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.
I agree about Ricky Gervais. I actually liked him in The Office, but in everything else - before and after - he is just fucking awful. Talk shows, stand-up, speeches, podcasting, he is a desperate, strained and insecure performer. When he’s telling a joke, it’s like every word has had to be pressed out of a gland with a clenched fist before the next word can be milked free; it’s clear he’s just saying the words in the correct order, and not performing it. He is never present and ‘in the moment’, and seems to be in a perpetual state of panic about his own inadequacy. If he were actually a decent person instead of whatever the fuck he has become, I wouldn’t be saying this about him. But he’s a cunt, so, yeah. His imposter syndrome (which is entirely deserved in his case) makes the media he’s in unbearable to consume.
To see just how truly awful the man is, watch that Talking Funny documentary. It’s him, Jerry Seinfeld (the least-funny paedophile in the world), Chris Rock and Louie CK all in a room together talking about comedy. Ricky is obviously feeling the full force of his imposter syndrome throughout. It’s probably the most glaring example of what I’m talking about.
I simply don’t get his success. Like, I can understand the success of paedophile rings, but I can’t fathom how Ricky has made it so big. One of life’s great mysteries, I guess.
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.
Seinfeld didn’t invent the three camera sitcom, but it was important in creating modern sitcoms that didn’t have a lesson to learn at the end of redeeming protagonists.
Ahh so THAT’S what they meant with the whole “It’s about nothing!” thing…
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…
I thought the wecond one was way better and more intereating than the first one. It even made me genuinely sad at one point. I watched like 15 or 20min of the third one and found unwatchable. I’m not saying you should watch the second one, because it’s a masterpiece or something, but i thought that if they keep that pace, maybe the third one will be good are something. It’s still a technical marvel, at least the first one at the time and the second one for the insane water scenes and water physics and time and effot that went into it. The third one looks a lot more like a greenscreen movie.
The first 2 are pretty much the same plot so you’re not missing much. Not sure about the 3rd one not interested in it.
It also has basically the same plot with the same enemies. Except they added a red lady villain that is weirdly sexualized and a kid gets magic powers - because nature.
Utter snoozefest I didn’t get the hype at all
I lost all respect for the movie and the entire franchise after hearing “unobtainium” as the name of the super rare space mineral. Nearly walked out of the theater.
I can’t remember if they ever refer to it as anything else in that movie but I actually appreciated this scene in the first movie for two reasons:
Info dumps irritate me in sci fi. He’s like the main guy in charge talking to one of his lead scientists. They both absolutely fucking know why they’re there. They know what it’s called and what it’s for. He’s spelling it out for our benefit without breaking in-world character. If, in-world, someone started pedantically outlining what the rocks were for to their lead scientists, it would be the equivalent of calling them an idiot. Calling it “unobtainium” is like saying “we’ve had this argument before, I remember everything you said last time, you know everything I’m about to tell you, and nothing you or I do will change what’s happening because you cant get it anywhere else and oh yeah it’s worth a fuck load of money”.
I can’t remember if they later retcon that into being the actual name, but in that moment, it didn’t sound like the actual name, it sounded like slang being used informally during a semi heated discussion.
Whether or not that was the original intent I LOVE this interpretation. I like to be entertained and err on the side of “Maybe this is a deliberate choice these very smart and passionate people made to smooth out a story.”
Sometimes I feel like people get mad that they aren’t just dropped into a completely fleshed out imaginary world.
It’s entertainment delivered to them as they relax in a chair, requiring zero effort on their part, and they make it a goal to nitpick whatever reminds them this slice of imagination was designed by humans, and isn’t actually a fully functional parallel universe they can literally isekai into to escape the mundanity of modern existence.
Critic culture is overrated, and I wish people would exercise their suspension of disbelief, basically. Hahaha
When did you watch it? When it came out, it was technically impressive for the computer-generated graphics, which included a lot of highly-detailed and expansive “organic” stuff like forests.
Here’s some quotes from the Roger Ebert review from the time:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/avatar-2009
Like “Star Wars” and “LOTR,” “Avatar” employs a new generation of special effects. Cameron said it would, and many doubted him. It does. Pandora is very largely CGI. The Na’vi are embodied through motion capture techniques, convincingly. They look like specific, persuasive individuals, yet sidestep the eerie Uncanny Valley effect. And Cameron and his artists succeed at the difficult challenge of making Neytiri a blue-skinned giantess with golden eyes and a long, supple tail, and yet–I’ll be damned. Sexy.
