When you need to rant...

[D'Snowth]

Chuck Lorre swears that any show he is involved with, even as far back as Roseanne, never use laugh tracks, and if they can't get an actual audience, they just won't go with any laughter, live or simulated.

Mockumentaries just don't work for television, they just don't. The Christopher Guest movies are fine, it works in that area of entertainment, but it's just not a good idea for TV, and I really don't know who thought it was a brilliant idea to make all new sitcoms like mockumentaries.

But another thing too, TV shows have been doing "cinematic style" production as far back as the 50s, they just weren't done like mockumentaries like today: back then, a television show was produced in two different formats, single-camera, or multi-camera. Most single-camera shows were meant to look cinematic: lots of close-ups and tight shots, quit a bit of tracking shots, being able to arrange a camera set up for a different angle you don't see very often (M*A*S*H was highly praised for their camerawork), and these are the shows that usually had laugh tracks; the multi-camera shows were usually done like stage plays, two cameras to capture the individual characters on the set, and one camera in the middle for a full picture, and these shows mostly had live audiences. It makes sense, the multi-camera shows do a lot of rehearsing, and in most cases, can usually perform the whole episode in only a take or two, which the audience could sit through; the single-camera shows on the other hand, the audience isn't going to want to sit through all the setting up and adjusting camera angles, and see the same shots done over and over again from different camera angles, which is why it was better to use a laugh track on those shows instead.

Some shows tried it out both ways: the first season of The Odd Couple was filmed with one camera, cinematic style, with just a laugh track, but the actors disliked working that way, so by the second season, they went with three cameras, did it like a stage play, and had a live audience, with a laugh track only for sweetening. The same can be said for Happy Days, first couple of seasons were single-camera and had a laugh track, but afterwards, they went with three cameras, and a live audience. Heck, even Norman Lear sitcoms, on very rare occasions, also had a laugh track only for sweetening... "The Taxi Caper" episode of All in the Family is a perfect example of this, if you listen carefully, with each genuine audience reaction, you can just make out those old 60s and 70s laugh track laughs mixed in as the audience quiets down.

 

[Drtooth]

Chuck Lorre swears that any show he is involved with, even as far back as Roseanne, never use laugh tracks, and if they can't get an actual audience, they just won't go with any laughter, live or simulated.

Yeah... I kinda lump live audiences and laugh tracks together... but the same problem arises... you need to make the jokes MORE important than the plot and character development. On a good show, you tend to not notice. But a BAD show will let you notice the rhythm... joke laugh, joke laugh, joke, laugh.... Nothing wrong with being funny, but you can be funny AND further the plot. If you try too hard to be funny with no plot, you wind up with something meh. Worst case scenario, you end up with terrible parody movies. And they don't even write jokes. They reference as many references they can in 90 minutes.

Mockumentaries just don't work for television, they just don't. The Christopher Guest movies are fine, it works in that area of entertainment, but it's just not a good idea for TV, and I really don't know who thought it was a brilliant idea to make all new sitcoms like mockumentaries.

Disagree yet agree.

The thing is, documentary shows do work, but when you have a glut of similar cloned television programming, it waters things down. I think the only 2 good documentary shows out there are The Office and Modern Family, more so the latter, and The Office lost its charm. I don't care too much for Parks and Rec, that's like VR Troopers to The office's Power Rangers to me.

But what I like are theatrical shows like My Name is Earl (I HATE that it was tossed off the network because of Parks and Rec), Raising Hope, and Arrested Development. Shows that feel like watching a good comedy film, but at the same time have longer plotlines that can go over the run time of a 90 minute movie, and become episodic. Though they are using first person narrative a little much. AD is the only one that was a third person narrative, and 30 Rock doesn't even have one.

I think those shows can co-mingle with Laugh track/studio audience shows without taking anything away from each other.

