Mad Men to Seinfeld – TV's most criminally overrated shows - The Guardian

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How long can you maintain the illusion that anyone would truly give a mouse-sized shit about any of the infinitesimally small social solecisms that fill this world?
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This guy knows its a sitcom right? This is part of what makes it funny.
 
1. They're trying so hard.

2. This is how you know you're not good at reviewing and analyzing and criticizing TV:

For a while I had the privilege of writing the Mad Men recaps for the Guardian. With a large and loyal audience, the blogs required attention. You had to watch the episode and take notes. You had to submit those notes to intensive textual analysis, then scan the show once more for oblique cultural references (Don is reading Dante on the beach) and analyse those too (but what does it mean?). Finally you had to double cross-check your observations against every other episode in the series so far, to fit each character’s actions into the grand, heroic arc that creator Matthew Weiner no doubt had planned for them. Then you had to take notes about the clothes.

After a while, I decided all this effort wasn’t worth it. This may have coincided with the third reinvention of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Cuthbert Dibble Grub, or when that underwhelming Brit baddy got his toes chewed off by a lawn mower. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, I had a realisation: Mad Men wasn’t the great existential drama of our age, exploring the nature of identity and our Freudian urges. It was just a meandering soap.

I stuck with it to the end, partly because I didn’t want to admit I’d wasted my time (there were 92 episodes, ninety flipping two), but also hoping there would be a satisfying resolution. In the end all I got was an attempt at pulling a Sopranos; an enigmatic ending that, in fact, wasn’t at all enigmatic. The conclusion, if you’ll pardon the spoiler, was that Don Draper, Mr Death Instinct, had used a moment of ultimate crisis to come up with a better jingle for Coca-Cola.

If the conclusion was a cynical comment on the nature of mankind, it hadn’t been necessary to spend 70+ hours to get to that point. And if, as I suspect was actually the case, it was intended as a happy ending with the great man creating a lasting piece of culture, then I had to despair for humanity. Still, nice suits. Paul MacInnes
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If your takeaway was that this was a cynical comment about the nature of mankind -- and not a journey of discovery with deep, deep character revelations covering an entire decade from a feminist perspective ... you're a fucking loser and you have no business anywhere near that keyboard. Step away.
 
lol this is like my top 10 best tv shows of all time.

  1. Seinfeld
  2. The Wire
  3. Breaking Bad
  4. Game of Thrones
  5. Arrested Development
  6. Mad Men
  7. BattleStar Gallectica
  8. Arrested Development
  9. Friends
  10. Stranger Things
 
Not getting a click from me.

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It always felt as if I was watching it with the writers sitting next to me, signposting every overly constructed joke, smugly looking back at me not for a laugh but for a self-satisfied smirk.
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Project much?

What absolute bullshit.
 
The Friends bit was fine but their criticism of Arrested Development (and by extension, community) was dripping with pseudo-intellectual drivel about a show actually being smart but maybe too smug about it? I'm sure you wrote your criticism without a hint of smugness as most reviewers avoid.
 
maxcriden said:
Arrested Development - the jokes get uglier and meanier on rewatches, despite my previous fandom of the show, I have to acknowledge this and it detracts significantly from it for me
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I don't understand this at all. One of AD's foremost strengths is its supreme rewatchability. Not only because there are setups to jokes that are even better after you've heard the punchline, but because the density of the humor is such that you'll never catch everything in a single viewing. It rewards you for going back over it.

About the only real criticisms that I could get are maybe the wacky style of humor not necessarily clicking with everyone and that some of the bigger jokes rely maybe a bit too much on contemporary and ephemeral pop culture and are thus dated now that we're a decade plus out from its original airing, but that's ignoring the vast majority of the genuinely original comedy that makes the show.
 
Such lists are so useless. Unless you're doing an entire feature about this with detailed long form articles articulating and critiquing exactly why a certain author felt a certain show was overrated (its shortcomings, strengths, cultural environment which made it appealing to audiences/critics in the first place) these lists come across as dismissive and do not adequately convince or even begin to sway its readers opinions to the contrary.
 
I kind of agree about Mad Men, as someone who watched the show for years. I can respect that it's fantastically well written, but I always thought it was just kind of missing something. Didn't quite move me or connect with me the way other shows have.

I also love AD but I can see the argument there too. I disagree strongly about Seinfeld and West Wing. I don't know anyone who thinks The Walking Dead is really a 'great' TV show on the level with some of the others.
 
OK so basically just some pretty decent TV shows that they didn't like?

Mad Men sucks though
 
CrunchyFrog said:
I don't understand this at all. One of AD's foremost strengths is its supreme rewatchability. Not only because there are setups to jokes that are even better after you've heard the punchline, but because the density of the humor is such that you'll never catch everything in a single viewing. It rewards you for going back over it.

About the only real criticisms that I could get are maybe the wacky style of humor not necessarily clicking with everyone and that some of the bigger jokes rely maybe a bit too much on contemporary and ephemeral pop culture and are thus dated now that we're a decade plus out from its original airing, but that's ignoring the vast majority of the genuinely original comedy that makes the show.
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Sorry, I was unclear. I agree with what you said in the first paragraph, in theory. What I meant was the jokes are a lot uglier and meaner than I realized when I first watched it.
 
I hate seinfeld and friends, and I don't really like Mad Men either... can't see what is so good when every character is a bag of dicks, not to mention it has some of the tropes of drama shows that people love to hate.

For example at one point in one of the episodes Don and his wife have an argument, breaks his kids toy as they both storm off, and then token kid comes in to save the day and make Don not feel like total shit but still pretty much a shit.

I remember when Vinyl came out the critics ripped that one scene where the kid interrupts his parents argument, and yet Mad Men does the same exact thing and still gets absolute praise.

Just one example.
 
Hmm, I agree with most of the shows I've watched except Seinfeld.

I agree with Arrested Development too, but that might be because I didn't watch it until 8 years later after it had been hyped up as one of the best things ever shown on television.
 
Sorry Arrested Development is one of the funniest TV shows of all time. Disagree with Seinfeld and Friends. Hated Friends during its intial run, but was able to appreciate it a lot more when I burned though it when it was added to Netflix.
 
I agree 100%. But I understand why people love them and that's ok. It's like these writers don't understand.

Lost was fun for the journey.

Downton Abbey is magical.

Mad Men is cynical.

Friends is relatable.

No one thinks The Walking Dead is actually good. It's popcorn TV.

BSG was a sci fi epic for genre fans

It's like these writers all missed the point entirely.
 
You know what's overrated? This author! Haha!


But seriously, not sure how you can't see the quality behind something like Seinfeld. Maybe you still don't like it, but that doesn't make it overrated.
 
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