Cameron promised he’d unveil the next generation of 3-D in “Avatar.” I’m a notorious skeptic about this process, a needless distraction from the perfect realism of movies in 2-D. Cameron’s iteration is the best I’ve seen — and more importantly, one of the most carefully-employed. The film never uses 3-D simply because it has it, and doesn’t promiscuously violate the fourth wall.
I mean, I remember being underwhelmed after I went to watch Avatar with a friend who was deeply impressed, but it did show off a lot of render capability for the time. I’d call it more impressive as a tech demo.
It’s way beyond a tech demo. Each Avatar movie invented dozens of new techniques. They actually film using cameras. They do a CGI movie with cameras, filming real actors acting. And they become huge blue aliens, while being filmed on a camera. It’s truly insane. I don’t like the movies themselves, but the BTS for them is crazy.
And that sort of thing totally DOES permeate throughout the industry. Whenever Pixar or Weta(RIP?) or Cameron or DreamWorks or whoever invent something REALLY COOL. . .
. . .At some point we eventually get it in Blender, and I think that’s neat.
I’m pretty sure that’s Cameron’s goal. He saw the direction movies were going and wanted to guarantee a niche for artists will keep existing within it 🤷♂️
@MonkeMischief you’re into animation ?
I’m a Blender hobbyist, yeah. I wouldn’t say I’m “into” animation yet but I’m taking a course right now. Making a ball bounce believably is insanely hard! But I’ll animate one day. :)
I watched it in 3D too and was blown away
Didn’t expect this is how I found out Roger Ebert was a furry
The plot sucks and the characters are forgettable, but that’s not the point. The point is the graphics, the locations, the crazy wildlife and eywa. The neural queues and the floating islands. Its a masterclass in world building, and has been an endless source of inspiration.
The first time I saw the first one in the theater I was blown away. Then I went and saw it again with someone else and paid more attention to the plot the second time and …yeah.
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.
I’ve never seen them, probably not going to either
…as opposed to the M. Night Shamalan movie?
We will never get along
For me it’s Friends. I don’t get all the hype about it until today. I tried watching a few episodes but it was nothing special. It was just a sitcom, nothimg special about it.
It was special because “everyone” watched it. The meh or bad parts were whatever, while the exciting or good parts were something you could talk with all your friends about at school. This made the good parts uniquely good.
So unless you happened to both be alive and watch it when it ran, it just won’t be amazing.
Alternately, you were “the kind of person who didn’t watch Friends”, which still made it a cultural touchstone.
Same here. Personally I thought the British comedy Coupling was so much better done.
Except the last season. That was bad.
No Geoff. No show.
I haven’t seen a full episode but Big Train seems like it had some legs, and was right around The Office timeframe.
My favorite scene with a VERY young Simon Pegg: https://youtu.be/VKH9ECC_Qa4?is=sntN4AxaEXgPHFsg
The US Coupling could have been the new Friends, but they bungled it just as bad as That 80s Show.
I rewatched Coupling a little while ago. There are some aspects which have not aged well. Anything Geoff centric is still pretty good. Anything Patrick centric is “yikes” and some of the relationship stuff is a bit messed up too.
Disturbed’s cover of “Sound of Silence.” I like the original Simon & Garfunkel, or at least the more upbeat version of it. And I like Disturbed (see below). But this cover absolutely blows.
Yes, I know the lead singer is a grade A shitbag. I liked the band long before I knew anything about any of it and have since stopped listening to them.
Big Bang Theory
Dave Matthews band. Also, any “jam” band in general.
Dont forget what they did on the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago.
Ok, what did they do?
Dumped a bus load of shit and piss off the bridge onto an architectural tour boat full of people.
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.
100% with you on this.
I just don’t get the appeal at all. I knew a couple that were all about String Cheese Incident. Finally listened to their stuff…fucking 15 minute long songs of fairly standard 90’s ironic music zapped by bloat ray. Hard pass.
You gotta be taking some psychedelics and want to dance, I’m not into it either. But I have plenty of friends who are and it makes them happy to have a show that lasts for long sets and they can get their freak on
I’ve seen String Cheese Incident live a few times at a festival. It was honestly a pretty good show, and I think that’s pretty much the only way jam bands work. When everyone’s a bit high and dancing and the band is playing off the crowd, it’s great.
I listened to a couple of their tracks at home, and had no interest in listening to any more. Jam bands are only good live.
That’s a fair point! Thanks.
Well, that’s just what the ass-crack bandit would say to throw us off their trail, isn’t it…
Clearly they don’t have two ears connected to a heart
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.
