Nobody likes clip shows, those pointless non-episodes of our favorite TV programs--especially sitcoms--that consist of a hodgepodge of great and not-so-great moments from the series. Yet they persist.
In the early days of TV, a clip show had a sort of rationale: Before the advent of syndication and dozens of channels with hundreds of hours to fill, before the word 'rerun' became a part of the vernacular, producers saw a clip show as a way to get an audience caught up with the characters and storylines. Some shows still do this. "Lost," for example, presents a clip show before the season premiere in order to remind viewers of what they may have missed (or, more likely, misunderstood). More commonly, though, a clip show is develoiped if a series needs a show shot in a hurry and/or to save some money on production and writing costs.
Understanding the rationale, though, doesn't really make the shows any more palatable. One thing that's particularly grating about clip shows is the "frame": the device the writers employ to give the clip show a semblance of plot. The most obvious and blatant type of frame consists of the characters sitting around reminiscing, these reminiscences serving as the precursor of a blurry screen and a harp glissando, which transitions the audience into THE PAST. And whaddya know, we get to see the very event the characters were just reminiscing about.
Were we to be involved in the production of a clip show, we would strive to find a more subtle, organic way to move into the clips.
At any rate, to change the subject, just a little while ago, WOS began randomly barking out numbers between 1 and 438, Fearing that she may be suffering from possession or a particularly non-potty-mouthed strain of Tourette's, we went delving into the solipsistic archives to see if, perhaps, some clue could be unearthed in the posts corresponding to those numbers. Looking at the highlights of those posts may just offer some clues. . . .
44: "Americans are all 5-year-olds. We need our special mug, or we get cranky. We also have our favorite blankets, t-shirts, socks, chairs. Maybe this is not a sign of five-year-oldness, Maybe it's just part of human nature to find comfort in objects."
87: "Technology has been described as a double-edged sword.
"(Digression: This is true. After all, double-edged swords ARE technology. Agriculture, interestingly, is a single-edged sword. Animal husbandry is a trebuchet. Marine biology is a blowgun. . . .)
198: [A summary of a baseball game] "[The Washington] Nationals won the game behind a pitcher who is no longer with the team, and the winning run was scored by someone who isn't on the official game-day roster.
"If you followed all that, children, you're ready to unravel the mysteries of the infield-fly rule."
224: "[Today] what's on our mind is found poetry: little nuggets of linguistic widom that just pop up from time to time. Years ago, when the Solipsist was a writing tutor in New York, he helped an Asian student who was struggling mightily with the English tongue. She was writing a paper about coming to the United States. The paper was rife with grammatical errors, and YNSHC was having difficulty even figuring out the gist of the paper. All of a sudden, stuck almost randomly in the middle of a paragraph, was this:
"'Being an American is easy. Living in America is hard.'
"We were floored!"
308: "Grammar Girl is one Mignon Fogarty.
"(Digression: When she was introduced, we thought her name was Min Yon Fogarty. Briefly, our loathing and envy was replaced by a grudging admiration that a Korean-American had achieved such heights of English fluency as to become Grammar Girl. Then we found out that her name isn't Korean--it's just stupid. EOD)"
Hmmm. . . .WOS seems much better. It seems that a clip show is just what she needed.
Well done.
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