Friday Five: My Five Favorite TV Sitcoms (Right Now)

Television shows doesn't seem quite right, does it? Just like books don't seem to be books anymore, is it right to talk about them as television shows? I watch 98% of my shows/movies on my laptop, or my phone.  We have TVs in our house but the boys are always using them. (One, in their room, is permanently playing Chicken Little and we cannot turn it off or Mr Bunches gets terrified.  The other one, in our living room, generally shows Ice Age or The Incredibles these days.) But even televisions are televisions anymore. They're just screens.

Anyway, here's my Five Favorite Shows (Right Now), in no particular order (other than the order I put them in):

1. Brooklyn 99: This is my and Sweetie's lunch show. I started watching this and around episode 2 Sweetie got into it and we've worked our way through most of the two seasons available online, watching it while we eat lunch.  While you're obviously supposed to love Andy Samberg's Jake Peralta (and he is funny) I think Andre Braugher's stoic, desperately unhip police captain makes the show:



I loved Andre Braugher on Homicide years ago (and Homicide still has the single best episode of a tv show I've ever seen, the one where Vincent D'Onofrio gets pushed in front of a subway), and he's essentially the same character only in  a wacky precinct. It's awesome.

2. BoJack Horseman: The Boy got me into this show, and while I'm suspect of many of his pop culture choices (21 Jump Street is the funniest movie ever? SERIOUSLY?) he was dead on here.  This is too weird a show to be as touching as it is: BoJack Horseman is a former star of an 80s sitcom just drifting through his days aimlessly, drunk and hoping to get some fame or recognition or respect.  Season 1 followed him as a ghost writer wrote "his" autobiography, and Season 2 shows what happens after the book, which tells all the bad stuff about him, comes out.  There are hilarious comedy bits but this season was also really touching. I didn't think a show about a drunken horse buying a yacht in New Mexico could bring a lump to my throat, but it did.

One of my favorite characters is "Vincent Adultman," who only BoJack Horseman knows the truth about.  See if you can figure out Vincent's secret:




3. The Mindy Project: I love commercials. If it wasn't for commercials, how would a guy like me -- who generally distrusts people and/or society -- find out about stuff? I started watching The Mindy Project because it was advertised all the time on Hulu after it got canceled and then put on Hulu.  I liked Mindy Kaling on The Office so one night when Mr F couldn't sleep I figured what've I got to lose and gave it a shot.  It's surprisingly funny.  The concept is that Mindy, a successful (?) doctor, is semi-obsessed with making her life as much like a romantic comedy as she can, with of course funny if not hilarious results.  The show almost tries too hard to be cute at times, but is rescued by Mindy Kaling, who's funny, and even more so by her foil/love interest, Danny, who's exactly the kind of lunky loveable character that populates rom-coms.




4. Archer: Archer shows how more or less how I have abandoned broadcast TV, as well as being the funniest, smartest, adventure-iest show around.  I am a season behind Archer right now because when I tried to DVR it and watch the latest season, I couldn't really keep up with it. Some didn't tape, and I didn't like having to watch it on the TV in our bedroom (which was where I DVRd it because we can't watch the living room TV, but we never just hang out in our bedroom until the boys have gone to bed, which is almost never -- it's 8:46 on Thursday night right now and I'm sitting in the boys' room waiting for Mr F to fall asleep. He won't fall asleep unless one of us is in the room, so we alternate nights sitting in here.)

Archer ought to need no introduction or explanation by now. Its's both a spy show and a parody of a spy show, full of action that is every bit as cool (and cartoonish) as Mission: Impossible but which also makes fun of spy movies.  And the wordplay and inside jokes; like my prior favorite, Arrested Development, Archer can be watched and rewatched without getting boring, because each time I get some new joke I didn't before.

Plus the show just goes off in these wild directions. For one whole season, the ISIS spy group was trying to work as cocaine dealers and ended up with its accountant being a third-world dictator.  It's that kind of stuff that makes the show extra fun.

The clips are somewhat NSFW:



5. Adventure Time: I'm not actually sure this counts as a sitcom, but I do love it so whatever.  Adventure Time I think is by the guy who also writes Dinosaur Comics, and I learned that Adventure Time is a thing when we were wandering through Toys "R" Us trying to find Star Wars X-Wing Legos for Mr Bunches like 2 years ago.  I saw some "Adventure Time" action figures and had no idea what they were, so I looked them up when I got home, and learned that the show is about some sort of post-apocalyptic world in which a 13-year-old boy and his shapeshifting dog have adventures and fight various monsters to save various princesses.  It's weird and touching and interesting and sometimes funny, but not really laugh out loud funny.  I can only watch 1 or 2 episodes at a time, because they're sort of overwhelming in a way.  It's like a day at an amusement park just after your mom died.  That's the best I can sum it up.



If you like scifi or fantasy, you should definitely watch Adventure Time, especially if you like weird stuff. It looks like a kids' show but it's so definitely not.