Hello and welcome to, because it was on the Fancy Film Podcast, but for people who would rather talk about that episode as Saved by the Bell, where Jesse got addicted to caffeine pills. My name is Zachary Christensen and I was a hall monitor in school, so I haven't actually been inside of a classroom since fifth.
Hi, I'm Jessica Thon and I got hit in the phase with the lawn art right before homecoming, court nominations, and now I have to see if people will accept me for my personality. and we wanted to say thank you for joining us. because it was on, is really a show for the NI night generation. And what we wanna do is really talk about the social politics of sitcoms.
We really wanna put our student debt to good use by pulling apart the classic sitcoms that we all know and love to understand how race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and many other intersections get reflected in the shows that were on at your grandparents' house when they babysat you. Or that you snuck out of your room to watch at 2:00 AM when your siblings were asleep and you could finally steal the remote or that you fake six so you could watch on daytime tv.
All of the good things that I know that I for sure did when I was growing up as a true lover of sitcoms, as a member of the, the Colts of TV land and Nick and Knight growing.
Sitcoms have been a huge and super important part of my life, and I really credit them for a lot of my sense of humor and who I am now in a way that I think maybe a lot of of other generations who've come after us, after myself and Zach as millennials probably won't really have the, experience Even the name of our podcast, because it was on talks about how we really experienced television and sitcoms growing up. growing up before Netflix and before on demand and stream.
A lot of television was, whatever happened to be on at the time was what you would watch, And a lot of times you just watched things because maybe it wasn't made for you. It wasn't meant for you, but. It was just on and you watched it because it was on. You were never the intended audience, but there you were sitting there watching it because it was on, and I know certainly that was my experience. but Zach, I'm really curious for you understanding how you came to the world of sitcoms as a kid.
I was the youngest of six children. And so the competition for the television was intense especially if there was like a widespread of age ranges. But I loved television and I would fairly defend it from my sibling. And I had an older brother who we were both like very, I don't know, legal minded or litigious people, and we were constantly negotiating extremely intense rules and household can law and so there was this turn system that we have, you know, just like a basic turn system.
But he was really an anime and he wanted to watch tsunami, which is. He wanted to watch all of it back to back.
Violation of the clause.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause you can, like, you can watch Yugi or whatever. I don't know what's on Dragonball, see what's definitely on tuna me. But then you have to flip it and I get to watch SpongeBob Squarepants or whatever. And so through protracted negotiations, the, the rule in our household which caused a lot of problems is programming blocks counted as one turn.
Whoa, whoa.
if you wanna know, like the real reason that I like got into sitcoms is that my, eight year old ass realized that that like TV land did nothing for programming blocks where you could watch Be Witch for eight hours
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
watch Tsunami when you get home, but the,
But
TV is mine for the rest of the day.
Guess what? Motherfucker Roseanne starts at 6:00 PM and that bitch is going until 3:00 AM programming block.
I literally got into sitcoms as like a legal loophole to like maintain control over my territory. But then I just, I loved sitcoms. Be Witched. I, I loved, as a child I dream of, Jeanie was big for me. And of course Roseanne was one of the big ones that we first responded over at a very young age. These shows were not written for small children, and I feel like we both have talked about how it like shaped our personality that.
a hundred percent.
We both have like a very deep neurosis about saving all of our receipts because as children, television had taught us that any given time the government is, will come to you and say, Did you save those receipts cuz we're auditing you And if you did not save your receipts, then you went to jail.
Yeah. It is a matter of when and not if. You will get audited in sitcom world. If you live in sitcom land, you are definitely going to be audited at some point. I took this as a concrete life lesson and I myself saved all of my receipts for everything that I bought for an embarrassingly long amount of time until my mom all found them in my purse one day and was like, No one is ever auditing you. You are a 16 year old who makes $2,000 a year at the local movie theater.
They don't give a fuck what you are buying and you
The IRS does not care that you went to send a bun last week.
Yeah, exactly. And I was like, Mm. Jerry Seinfeld had a shoe boxes of receipts and so I think you actually don't know the rules mom.
Yeah, I yeah, we've talked before with each other about how sitcoms made us smart because it gave you like all this random cultural context that you would have no other way. Like I didn't read Prust as a child, but I had heard enough priest jokes in sitcom. That I knew that I could like reference it as like a joke about something pretentious to read. And just that kind of thing.
Like I knew that Paris was the capital of France as a child because there are lots of episodes where people like, go to Paris, France,
Exactly, exactly right. When you're like me and you're a nine year old child whose favorite show in the world was Cheers. A show that pretty much was off the air prior to you ever being born. I believe we overlap for maybe a couple of years, but certainly never while I was a conscious human in any real.
