Could I BE anymore of a paper-thin stereotype?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Want a show that holds up? Watch M*A*S*H without the American laugh track. My god it hits hard, totally different show. Guess you Brits and Aussies already knew, but damn, what a fucking masterpiece of drama, every season. I didn't know it wasn't a comedy!
You can get it without the laugh track? I've actually been thinking about MASH lately, so this would be a good way to watch it. How do you search for that? Do you search for a specific language/region or what?
Is this Stargate??
This is a crossover I didn't know I wanted until now.
The Mummy
I rather watch The Expanse
This but The Office
Good god that show sucks so much. Glad somebody finally said it. I thought the whole world had gone crazy. Their other show, Parks and Rec, was considerably more entertaining.
I like how Steve Carell plays out Michael, and I enjoy Dwight as well. But the rest really is nothing special. The whole Jim and Pam story arc was more annoying than anything.
It is crazy how good Parcs & Rec is compared to the office.
Especially after they get married and they have to keep inventing Jim and Pam conflict to keep their arc “interesting”
I love parks and rec, because every character is interesting. The office has like 3 and a half good characters
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I saw some clips of Friends in which the laugh track had been edited out. Let me just say that this meme is well-justified.
Idk it's pretty funny quit crushing my childhood
I've mentioned this before and faced fierce pushback from friends fans. The laugh track causes such pacing issues it's so distracting.
I hate laugh tracks - but most of the show (as far as I can tell) is in front of a studio audience
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It's a live audience, not a laugh track.
It's a live audience and a laugh track.
Yes, The majority of Friends was filmed in front of a live audience, with the exception of a few shots filmed on location here and there. I saw a recent interview with Lisa Kudrow where she talks about being frustrated on stage because of all the pauses for audience laughter, where the actors would have to pause and do some idle animation. That a television show taped before a live audience is expected to be different than a stage play.
I've also seen a "behind the scenes" video, I think as a special feature of the DVD releases, where they would swap out audience reactions. Because, for example, the take where Monica pops out from under the sheets with Chandler, revealing the two were sleeping together, the live audience went nuts for several solid minutes. For the broadcast version, they inserted an uproarious but brief cheer to keep the pacing up.
Compared to MASH or the Flintstones (!!?!), Friends' laugh track is a lot more genuine but it was at least somewhat engineered.
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That was a nice serie, in the 1990s...
HA HA HA HA Ross!!!
It's aged not so well.
Watching sitcoms from decades past through a modern lens is difficult.
Most 90s sitcoms haven't aged well at all. Multi-cam 3-wall sitcom in general don't. Single-cam higher quality production that aren't trying to replicate the old variety show live-theatre format have come around.
Sanford and Sons, Full House, and Cheers were really popular, but have aged poorly.
But things like MASH (especiallythe seasons after they dropped the laugh track), Arrested Development, and Scrubs have done really well because they didn't have an identity crisis between theatre and film.
MASH never had a laugh track. It was added in syndication and I believe the episodes, like Seinfeld, were sped up by small percentage to make them a couple minutes shorter.
I fully disagree with you though that there is no place left for classic sitcoms and that they haven’t aged well. While a little old still (but newer than Scrubs) I will refer to The IT Crowd as an example.
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You can't just watch friends for the first time in 2025, it's a bad show. You can maybe rewatch for the nostalgia but the show was clever at its time and paved a lot of way for another sitcoms.
It's similar to breaking bad, if you are just watching for the first time you may not find it appealing, but it was great in 2008 and new shows took inspiration from Gillian's direction
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It was in the 90s. Then somewhere in the early 2000s somebody came up with the idea to write a sitcom, that the audience laughs at instead of the laugh track.
Friends was one of the dumbest shows my ex has ever made me watch. When she tried to make me watch Seinfeld, I knew it wasn't going to work out.
I genuinly enjoyed Seinfeld, although I don't think that it would be at my top three funniest TV shows. Friends however, I couldn't get into it.
As a kid, I didnt really understand the jokes or plot but parents would watch it all the time, and it had me thinking it was some sort of high brow humor I was too young to understand.
Then I watched it as an adult and realize there's some kids shows more witty and funny (e.g. The Weekenders) then the vapidity and fake-intensity reactions each episode has.
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