Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade. Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days.

Friends, parents, people who stumble upon this blog because of random blog searches, lend me your ears. Well, actually eyes, come to think of it. I come not to bury television, but to praise it. I'd like to put forward an opinion that, while certainly not unique, cuts against the standard story that nearly everything gets worse over time. There are a string of writers and thinkers who have claimed that each generation is inferior to the prior one dating back roughly 3,000 years or so, and to them I say "Bite me". No, I'll try to argue that television, one of my other true loves after my wife, selected other family members, physics, and baseball, is better today than it ever has been before. Well, better in a way. Like many aspects of modern media, there is simply more of it, and the average show on TV is almost certainly worse than the average show from years ago. Let's face it, the average show is a crappy reality show where a group of strangers on a deserted island build a house for a needy family while being taunted by a B-list celebrity who wants them to eat some animal's internal organs for the chance to answer a trivia question that may earn them some large amount of cash, since those shows make up a majority of modern television. If we look at the cream of the crop, though, it really does have a great deal to offer.

Tonight, we'll examine comedies. Some people look down their noses at all network comedies, assuming them to be nothing but a series of fart jokes and cheesy double entendres. First of all, there is nothing wrong with fart jokes and cheesy double entendres, when done right. They are juvenile, but given the choice between laughing at something and not being amused, why do we even have to think for a second as to which choice is better? It's really an easy one, all things considered.

Still, there are any number of comedies on TV that really push the envelope for what a 30-minute comedy can be, and better yet, they're available on DVD if you haven't seen them before. We'll ignore some of the more formulaic dreck out there, and lord knows there's plenty of it. In the 80's, we had harmless nuclear family comedies where twice a season they'd discuss An Important Issue and give some good advice their Teenager In Trouble. Now, we have Twentysomethings Who Hang in a Coffeeshop, or harmless family sitcoms with or without children, because, lets face it, what can be more fun than watching two DINKs snipe at each other but remain in love?

Tonight had two of the finest examples of sitcoms redefining the genre. Importantly, neither is a 4-camera sitcom, the genre done to death by safe comedies like Raymond, King of Queens, and virtually every other "living room" oriented show on TV. The Office may be the finest remake of a British comedy of all time, not that there's really that much competition. If you've somehow managed to miss both versions to date, it's filmed in mockumentary style, detailing the lives of a group of paper supplier employees toiling away under their hapless boss. The original attempted to be as excruciating as humanly possible, limiting its lifetime but making sure that every single moment was utterly embarrassing for everyone involved, up until the slightly more heartwarming finale. The American version, on the other hand, is designed to have more legs, giving it's characters enough redeeming features that you can see how they've managed to all plausibly keep their jobs. In style, the show owes some stylistic nods to mockumentary movies (Christopher Guest comes to mind), and perhaps to Arrested Development, which admittedly tilted slightly more toward farce and less toward comedy.

Both versions were visionary in being true ensemble pieces, with a lead cast of four or five actors but a good number of meaty parts for the supporting cast, especially in the American version (it doesn't hurt that many of the side actors are the show's writers, who can insert themselves into any bit they want). More than anything else, it makes its characters seem more real by giving them a world in which they interact, rather than just a living room full of canned laughter. Also, if you think about it, it would take weeks for a small family to crack enough jokes to fill up 22 minutes. An office with 15 people in it, on the other hand, is a comic goldmine. If I had to assign a single influence, though, it has to be All in the Family. The Office does everything it can to be as offensive as possible on network television, and Archie Bunker will forever be the archetype. We need not even get into a discussion of political correctness; it's simply true that many of the finest comedians of all times have been able to skewer society by pushing it's buttons: George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, etc. In Steve Carrell's character's flaws are all our flaws reflected, and it's hilarious.

I somehow missed out on Scrubs for its first five seasons, and I don't know what I was smoking. Tonight's episode, a musical written by the team that wrote Avenue Q, was brilliant, the defining episode on TV since the Season 2 finale of Deadwood (which still takes the title for the entire decade, hands down). Making fantastic use of a the directorial control allowed by a single-camera setup, the show also maximizes it's ensemble cast of 11 or 12 regulars. Ironically, it's inspiration seems to be I Love Lucy, the first multi-camera show on television, as well as the Honeymooners; they toe the line between farce and comedy, they love to employ physical humor, and they all know how to harness a character's anger for comedic purposes. If anything, the show can be seen as a post-modern update of it's 50's forbears, adding a self-referential and self-aware narrator on top of a similar style of humor. By letting it's voiceovers go omniscient, it picks up the ability to mock pretty much whatever it chooses, including other TV shows and even it's own actors.

If TV is better today, it is not in spite of its past, it is because of it. Every medium has its visionaries, but it also has it's interpreters, who can take the ideas of previous greats and resynthesize them for the modern day. So long as new rules are being broken and new situations explored, comedy will always stay fresh, in spite of network executives' attempts to Raymond us into brain death. I haven't even gotten into the network vs. basic cable vs. pay cable divide, so I'll do that some other time, and manage to work Weeds into the discussion (who wouldn't love a sitcom about a suburban mom growing marijuana). Until then, get reacquainted with your television. Remember, for most of us, it raised us from our childhoods into adulthood and beyond, teaching us important life lessons, and never even asked us to take out the trash or make our beds.