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.
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.
God thank you. I fucking despise that cover. It’s honestly such a dumb fucking take on that song.
If I may add their cover of Land of Confusion by Genesis to the list. It was disappointing.
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 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.
The James Cameron Avatar movies.
They’re so bad.
…well the first one was. Didn’t bother with any after that…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Big Bang Theory
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.
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…
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.