that would be difficult and/or expensive to shoot multiple times. I Love Lucy was one of the pioneers for using the technique for filmed situation comedies. In fact, when Get Smart went into production, it was one of relatively few sitcoms of its era that weren't shot 3-camera. My best guess for the "Abby's chambers" scene is that they might have drawn a curtain (or other view-block) while a crew of stagehands overturned the desk and otherwise redressed the set as the result of Abby's rampage. That would allow the studio audience to see it for the first time, just as the television viewers do, and react naturally. Or the studio audience could be seeing a mix of live and pre-recorded material. Obviously, if one of us were to attend a taping, we'd have a better idea what actually goes on. I've only attended tapings of The Hollywood Squares (Heatter-Quigley version with Peter Marshall), Jeopardy (Trebek-era), and a bunch of local-origination and public access cable shows (and in the case of the latter, I was invariably a crew member).
I had such a crush on Corky as a kid! As disappointing as the Murphy Brown revival was, it was good to see Corky in action again. So it's great to know Faith Ford is going to show up here.
It was... not great. It kind of fell apart pretty quickly, which is a shame because the original Murphy Brown was on fire. Also, I just read that Charles Kimbrough, the actor who played Jim Dial on the original series, passed away last week. May he rest in peace.
I didn't immediately have context. Thought you were talking about Corky from Life Goes On, for one second.
Kind of borders on the "very special episode" trope, and I missed a lot of the setup dialogue (should have had the sound up a lot higher; it was fine for Jeopardy), but it seemed like something worth re-watching on the DVR recording.