Just the other day, I was watching two sitcoms back to back in the morning - episodes of '2 and a half men' and 'How I met your mother'. For the inhabitants of the Stone Age who are not familiar with these shows - '2 and a half men' is acted by the dysfunctional Charlie Sheen as a drunkard womaniser who shares his house with his 'forever broke' and dysfunctional and gullible divorced brother with a pre-teen son who sometimes stays with him. They have a sarcastic housekeeper with attitude and a nymphomaniac daughter who is a single mother. On the episode that I watched, the subject revolved around what the son overheard from his mother's bedroom when she was with her current live-in partner!'How I met your mother' is a story of 5 late 20s friends - 3 guys and 2 girls; 1 couple is a pair who are living together, another couple used to date but have separated, and the remaining fornicates with anyone who carries the XX chromosome! This group will forever be discussing facts of lives in a pub sipping alcoholic beverages. On that episode that I saw, the dilemma was that the promiscuous friend had bedded the other friend's ex-girlfriend, hence had broken the brotherhood code ('bro code').
The glaring similarity between the two episodes was in their themes of adult nature. First of all, sitcoms are hardly suitable for daytime viewing. The script (conversation) was not sexual innuendos but, in fact, point-blank (in your face). This is coming from a country that boasts of being a Christian nation in God they trust and would go into crusades to live their way of living. And a country that has a large so-called 'Bible belt' states. Is it not ironic?Whatever happened to sitcoms of yesteryears, albeit churned from Hollywood with canned laughter but carves a smile or two on its audience without stooping so low (sic) as to talk about sex, sex and sex all the time. The sitcoms mentioned above make the old sitcoms look like episodes of 'Sesame Street' and 'The Electric Company'. In fact, the teenage Disney sitcoms today are like sitcoms of the 70s and 80s. Am I missing something here? I feel like I have been through a time warp or cocoon and the world just slipped by. I miss real situational comedies like 'Gilligan's Island', 'Beverly Hillibillies', 'I love Lucy', 'I dream of Jeannie', 'Bewitched', 'MASH', 'Gomer Pyle', 'Happy Days', 'Laverne and Shirley', 'One day at a time', 'Different Strokes', 'Facts of life' and 'Brady Bunch'. Does it mean that as the lady's swimming suit gets smaller over the years, we have fewer things to hide and nothing is taboo anymore, and anything can be out in the open? Is taboo a taboo word now?
It does not take a rocket scientist to pen jokes of sexual nature, but it takes a lot of wit and brain matter to come up with witty, real funny situational comedies as it used to be in most British comedies. In that sense, their trans-Atlantic counterparts fared much better with their evergreen efforts like 'Yes, Minister', 'Black Adder', 'Mr Bean' and more.
True, we should move with the times like Bob Dylan said, 'Times are a changing'. However, certain things are better left mysterious and the search for it more gratifying!
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