But if you're a nine year old whose favorite show is Cheers, you're definitely gonna pick up a lot of jokes about like Yates because you have a character like Diane, who's, who's going to be there reading it. And you also are gonna get a lot of jokes about like, 1980s sports world, which is something I would never know anything about in any real life or situation. But I happen to know a lot about Larry Bird because they talked about it like a lot on Cheers at that point in time.
So it's definitely something, definitely something that made me smart and played a, a very big role in my development of. Understanding the world, my humor, and
It also made us dumb as well,
Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent, yeah. Because I think there are a lot of times where I I have structured how I talk to people and how I understand things like in the format of like a one two punchline joke. And so when you're always playing to an invisible audience, an invisible crowd you're never actually like having a conversation.
Yeah, this is something that I had to like un
A hundred percent.
like in my early twenties, is just if nobody in the actual conversation is enjoying themselves and nobody else is watching then maybe you're just being an asshole. Like Dorothy, it's only acceptable that Dorothy talks to our friends about like that in the Golden Girls because there's an audience that it's not real. If you say that about your actual friends to their
You're just a mean girl
yeah.
Yeah, same. I, it's still something I've done learn. That's why we have this podcast now, a different invisible audience,
Yeah. is partially like.
It's, it's just therapy. It's fantasy fulfillment.
Yeah, we're gonna go the full like Harmon Town route of starting off with one thing, but this will just be therapy sessions by the end of it
the other thing, Zach, that I have to admit as it relates to sitcoms and how it, how I grew up with them it happened to coincide for both of us sitcoms and, and our love for them really coincided with the early internet and. I spent an insanely, embarrassingly large amount of time on an internet forum called Sitcoms Online, as I, I'm telling you, this was between the ages of nine and thirteens. It comes online. I've checked it out recently. It still exists in like its early two thousands.
Internet website forum setup. And so I spent a lot of times on the cheer. Forum. I spent a lot of time on the Roseanne forum. They were places that I haunted to such an extent, to such an extent. That the cool girl had a sleepover birthday party for her 12th birthday. I was invited because I went to a small school and all the girls were invited, and I was so wrapped up in a thread on this message board.
That I insisted I use her dial up internet at the time, tie up her entire family's phone line while the party was going on so that I could log onto her computer and respond to this message thread in real time because there was absolutely no way I was going the entire evening without making it known what I thought about the potential. Diane Woody ship.
What, what I love is that you were getting in these arguments with like
Full adults.
Yeah.
full adults, a hundred percent. They were completely grown. They were absolutely like 30 to 40 years old at that point in time. Easily older than that. Older than that easily. And here I was like 12 years old and I was like, I'm actually ready to go toe to toe with you about this. I do think that Diane and Woody would have made a great couple because they're both attractive.
Jessica, I have known you for 11 years now, and at this point it's so rare to get like a new Jessica revelation that this is Premo content. I have to apologize to you. I did not. Your street cred as a sitcom con aso, it goes much deeper than I thought.
You thought I was bluffing. I have 2,809 posts on the sitcoms online message board. I never bluff.
you definitely became the dom of this podcast. Okay. What is it that you think like resonated with you about sitcoms? Like what, what was it like captured to.
I think first and foremost they're almost a Trojan horse Into culture. And what I mean by that is it's something that is at least for a long time in American television culture, something that was pretty universally watched and very accessible to a huge, huge, broad swath of the audience. Right? And because of that, it's.
A, a tool by which a lot of different ideas and thoughts can be communicated out to a very large audience who maybe wouldn't get ahold of them or be able to touch them kind of on their own in a relatable way. Obviously that knife cuts the other. In that sitcoms also are reflection of all of those things that we are as a culture in a society. And so they can also be kind of a a touchstone of, or times capsules, probably a better way of putting it.
Sitcoms can really be a time capsule of the, essentially, Thoughts, beliefs and values of our culture at any given point in time so that they have this really interesting dual nature to them.
Yeah, that's right. I think. In a similar way, one of the things that appealed to me as a child about sitcoms is that almost always sitcoms are written with the idea that they are family programming and that there's this assumption that there will be children in the room. And so it, it is this sort of, like you said, bridge into adulthood, a bridge into more complicated media. There are jokes there that are sort of designed.
For kids to pick up on, or there's physical comedy there that a younger kid can like understand and the more he watches or she they, they, they will pick up on like the more complicated stuff.
And I think that that appealed to me that it was like more complicated media that had the kind of like silly stuff that I craved and then, I got hooked on like, I think eventually that came to a point where like, children's programming was a little too simple for me cuz I was used to like an A plot and a B plot and like more nuanced stuff happening. And so I, I really liked it. I also liked.
