shows, characters, your opinion

[derien]

I've been watching M*A*S*H* (without laugh track) and it's true that there are quite a few kind of creepy points which aren't near as funny in retrospect, but that doesn't bother me too much, I find, because I did feel like they were real aware of not crossing a line. Even in the first ep, Hawkeye is after a nurse and shows up in the shower and hands her a towel when the soap is in her eyes, but he doesn't touch her at all. But we were discussing the differences between the movie and the show - in the movie the main characters really weren't nice at all. (And one of my ex co-workers wife who was a nurse worked with the doctor who wrote the book, and said he was really an asshole, so I guess that's to be expected.)

My theory is that they had to make the characters more nice for the show because people wouldn't watch a show in which you really can't sympathize with any of the characters, you don't like any of them.

Matt countered that there are lots of shows these days with an all-nasty cast of characters.

Do you all think that's true? I don't watch much TV these days. Is he right?

Comments

[cuddyclothes]

I lost my taste for network sitcoms when I read that characters say things to each other that, if you said them to someone in real life, they'd never speak to you again. The Big Bang characters were unrelentingly insulting to each other, and in later seasons the entertainment value was definitely deflating.