Journal Archive: January 2003

season 4

"sitcom", an offbeat borderline drama-comedy that follows the lives of miscellaneous yet loosely related characters is entering it's 4th season. "sitcom" however is not a sitcom. there is not live audience or added laughter and it's shot in a different format than standard sitcoms. the cast includes addy palance, mischelle kaludjerovic, matteo delamitri, bart hagaford and cornelius c.. the show, written by cornelius c., does not have a definite main character (what like friends?) and rarely ever contain plots (what like seinfield?) and the dialogue sometimes goes into absurd conversations about auto-erotic asphyxiation (what like waiting for godot?). established in the first couple of episodes is the role of mack, played by cornelius, who observes and often refers to things as "so freaking sitcom like". the show is merely a play on the humor, irony, and pattern of everyday life that we see in television. the third season faced much turbulence because unlike the first two seasons, there were less zany antics, racy humor. instead, the 3rd season contained a lot of very dark humor, emotional breakdowns, decay in the friendships that were formed in the first two seasons. cornelius pushed to have a movie made containing the characters of "sitcom" entitled "movie". despite the widerange success and the fact a script that was being praised by several producers the movie was not given a chance to be created even for television because of the dark and less zany nature of the script. cornelius commented "the movie was intended to be this crux point for the fate of these characters that i wanted to show in a consecutive stream of images with film as opposed to the DV we use for the show. but evidently fate fell through... i did it anyway. i tried to hit the targets the film was trying to hit. and completely missed, but i hit something else i really liked despite losing almost 1/2 of the original audience. fortunately enough of the actors were willing to put their salaries on the line to keep the show going. it almost got canceled."
so what can we expect from season 4? we'd like to say more funny mishaps, and misplaced love and that's what we will get. "well, i'm not writing that in to get ratings back up. life happens in cycles and it's back to this beginning stage sort of. it's not going to be a rehash of the humor from the first year. this new season is going to be very experimental, storytelling wise."
while the show's rating went down, the 4th season did recieve critical praise and there is talk of "sitcom" being picked up by cable network.
though there is a lot of talk about the show, no one really knows anything except cornelius and a select 3.
cornelius, "i don't really know what happens. this whole thing, just getting it on air, and talking to execs or whatever is really complex and luckily someone liked what i was doing enough to pay someone to take care of that for me. i'm just really lucky i get to make something like this and show it to the masses."
the first episode of season 4 airs thursday night at 8.