The Great Indoors
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Dave Sikula
Nov 18, 2016, 12:03:51 AM11/18/16
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Is anyone else watching this? I find it stuck in a time warp, like a bunch of Bob Hope's radio comedy writers pitched a series on "these kids today with their computers." I've been dealing with college kids this term, and while their pop culture knowledge doesn't go back as far as I'd like, they don't mistake an answering machine for "a first generation iPod" or think an atlas is "Google maps printed out." (Actual dialogue from tonight's show (I won't dignify the lines with the word "jokes.")
I once read a description of Hope's late 60s specials that mentioned actors like Hope, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball dressed as "hippies" and staggering around like drunken sailors after smoking marijuana. This show seems the 21st-century equivalent of that.
Though, I suppose given CBS's demo, this seems like cutting-edge comedy.
--Dave Sikula
I once read a description of Hope's late 60s specials that mentioned actors like Hope, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball dressed as "hippies" and staggering around like drunken sailors after smoking marijuana. This show seems the 21st-century equivalent of that.
Though, I suppose given CBS's demo, this seems like cutting-edge comedy.
--Dave Sikula
PGage
Nov 18, 2016, 12:41:07 AM11/18/16
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I worked closely with college kids until very recently and still have a son in college. These are not the kinds of mistakes they are prone to make, or the kinds of holes in their knowledge. In other words, they are not stupid. There are some things they don't know that can strike old people as funny - the two main things that always got me were, for maybe 15 years or more now, many of them have no idea at all what carbon paper was, and have trouble understanding even when explained to them why anyone would want to use it. Also, while they know intellectually what a typewriter is, many of them have never seen one, most have never used one, and they have no intuitive sense of when it would be used. Just a few weeks ago a former student texted me, genuinely perplexed by a grad school application form that included the cryptic instructions "Do not print or hand write". After she went on for some minutes with her frustration as to how she was supposed to fill it out since it was not provided in any electronic form and prohibited being filled in by hand, I just said "you need a typewriter". She was quiet for a thoughtful minute and said "Oh, so that's what those are for?", I told her that they were for a lot more than filling out forms, but these days that was probably one of their last vital functions. She told me it would be easier for her to turn it into a PDF file that she could type in the blanks - and it turned out she was right.
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Kevin M.
Nov 18, 2016, 1:43:32 AM11/18/16
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I've watched the first three episodes, only because I needed a dumb comedy in my life, one that makes no demands of the audience, and this series fits that bill. Besides, I'll watch Stephen Fry read the phone book, and he is basically phoning it in on this show.
As far as portraying 20-somethings as stupid, they aren't, but they do lack the fundamentals of my generation's pop culture, and this might be the first generation that has done that. I can reference Bugs Bunny cartoons made decades before I was born, and I have a keen fondness for music of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. I've read books written hundreds of years ago -- not as a class assignment, but out of interest. I can speak about the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other historic events long before my time. It isn't that the current crop of youngsters are stupid or intentionally ignorant of these sorts of things of my generation... to them it just doesn't matter. Why would an atlas matter to them? How does knowledge of an answering machine impact them?
As far as portraying 20-somethings as stupid, they aren't, but they do lack the fundamentals of my generation's pop culture, and this might be the first generation that has done that. I can reference Bugs Bunny cartoons made decades before I was born, and I have a keen fondness for music of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. I've read books written hundreds of years ago -- not as a class assignment, but out of interest. I can speak about the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other historic events long before my time. It isn't that the current crop of youngsters are stupid or intentionally ignorant of these sorts of things of my generation... to them it just doesn't matter. Why would an atlas matter to them? How does knowledge of an answering machine impact them?
PGage
Nov 18, 2016, 2:06:32 AM11/18/16
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Well, a telegraph did not mean anything to me from a practical stand point growing up, but I knew what it was. I don't know a single current college aged person (18-22) who does not know what an answering machine is - and it would never occur to them to relate it to an iPod (indeed, they are probably more likely to know really know what an iPod was).
In terms of general popular culture from decades before they were born, I would say they are more spotty than ignorant. I think they know a hell of a lot more about music from before they were born than maybe any generation in history, because of how much access they have had to music. I have heard them listening non-ironically to Motown and Swing and Classic Rock and mid-century Broadway Musicals. Whenever I have braced them with the traditional challenge ("How do you know that, you weren't even born when...") they look at me like I am an idiot and ask if I have ever heard of iTunes or Spotify or Youtube (or other things that I actually have not heard of that allow them to listen to any music ever recorded whenever they want to). They also have some pretty good exposure to certain kinds of old TV - I suspect it is correlated to what is (or used to be) shown on Nick at Night and the like. But there is also a lot that they don't know.
OTOH, I find that their (as a group, of course always exceptions) knowledge of old movies is almost non-existent, and "old" here can be anything from the 1990s and before. They have almost no tolerance for anything in black and white (except for a certain kind of proto-hipster, who pretends to only like black and white films the way some of my college friends pretended to only watch silent films back in the day). And I agree that they often have very little context for social history and old pop culture. I knew vaguely about Raccoon coats and the Charleston and the Lindbergh Baby as a high schooler, but the pop history knowledge of most college students today is exhausted by the OJ Trial and maybe Monica's stained dress. I find they know very little about things like Watergate, McCarthyism, the Manson Family or anything like that.