There’s a huge regional and cultural aspect to what you’re saying. You’re comparing slapstick in-your-face American comedy to subtle cringe British comedy. The Office is an excellent example since it is exactly the same script used in both initially. Watching S1E1 for British vs American version is an excellent comparison of styles. I don’t like British comedy particularly and don’t even like The Office, but watching both back to back, I would prefer the British version.
There are a number of amazing British comedies. They are very different to American. British comedies are understated and a bit miserable. Try “I’m Alan Partridge”…such an amazing comedy.
Equally I’ve tried watching Curb Your Enthusiasm with British friends and a large portion can’t stand that for how cringe it is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
There’s no superior choice in matters of art and taste. Just different flavours.
There’s a big cultural difference between Curb and Partridge - cringe isn’t universal!
Specifically, Larry in Curb has a distinctly American sense of individualism. He does what he wants and doesn’t care if someone doesn’t like him for it. The cringe comes from his attempts to enforce his own set of unwritten social values on others.
Alan Partridge is the exact opposite - fundamentally insecure and desperate for approval. His cringe comes from lack of self-awareness and trying to fake social status, which is painfully obvious to a British audience with our deeply ingrained sense of class.
Ultimately, taste is taste, but I think that goes some way towards explaining why some people like one or the other but not both.
Good points. iirc, the US Office almost got cancelled the first season. The type of humor in the first episode didn’t really work for US audiences. Only after the series found its own style did the series really thrive.
Personally I think Office UK is awesome. The whole Training session is freakin hilarious.
Part of the longevity of the US version was the decision to make characters likable, especially Michael Scott / the manager. The UK version leans hard into the cringe / social ineptitude and gives the manager essentially no redeeming qualities.
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
but the payoff for Garry was SO good.
I nearly stopped after the first few episodes. They are really bad, I just cannot see the appeal of cringe comedy.
I would say the first season is the worst, and then after that it finds its footing and it doesn’t rely on cringe comedy but actually humorous situations.
There is still a little bit of cringe after that, but the majority of it is in the first season.
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).
Or to reference another overrated work: John Galt. Lol
A lot of the hype about Grease is nostalgia, no doubt about that.
But a lot of the rest is that a loooot of the songs are both catchy and very easy to understand. The movie also forms a social dynamic that is easy to understand for kids.
We learned to sing “Summer Nights” in school, and then friends and I would sing the song over and over, adding more and more childish humor that we found hilarious (because…kids). We also instantly got the implied social dynamic (boys just want to get sex, girls want to have mushy romance).
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
Oh you think that’s bad? What about the time I fell off of that elephant and broke my ankle in 75 places while a monkey played la cucaracha on a tambourine?
(wince) “aHHHHhhh!..(wince)…Aaaaghh!!.. It’s in my raccoon wounds! :(”
Kinda surprised I didn’t see breaking bad already listed. I guess I’m one of the few who dislikes it. I don’t like tragedies in general. Life is already a tragedy.
I’m sure it was extremely well executed and totally worth making, but it’s not my flavor of ice cream.
It started out a lot funnier and slowly became darker over time. I think I remember Gilligan saying this was a conscious choice, to grow darker in tone over time.
Anyway, that’s what hooked a lot of people initially, and a lot of them stuck around for the drama that followed
Genuinely though the Talking Pillow scene is still my favorite. As someone who lost a dad to cancer the conversation was morbidly funny and real to me, with the pillow as a perfect set piece.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Its not just that the humor is unfunny (and basically just bigotry porn with a side of cringe), its that none of the “friends” in the show are even friends with each other. The whole show is just a bunch of assholes being bigoted assholes and then you are supposed to think that its funny.
Well, yeah, the whole show is based around each character being the worst narcissistic and self-serving asshole you can imagine, and then some.
I personally find it really funny, but I can sort of see why some people don’t like it
This is a style that I first noticed with Archer, and it is very hard to do well. I enjoyed Archer, I enjoyed some of Rick and Morty, but I also recognize that I’d refuse to engage with someone like that in real life. Iasip takes it to the extreme of being genuinely unpleasant.
The whole show is just a bunch of assholes being bigoted assholes
and then you are supposed to think that its funny.
They take their twisted logic and antics to such extremes that it resembles a live-action version of some mid-20th century American cartoons. Same level of slapstick cruelty but the plotlines make it all more premeditated and sociopathic.
(I laugh hysterically at it, but I totally understand anyone who thinks it’s depraved!)
