Samyak Jain

@Samyak

Joined on May 6, 2020

  • Warning: Spoilers Ahead (we haven’t really checked if there are spoilers but you should assume there are spoilers, just to be safe) Modern Family by ABC has been one of the funniest and hottest sitcoms of the network for nearly a decade. The show is based on a big, dysfunctional but nonetheless heartwarming and close family and their daily adventures and encounters. It’s a comedy that combines some of the hug-free, ironic stylings of shows like The Office and Arrested Development with the sentimentalism of more traditional family sitcoms. The premier reveals three different families to the audience. The typical sitcom mom and dad are played by Julie Bowen and Ty Burrel respectively. By deluding himself into believing he is hip and cool, Burrell takes the role of a dumb TV dad up a notch. The mother is depicted by Bowen as a former wild child who now worries that her children will pursue her former rebellious path. Their three kids transform daily parenting struggles into comedy gold — a high school cutie, a precocious daughter, and a klutzy son, all recognizable TV styles. In the opener, the second family, a gay pair played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet, become adoptive parents. On CBS ‘The Class’, Ferguson's comedy skills were obvious, then blurred in Fox's Do Not Interrupt. Here, and especially across from Stonestreet, Ferguson realizes his potential. Patriarch Jay Pritchett (Ed O'Neill), his Columbian wife, Gloria (Sofia Vergara), and her pre-teen son, Manny (Rico Rodriguez), are in charge of the household. Jay struggles to remain young and keep up with Gloria and not be mistaken for her father, as he tries to help Manny while he seeks to maintain his national identity. Manny is the source of a lot of humor from this part of the family, as he's in the midst of the sensibilities and parental methods of Jay and Gloria.
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  • WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!! Space Force is a 10-episode series about the decorated army general Mark Naird who is selected to lead the newly formed sixth branch of U.S Armed Forces, i.e, Space Force. Space Force, created by The Office US alumni Steve Carrell and Greg Daniels and starring amazing talent such as Carrell, John Malkovich, Lisa Kudrow, Jane Lynch, Noah Emmerich and other trusty television actors – has been made, and is available to watch on Netflix. Space Force is a series lifted directly from another notable time the US president demanded something without the slightest notion of what that meant: A Space Force. The show follows General Mark Naird (Carrel), the newly minted chief of space operations, as he works hard to make the somewhat foolish notion of putting the country's armed forces on the moon a reality. The story is straight, imagining what it would look like if the country used it's resources to make Trump's foolish tweet a reality.
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  • Middleditch & Schwartz, named after its stars — Thomas Middleditch, who looks like Seth Meyers if he didn’t have to be presentable every night, and Ben Schwartz, who looks like Andrew Garfield if he were 100 percent Jewish — is a two-man long-form improv show in which every part is improvised by the performers, including the structure of the show and the scenarios within it. At the start of the program, instead of just asking for suggestions from the audience, they interview one randomly selected member about “something coming up in the future that [they] are either excited for or dreading.” Using nothing but their own bodies, voices, and a couple of chairs, Middleditch and Schwartz sweep up the audience in an entrancing, electric kind of energy. The chemistry that sizzles between them and the way they build off of each other is a rare thing to see. The two have cut their teeth in improv over the years in some truly incredible fashions. Schwartz's role in Funny or Die's improvised morning news show called The Earliest Show is an underrated gem, while Middleditch has been doing incomprehensibly impressive Shakespearean improv with a company since 2005. Filmed at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, these three 50-minute performances come from an audience suggestion. A few moments of back-and-forth Q&A with a single member of the crowd — in these cases, conversations about an upcoming wedding, law school, and a job interview — give Middleditch and Schwartz the tiny story milestones they’re free to disperse however they choose. For a show that only involves two people, this is also an impressive showcase for director Ryan Polito. Middleditch and Schwartz make full use of the stage, using the physical space between them as jokes almost as much as the words they’re saying. It’s not that they’re running around the auditorium at all times, but the fact that the camera catches them in the sporadic moments when they do start to move helps mark the switches between characters. And like a standup special, there are certain jokes that hit harder with a specific reaction that a wide shot of the stage wouldn’t pick up. This all goes far beyond setting up a few stationary cameras and cutting between them.
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  • An article appeared in the London Evening Standard on March 4, 1966 that would eventually cause quite an uproar. Journalist Maureen Cleave was doing a series titled "How Does a Beatle Live?" and her encounter with John Lennon provided controversy that spread far beyond the London paper. “Christianity will go,” he had said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock & roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” Lennon himself barely remembered saying it. The interview had been published in the London Evening Standard that March without controversy. But when it was reprinted in the American teen magazine Datebook on July 29th, the quote set off an international furor that threatened the Beatles’ future – and their lives. It caused quite an uproar that would change the Beatles forever. Alabama disc jockeys Doug Layton and Tommy Charles of WAQY initiated a "Beatle Boycott" urging people to take their Beatles "records and paraphernalia" to designated places to burn them. The Beatles, and Lennon in particular, were momentarily the devil incarnate to the Bible Belt and beyond, just as they were about to begin a U.S. tour. "John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended in any way whatsoever," said Beatles manager Brian Epstein at a press conference. "I'm not anti-Christ or anti-religion or anti-God," Lennon argued in a separate press conference. "I'm not saying we're better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person, or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and was wrong, or was taken wrong, and now it's all this." Paul McCartney in an interview recently said Lennon s character was very cocky and confident, but this incident had sure made him nervous.
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