OTOH, I find that their (as a group, of course always exceptions) knowledge of old movies is almost non-existent, and "old" here can be anything from the 1990s and before. They have almost no tolerance for anything in black and white (except for a certain kind of proto-hipster, who pretends to only like black and white films the way some of my college friends pretended to only watch silent films back in the day). And I agree that they often have very little context for social history and old pop culture. I knew vaguely about Raccoon coats and the Charleston and the Lindbergh Baby as a high schooler, but the pop history knowledge of most college students today is exhausted by the OJ Trial and maybe Monica's stained dress. I find they know very little about things like Watergate, McCarthyism, the Manson Family or anything like that.
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 10:43 PM, Kevin M. <drunkba...@gmail.com> wrote:
I've watched the first three episodes, only because I needed a dumb comedy in my life, one that makes no demands of the audience, and this series fits that bill. Besides, I'll watch Stephen Fry read the phone book, and he is basically phoning it in on this show.
As far as portraying 20-somethings as stupid, they aren't, but they do lack the fundamentals of my generation's pop culture, and this might be the first generation that has done that. I can reference Bugs Bunny cartoons made decades before I was born, and I have a keen fondness for music of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. I've read books written hundreds of years ago -- not as a class assignment, but out of interest. I can speak about the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, and other historic events long before my time. It isn't that the current crop of youngsters are stupid or intentionally ignorant of these sorts of things of my generation... to them it just doesn't matter. Why would an atlas matter to them? How does knowledge of an answering machine impact them?
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:41 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:
I worked closely with college kids until very recently and still have a son in college. These are not the kinds of mistakes they are prone to make, or the kinds of holes in their knowledge. In other words, they are not stupid. There are some things they don't know that can strike old people as funny - the two main things that always got me were, for maybe 15 years or more now, many of them have no idea at all what carbon paper was, and have trouble understanding even when explained to them why anyone would want to use it. Also, while they know intellectually what a typewriter is, many of them have never seen one, most have never used one, and they have no intuitive sense of when it would be used. Just a few weeks ago a former student texted me, genuinely perplexed by a grad school application form that included the cryptic instructions "Do not print or hand write". After she went on for some minutes with her frustration as to how she was supposed to fill it out since it was not provided in any electronic form and prohibited being filled in by hand, I just said "you need a typewriter". She was quiet for a thoughtful minute and said "Oh, so that's what those are for?", I told her that they were for a lot more than filling out forms, but these days that was probably one of their last vital functions. She told me it would be easier for her to turn it into a PDF file that she could type in the blanks - and it turned out she was right.
On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:03 PM 'Dave Sikula' via TVorNotTV <tvor...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Is anyone else watching this? I find it stuck in a time warp, like a bunch of Bob Hope's radio comedy writers pitched a series on "these kids today with their computers." I've been dealing with college kids this term, and while their pop culture knowledge doesn't go back as far as I'd like, they don't mistake an answering machine for "a first generation iPod" or think an atlas is "Google maps printed out." (Actual dialogue from tonight's show (I won't dignify the lines with the word "jokes.")--
I once read a description of Hope's late 60s specials that mentioned actors like Hope, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball dressed as "hippies" and staggering around like drunken sailors after smoking marijuana. This show seems the 21st-century equivalent of that.
Though, I suppose given CBS's demo, this seems like cutting-edge comedy.
--Dave Sikula
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Dave Sikula
Nov 18, 2016, 2:07:37 AM11/18/16
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Fry is the only reason I've stayed with it, and he wasn't even on this week.
It's not that an answering machine or an atlas should have any relevance in their lives, it's that the writers consistently portray those darn kids as misidentifying or being baffled by them in a supposedly humorous fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to have them shown picking up a photo album and saying "but how do I scroll through this? It must be broken" or, faced with a transistor radio, using it to ask Siri to give them directions. Twenty-somethings may not use (or know how to use) typewriters, dial telephones, or even stereopticons, but they don't act as though they're artifacts from ancient civilizations or something dropped off by Martians.
Of course, this is the same network that's gotten a decade of mileage out of showing a group of supposed geniuses who possess little acquaintance with the commonplaces of modern life.
--Dave Sikula
It's not that an answering machine or an atlas should have any relevance in their lives, it's that the writers consistently portray those darn kids as misidentifying or being baffled by them in a supposedly humorous fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to have them shown picking up a photo album and saying "but how do I scroll through this? It must be broken" or, faced with a transistor radio, using it to ask Siri to give them directions. Twenty-somethings may not use (or know how to use) typewriters, dial telephones, or even stereopticons, but they don't act as though they're artifacts from ancient civilizations or something dropped off by Martians.
Of course, this is the same network that's gotten a decade of mileage out of showing a group of supposed geniuses who possess little acquaintance with the commonplaces of modern life.
--Dave Sikula
PGage
Nov 18, 2016, 2:25:54 AM11/18/16
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Exactly.
Mark Jeffries
Nov 18, 2016, 12:16:39 PM11/18/16
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Since I stopped reading a lot of message boards a long time ago and my Twitter status is still rudimentary, have a lot of "Community" fans been getting on McHale's ass for doing this show and throwing around words like "traitor" and "sellout?" Of course, I suspect that the "Community" audience that's active in the usual places have been more Dan Harmon fans than Joel McHale fans (or any other cast member on the show).
Exactly.
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