TV Comedies

I think I may have posted about TV series on DVD before, but I've been watching a lot of TV comedies and wanted to post about them specifically.  After getting hooked by my roommate, I tore through the six seasons of How I Met Your Mother that are available on Netflix and look forward to catching up on the recently-finished season seven, maybe in time to watch the show live this fall.  Toward the end of the sixth season, I calculated how much time I had spent watching HIMYM and found it was around forty-eight hours.  That's a lot of TV, especially considering each episode is about 21 minutes long.  When you invest that much time into a TV show you start to feel like you really know the characters and really care about what happens to them.  You share inside jokes with them (which the creators of HIMYM do a great job of incorporating into the show), and remember their past failures and successes.

I realized that I had started to apply lessons from the show to my own life, and was surprised at how often a situation on the show would reveal something helpful to me in my own relationships.  It's a comedy first and foremost, but the part that keeps me coming back is the heart behind the jokes.  It's the imperfections of the characters that make me sympathize with them, and their dreams that help me notice when I have set my own dreams aside, and encourage me to pick them back up.  While I was watching HIMYM, it was something to look forward to after a long day at work.  I would come home, say hi to my roommate--he was usually working in his room when I got back--and collapse on the couch with a snack, escaping into the sitcom world for forty minutes or so before having to make plans, cook dinner, clean, organize, and put on my adult face.  There were definitely days where the episodes of HIMYM that I watched were one of the high points of my day.  It sounds kind of pathetic, but it's not so bad.  The show was a way for me to escape while also reflecting on my own life and what I needed to do.

More recently I've been watching Community on DVD.  My sister gave me season two, which she preferred to season one, and having finished that I've moved on to season one to catch up.  It took a couple of episodes to get into, but I absolutely love it now.  It's one of my favorite shows ever.  It's the show among all others that most reliably makes me laugh, and laugh deep, rich, good laughs.  It mixes utter absurdity with believable human drama, and somehow makes it all work.  Some of the characters act jaded and cynical but still possess a redemptive innocence and hope which along with the humor keeps me coming back.

As somebody who tends to avoid or postpone conflict when possible, I love the way that characters on Community dive into conflict, and throw each other into conflict all the time, with nary a thought for the consequences.  But they always work through it and learn from it.  The show reminds me that conflict is important and can be really productive.  It doesn't matter how you get into it--it's working through it that makes things better and gives you understanding.  And while I can't always jump into conflict in real life the way the study group at Greendale Community College does, it's valuable to see how they work things out, and to laugh with them along the way.