 

[D'Snowth]

A lot of it basically has to do with what the producers request during the editing process: sometimes, producers believe that if a show has a louder, bigger laugh track, that will somehow make the show funniest, but the truth is that it doesn't, it just emphasizes the artificial nature of the show... a number of 60s shows are like that, like the first couple of seasons of Hogan, the laugh track at times could be louder than the dialogue, and they used a lot of extreme reactions (loud belly laughs, uncontrolable laughter, etc), and like you mentioned with Get Smart, it started out okay, but towards the end, the laugh track on that show was a little on the invasive side as well.

But then, you've also got the problem with some shows where the volume of the laughs are dropped as low as a whisper, and those can be even more annoying than the when the laughs are too loud if you ask me.

There's a surprising art to the laugh track, you have to know when the big reactions are necessary, and you have to know when enough is enough... when done right, the laugh track can be a work of art, but when done wrong, it just rings of either desperation (if it's abused) or poor editing (if it's low as a whisper).

 

[Mo Frackle]

Another thing that I hate about Closed Captioning is when the captions read "laughter" everytime the laugh track plays. Really? What's the point in that?

 

[D'Snowth]

I've never experienced that with laugh track... live audience shows, such as Whose Line yes, but never a laugh track show.

 

[Mo Frackle]

I've never experienced that with laugh track...

There were a few episodes of "Drake and Josh" like that.

In another episode, Drake bought a toy robot that speaks Spanish. Whenever the robot spoke, rather than reading out the Spanish words, or even simply saying "speaks Spanish", the caption says that the robot "makes noise".

The CC on "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" had a bad habit of referring to Coco's language as "clucking" (and at least once had Coco say "Caw Caw"). The captioning on "My Gym Partner is a Monkey" rarely spelled Adam Lion's last name correctly.

 

[fuzzygobo]

Call me nostalgic for a bygone era, but remember when public libraries used to be QUIET? Where theoretically, you could go to study, concentrate, or maybe even have some quiet time to yourself? Maybe I need Peabody's Wayback Machine to go back a couple of decades to when this worked on paper.

I'm here right now on my lunch break, where quiet time is a valuable commodity. And there are soccer moms who let their carpetmunchers run around screaming their heads off "No, Caitlin, you need to use your INDOOR voice, or Mommy might give you a time-out!" Right across from me are two girls yakking up a storm (one is talking about her wishes to be kissed by a lifeguard). The other one has three phones in fromt of her- she's texting on one, facebooking on another, and putting the third one on vibrate and sticking it somewhere guaranteed to put a smile on her face.
And the staff seems to be extremely lax in enforcing any policy to keep things quiet.
I just went over to ask the girls if they'd mind keeping it down, and they got indignant about ME bothering THEM!!! What exactly is going on here?!!!

One of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone was called "Time Enough At Last".
Burgess Meredith starred as a bookworm who wanted nothing more than to be able to read without the constant distractions of modern society. A nuclear bomb goes off, and he's the sole survivor on the planet. Luckily he has a library full of books, and nobody to bother him. All is fine- until he breaks his glasses and can't see anymore.
Oh sweet fortune, how you mock me!

 

[D'Snowth]

Call me nostalgic for a bygone era, but remember when public libraries used to be QUIET?

Oh, are you kidding me? You do NOT want to go to the library with my mother: if somebody isn't being quiet, she'll make a scene about it, and it's quiet embarrassing. Most recently, when we were using the computers, because our internet was out, there was a man down a couple of computers from her talking on his cell phone, she reached one of those little stand-up quiet signs, and she slammed it down in front of him, to which he returned the gesture to her and told her how rude she was, which led to an argument over who was really being the rude one.

 

[charlietheowl]

Call me nostalgic for a bygone era, but remember when public libraries used to be QUIET?

My local library is good about being quiet, because the children's floor is separate from the computers/magazines place which is separate from the regular books floor. That way the noise can easily be avoided.

 

[CensoredAlso]

And the staff seems to be extremely lax in enforcing any policy to keep things quiet.

As a library major, I speculate that libraries in general are becoming less strict in order to encourage people to come in. Libraries are under a lot of competition from the Internet and staying in your own home.