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- Seinfeld's Strange Take
Hi Hollywood tech nerds! You’re NOT seeing double. This morning we sent out an email with an incorrect subject line. Even your friendly tech nerd Steve can screw up sometimes… often… frequently!
If you’ve already read this newsletter, feel free to disregard this one. It’s the same stuff. OR read it again. The choice is yours!
In this week’s post:
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Seinfeld’s Strange Take
Before I say anything else: my Seinfeld bona fides are impeccable. I’ve seen every episode; it was the one show my family watched together every week! I’m not a revisionist who pretends that the show wasn’t funny. It obviously was and is! The music of my millennial upbringing may indeed be the Seinfeld theme.
All that out of the way, late last month The New Yorker published a long interview with Jerry Seinfeld, during which Seinfeld dropped a completely bonkers claim:
It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘m*a*s*h’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.” You just expected, There’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what—where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.
Jerry is a cranky guy - not that there’s anything wrong with that! He’s entitled to his (wrong) opinion. The political implications of humor, ie “you can’t joke about that anymore” are beyond the scope of this newsletter, and frankly not relevant to this discussion, because Seinfeld’s description of why there aren’t monoculture-popular sitcoms has nothing to do with “extreme left and P.C. crap.” The reason is much more mundane, and should be obvious given why Jerry is doing so many interviews!
Seinfeld lists four TV shows - Cheers, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family. What do all these sitcoms have in common? They were all primarily produced in the 1970s-1980s, with Cheers extending into the early 90s. Why didn’t Seinfeld list more modern sitcoms? Surely the progression of Friends, Frasier, The Office, Modern Family, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia etc. should be mentioned?
They’re not included because that would interfere with Seinfeld’s thesis - these comedies were popular for their time, but became less of a monocultural event not due to some sort of PC humor stoppage, but because they faced more competition from content on cable and streaming. To take a recent example, the most-streamed TV show of 2023 was Suits, a dramedy that premiered in 2011 and ended in 2019. Modern TV isn’t just competing with itself, it’s competing with TV from the past! Would Seinfeld have been as popular as it was in 1994 but with the competition of 2024?
Furthermore, are old school sitcoms desired by modern audiences? We’ve reached the point where even the fake documentary/reality TV style of sitcom pioneered by The Office has begun to feel overdone and entrenched, so the live studio audience show absolutely reads as even more antiquated. As Gen Z would say, it’s giving relic!
All of this is especially strange given that Seinfeld is making this claim as part of a promotion for his film Unfrosted, which premieres on… Netflix. Jerry, buddy, if they’re watching your movie on Netflix, guess what they’re not watching!
SFX, VFX, CGI, and Stunts!
I love StudioBinder’s video essays, and they’ve released another banger all about special effects, visual effects, CGI, and how they interact. It’s not all the same!
For real life action, I recommend this Empire article on some of the real life stunts filmed for movies (if you watched the StudioBinder video, you’d know these count as special effects!).
My favorite was this tidbit about The Man With the Golden Gun:
On 1 June, 1974, with 100 members of the European press gathered along the banks of Thailand’s Klong Ransit canal, Willerts — who’d never even driven the specially-modified AMC before, let alone attempted a jump in it — hit his computer-calculated 48mph mark and pulled off the dizzying 360° leap in just a single take. And not only does the stunt, designed by crash reconstruction pioneer Raymond McHenry and guided by stunt coordinator W.J. Milligan Jr., look perfect in the finished movie. Willerts’ corkscrew jump also represented the first computer-modeled stunt in movie history.
Here it is in the film:
Sadly this glorious stunt is nearly ruined by a ridiculous slide whistle on the score, it’s like watching the hallway scene in Inception with a polka band playing over it!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Is this the end of Paramount+? (link)
Disney bets big on parks. (link)
How technology is transforming rap beef. (link)