Archives for category: Funny

Things are tough on Broadway right now. 16 shows are scheduled to close by February – and sure, a whole bunch of new shows will open up by the time the Tony qualifying deadline hits at the end of April, that’s still a lot of actors, techs, stage managers, and musicians out of work in the near term. As a theater geek at heart, that makes me sad.

You know what else makes me sad? The current state of SNL. Save for the brilliant stunt-casting of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin earlier this season, SNL hasn’t given me any reason to watch on a weekly basis since…well, since Tina Fey stopped doing Weekend Update. (Noticing a theme here?) So imagine my surprise when this sketch came to my attention earlier today.

Not only is it funny, but it touches on what are, in my opinion, big problems with the state of Broadway and the American musical theater in general. That, and NPH is teh awesome.

Yes, that’s right, You Don’t Know Jack is back. Deal with it.

Edit: I’ve removed the embedded game, because it was creating display problems in Firefox. You can get to the game I had originally embedded by clicking here. Sorry for the inconvenience.


You be the judge.

Edit: Video removed by YouTube. Sorry. But take my word for it – it was funny.

BTW, if you don’t already know about Nobody’s Watching…well, you could almost call it ‘the little TV show that could’. (Or ‘the little TV show that didn’t, then went viral, then finally got a chance’.) Created by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs), the pilot followed two guys from Ohio who are obsessed with sitcoms, but think none of the modern sitcoms are any good. They journey out to LA to pitch their ‘perfect sitcom’ to the (now-defunct) WB Network, and – astonishingly – land jobs creating and writing the series…except that they’re REALLY the unwitting subjects of the WB’s latest reality show. (It’s much more clever than it sounds.)

Anyway, a pilot was originally shot for the real-life (now-defunct) WB Network, but the show wasn’t picked up. Eventually, the pilot found its way to YouTube (in three parts – 1, 2, 3), and the show gained fans and supporters. Eventually, NBC (who shot down the concept pre-pilot) caught on and picked up the show – probably on the strength of the pilot, as well as the pedigree of Lawrence (and, possibly, guilt for all those times “Scrubs” nearly got cancelled). I’m a fan of the pilot, and I’m looking forward to the new episodes since “Nobody’s Watching”, like The Office, before it, is a new spin on the situation comedy. It may do well, or it may fail spectacularly, but either way, it’s nice to see someone taking risks on network TV.

It might just be my imagination, but it seems that being stuck in 4th place has NBC turning the camera inward for the upcoming season – “Nobody’s Watching”, “30 Rock”, and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” are all TV about TV. Thankfully, all three look promising. (TiVo, don’t fail me now…)