The original post: /r/television by /u/-Clayburn on 2024-06-28 19:25:45.

Obviously any TV show will have its own memes, but it seems like there’s a kind of specific phenomenon that sometimes happens where the show sort of morphs into an excuse to see the same ol’ characters doing their silly things with each other. The full cast, even antagonists, seem to be just a big ol’ family.

I think this was particularly apparent with Cougar Town (maybe Scrubs, but I haven’t watched that). Perhaps Community has a little bit of that too, but more recently The Big Door Prize is this.

So with Cougar Town and The Big Door Prize, the characters almost seem to be purposely flanderized and every episode is more about them all just chillin’ in this fictional world. Cougar Town famously dropped it’s stupid cougar premise early on, so that explains that. The Big Door Prize though has this LOST-style mystery box backdrop to it, which barely gets any explanation and the bigger draw is the characters and their relationships with each other. But it’s not like LOST where yeah we like these characters and seeing them together, because there’s a hightened level of absurdity. To give you some examples, with Cougar Town, the main character’s quirk is that she drinks wine, so every season her designated wine glass gets comically larger. On The Big Door Prize, there’s an Italian restaurant owner named Gorgio who is so narcissistic and obsessed with himself that he refers to himself as a “step-Gorgio” instead of a “step-dad”.

Community had absurdity, but a lot of it was “grounded” in genre parodies. LOST had characters and relationships, but they weren’t ratcheting up the absurdity or flanderizing them (at least not intentionally).

It almost seems like these kinds of shows would be impossible to watch casually, which sets them apart from normal sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond. You could turn that or King of Queens on any episode, and you get the point. But turn on a random episode of Cougar Town and you’ll be like, “What the fuck is penny can?”

What’s going on here? How would you describe it?