MagneticMediaFed

You can’t have a sit-com, in this age, about young people living in an apartment. You can try, but people won’t watch it. Whether its last season’s Four Kings, or the dreadful Happy Hour on FOX, there will always be sit-coms produced in this model, but for the foreseeable future they simply won’t stick. Instead, the newer three-camera comedies that are succeeding all seem to be fairly conceptual (they also seem to be on CBS, for some reason). If ‘degree of conceptuality’ is proportional to a shows success with the public, then no series will have a bigger audience this season than CBS’s [natch] new comedy The Class. Here’s the set-up:

A guy throws a party for his fiance. The two of them were in the same third grade class, but met years later and fell in love. His idea is to invite all of his classmates from third grade to the party. About a dozen show up. When his fiance arrives, she’s shocked by his effort, feels smothered, and dumps him in front of all these now-twenty-somethings. We’re left with eight characters who kind of know each other and all the hilarity that these connections can produce.

That’s the show, and dare I say I liked it? A lot*. Keep reading by clicking below…

The Class is created by David Crane who also created Friends. In this new series, he’s somehow accomplished the impossible: taken his previous series, the megahit, and stripping it back down to its earlier self. The last few seasons of Friends became awash in will-they-won’t-they storytelling, often at the cost of comedy (its weird to see episodes from their first couple seasons and remember how genuinely funny it was — there was that monkey!). The Class has its fair share of romantic entanglements (and will likely milk them for all they’re worth in weeks and months (years?) ahead), but at this point in the show’s run — the point in which it hasn’t even seen its audience — everything comes off as charming.

Everything here is by the numbers. Eight twenty-somethings all playing an archetype in a world free of minorities. The series has laughs but isn’t what I would call hilarious. It’s “funny,” but perhaps more important, it’s rarely boring. The pace is rapid-fire, which is necessary given the large cast. As convoluted as the set-up may be, we’re all ready past the party by the first act break. In fact, over the three episodes I have seen the series finds a rhythm most shows are lucky to capture by the times sweeps roles around.

With The Class, CBS will likely have established the first successful block of comedies since the glory days of Must See TV. The line-up is quite clever. From 8pm to 9pm we have The Class and How I Met Your Mother, two shows with attractive young casts, based on the premise of instant nostalgia, a subject no self-respecting twenty-something can get enough of. Then from 9pm to 10pm you have Two and a Half Men and The New Adventures of Old Christine, two comedies dealing with non-traditional families. Also two comedies that are looking toward a slightly older audience. It’s pretty brilliant programming, and even if I’d prefer to watch The Office to any of these shows, I’m afraid NBC doesn’t offer a block of programming nearly as tight (why 30 Rock and 20 Good Years aren’t playing with The Office and My Name Is Earl is beyond me).

What is often forgotten is at the heart of sit-com you have the word “situation.” The whole point of this genre is have interesting characters responding to the situations they are placed in, and in that sense, The Class is a triumph.

*Or at least as much as I can like a three-camera sit-com, which will always be the lesser form of comedy in my book– that is until someone, somewhere can finally figure out what made Seinfeld so good and reproduce it.

Tags: CBS, How I Met Your Mother, The Class, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Two and a Half Men

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Reviews, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.