Not depraved, just pitiful.
Danny DeVito is still “pitifully” entertaining 50 years later, with his studio producing the longest-running American live-action sitcom.
I think it’s supposed to be Seinfeld but moreso. Part of the humor is watching these assholes screw themselves over with their terrible plans.
I like it, but it seems really overrated.
3 body problem. What a fucking terrible shit waste of paper.
The worst part is that if you somehow drag yourself through the first book and rightly declare that it sucks, fans will all say “Oh, yeah, the first book is bad, but it gets sooooo much better after that!”
This is a fucking lie. The books actually get progressively worse at a genuinely shocking rate.
Do you like reading a series of Wikipedia articles about all these really cool ideas the author had? Do you like being slapped in the face with moments of truly egregious sexism? Do you like characters with zero defining traits? Do you like entire plotlines built around Death Note style “I know that you know that I know that you know that I know…” style bullshit that falls apart the moment you think about it for five seconds? Do you like like awful solutions to the Fermi Paradox? Oh boy do we have the book series for you!
Preach.
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).
Ya’ll be talking about anime like it’s a genre but it’s a medium
Yeah, but come on. Sure, you could depict anything with it, but in practice, it’s correlated with content.
Chinese ink painting is a medium too, but people talking about it probably are not going to it for cyberpunk stuff.
I mean, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, Great Teacher Onizuka, Frieren, DragonBall, and whatever are absolutely different genres and have practically nothing in common.
Yeah, but normies don’t know that. It’s all just cartoons with a weird annoying fanbase to them.
Yeah but some people just can’t stand the medium. Me included.
Everything? Perfect Blue? Paprika? Angel’s Egg? Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space? Anne of Green Gables? Moomin? Belladonna of Sadness?
I’d be genuinely surprised if the answer was yes, as all of those wildly depart from the tropes people have in mind when anime is brought up.
Yes
Never understood the “I don’t like anime” mindset, of course everyone has the right to like and/or dislike anything they choose to, but as you said it’s a medium. “I don’t like anime” makes as much sense as “I don’t like live action movies.” It doesn’t.
I guess “I don’t like the way anime look,” or, “I don’t like the Japanese approach to storytelling” makes more sense.
It makes sense to me because they’re describing in a simple way the thing that they don’t like. If you ask why, they’d probably tell you the reason. “I don’t like the way anime looks” or “I don’t like the Japanese approach to storytelling” or whatever…
Not liking “anime” is just saying “I watched a few hours of popular anime, didn’t like it, assumed it’s all like that and now I’ll never be able to correct my opinion.”
Personally, it’s the art form I don’t like. I couldn’t say why, but there’s something about the style of drawing people that I just can’t get past.
I accept that I’m in the minority, and I’m not criticizing it or talking down on it in any way. I understand there’s an incredible amount of love and talent that goes into it, it’s just not for me. Think of it as someone who says they don’t like the Mona Lisa, they aren’t saying it isn’t a famous painting or shouldn’t be well known, they’re just saying they prefer other styles of art.
Even with the wide variability of art styles, something about that anime gene creeps you out? That’s fair, but a little sad that keeps you out of it.
I was speaking mostly from personal experience. I used to think all anime was adolescent violent wish fulfillment and tits, so I didn’t explore too much, and found plenty of incidenthl confirmation bias.
Not OP, but some genre conventions of anime weird me out. I can learn to ignore them with practice, but I have to stay in practice to keep doing this.
I don’t hate anime, but getting myself in a state where I can enjoy a show is a huge chore.
Another part that makes even less sense: the existence of people that only watch anime makes me less willing to engage. This happens with other things too, but it seems moderately common with anime.
It’s usually ugly as fuck and blatantly misogynistic, it infantilizes and objectifies women and often has very strong pedophillic themes? 90% of it is an incredibly problematic form of media and when a person tells me they’re into it I wonder do they just willfully ignore these problems or are they not actually smart enough to notice in the first place, or are they into that gross shit?
How do you feel about other forms of animation?
I’m picky. Some are ok, some just weird me out. I think it really just depends how close they get to portraying the human figure, when they start intentionally skewing proportions and making features anatomically impossible it’s just creepy for some reason. If it’s not a human character or if it’s still sort of realistic to normal proportions it usually is fine.
If you mean stuff like Fantastic Planet, The Thief and the Cobbler (Re-cobbled Cut) and The Glass Harmonica, then I love it.
(Edit: oops I misread the comment nesting, you weren’t talking to me.)
What’s wrong with bugs bunny?
