Response to article in The Economist:
Sucks. Annoying. Bullshit. Tripe.
Show reinforced stereotypes by tweaking them, and featured characters (and a worldview) that hadn’t heard of Don DeLillo, William Gibson, or alternative music. Plus it had a laugh track (unlike The Simpsons). Only people not trapped by TV could import a whole context to make it “bona fide.” You people have Ian McEwan; we don’t (or should I say Clive James?).
WKRP in Cincinnati, That ’70s Show, and Seinfeld were good shows. That’s rare. The sitcom format is necessarily corrupt (unless you mean sketch comedy, like Kids in the Hall). Mystery Science Theater bashed stuff shoved down our throat, by proxy — is that “daring”? Richard Linklater did a much better job documenting American life, and developing modes to do it in — have you seen Dazed and Confused”
Fuck Frazier. Fuck Howard Cosell, and every other hoity-toity pseudo-intellectual populist bullshit that irritated, enraged, alienated, and divided the general population when the makers themselves haven’t heard of Joan Didion, the zine revolution, or Jim Jarmusch.
Kelsey Grammar, himself, is a conservative (which puts him in the same category as Bruce Willis, apparently Eli Roth, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and not many others). And as everybody knows, a conservative would never read The Tempest (let alone White Noise or Sputnik Sweetheart) for the hell of it — there always has to be some “point” to it. Lazy, entitled assholes!
(Daphne was nice, though. One would have to presume — like the Daphne in the kids’ “Scooby Doo” TV show — that she was named after mystery writer Daphne du Maurier, who was made a Dame, incidentally. Have you read “Don’t Look Now” or The Scapegoat?)