I so children's programming, I feel like it doesn't, it's not often very sympathetic to, or gives a lot of exploration into like what it's like to be an adult. And I think that like adults were very mysterious to me as a kid. They were like their whole world. Yeah. So you love your parents, you love maybe your teachers but they're these very mysterious figures because they're so powerful and they have all of these.
If they have all this power over you and they're sometimes stressed and stuff, so maybe you're like curious about what's stressing them out, what kind of forces are, and they don't wanna talk about it cuz you're a kid. and sitcoms I think were like a cultural translator I guess. Where like I lived in a working class household where my parents were struggling to pay their bills.
They of course would never talk to me about that, but I could watch Roseanne and it kind of helped me understand in a way what was going on.
Just expanding on it as well. It's not only a window into understanding and being able to relate to adults when you're like a younger person watching it. If you read my posts from sitcoms online, really thought she was unattractive, and you watch all of these shows When you are at the age that you are really wanting to essentially grow up and have adult experiences. It is a way of living vicariously to understand what those experiences should be.
And even what, you know, what are those opportunities, If you're a, 11 year old girl who. if you read my posts from sitcoms online, really thought she was unattractive, and you watch all of these shows, about women dating in the sitcom world, you can sort of set expectations of what that's gonna be like, And sort of live through that. and I think part of.
What we'll be able to unpack in our show is what were those messages we then picked up as people who were forming world opinions and views about how life is and should be. And, learning how to relate to experiences and people through sitcoms, which as we'll see are kind of like a fun house mirror. They're very distorted versions of reality.
Absolutely. Full disclosure, we are recording this introduction to the series with several episodes already in the tank for, and it's gonna be a theme throughout that the show does not necessarily a hundred percent endorse the social politics of these sitcoms. We love sitcoms most of 'em at. King of Queens is not treated very
Fuck you, King of Queens.
but yeah, they're, they're just interesting. Like we love the genre but you can take a critical relationship to the things you love.
I think it's important now to, to take that critical lens to it because. It has clearly had an impact on us and how we view the world.
But if you extrapolate that, I think even further to more of like a macro level, we can see that the media that we consume, whether it is great media and wonderful art versus, you know, a, a really bad bot written sitcom That it is still, you know, what we choose to, to put on air and say this is a reflection of us, I think has weight as a, an artifact worth understanding in terms of its messaging and what it means and what it can tell us about who we are as a American culture.
Right, Absolutely. The sitcom sitcom. Coincide with history sitcoms lines up perfectly with sort of. Post World Wari America. And there are all these cultural artifacts that you can look at and see how we progressed, how we developed over time, and so. The history of sitcoms is the history of the racial politics in America, gender politics. The sexual revolution happened you know, over, it's documented very well in the history of sitcoms and.
L G B T rights the AIDS epidemic all are just represented in sitcoms, and it is this interest. There are these very interesting texts that you can look at about what it was like and on prime time television at the time, and how the culture was dealing with it, what entertainment looked like at the time that these things were happen. At the, And sitcoms have a special place that it's very strange and it's something that we should unpack some time.
Like the special place that sitcoms have in our culture where there is this very odd Expectation that they be moral parables a lot of the time that they be cultural teachers. So they're not just reflecting it as often. People want sitcoms to be to be advocating for certain viewpoints or certain values. Oftentimes there's even been like political movements of influencing what kinds of contents that creators can make. So it, it's just this moral teacher in our culture.
It's very weird and therefore worth interrogating. Like if we are going to have the, this genre in that like place where people think that it's like a teacher we should probably look at it and say what's up with it and what it's actually teaching us.
Yeah. Yes, I agree. I agree. And I think, you know, we're, that's what we're gonna set out to do. That is our goal for this show is to poke at those things a little bit more and try to understand them a little bit better. And look at this dual nature that they have as both reflection and standard bearer as our guidepost and as sort of our weird roar shack of of understanding. And we have a lot to, to look forward to with the show.
We're very excited to be having this conversation with all of you. Zach and I have loved sitcoms and bonded over sitcoms. We're largely friends because we both enjoyed sitcoms growing up and, and really shared that in, in common even though we, we came from very two different circumstances and. Childhoods and upbringings. We really shared that, that piece of ourselves with each other, and we're excited now to share that with, with you guys, the audience joining us.
we're glad to have you
Thank you for sticking around and listening to us. Talk about why sitcoms matter to us. We can't wait to hear more about why they matter to you. stay tuned. The rest of our episodes will start to be dropped in the feed. So keep an eye out for them. And. We'll talk to you As soon