Unpopular Entertainment Opinions • Page 240

I remember really liking A Fish Called Wanda as a kid does that hold up as an 80's comedy?

 

what’s the gay panic stuff? I don’t remember that? There’s definitely reinforcement of gender norms though but like you said that’s common for 90s sitcoms. Friends has a ton more problematic stuff. Basically everything ross does is problematic.

 

Planes trains and automobiles rules. One of my favorites. Maybe the best John Candy performance.

 

I like Canadian Bacon

 

In an early episode George is accused of being homophobic for wanting Elaine to sit between him and Jerry and he agrees with the label. As far as the "not that there's anything wrong with that!" episode, that is how straight men still act and probably will for a long time.

 

The episode where George panics about getting a massage from a male masseuse comes to mind

Def not comparing the two shows in that way. Just that seinfeld def has dated stuff that didn't surprise me cause the time but I guess sorta did because people always say it holds up better than other old sitcoms in that way and it seems about on par to me so far

 

Also it feels weird saying "for the time" because I also feel like there was stuff like ER that holds up extremely well and at least off the top of my head was a lot more progressive. With the caveat I could be blanking on some stuff espesh the later seasons I haven't rewatched as much. But I remember the first time I watched it being shocked how well it held up and many eps and storylines could be done now (and many were, being directly lifted by Grey's anatomy lol)

 

What is wrong with George not wanting to get a massage from a male masseuse? That is a very accurate plotline about straight male fears in the 1990's and there are still a lot of straight men today that would be afraid of being perceived as gay. George is not supposed to be the good guy.

 

Ross sucks. When you watch Friends, you watch for Chandler, his dumb roommate, and the girlies.

 

Seinfeld also has a few pretty racist episodes as well, people try to pass it off as them making fun of white ignorance but I don’t buy it

Ross doesn’t really do anything worse in Friends that didn’t happen in most movies or shows of that time. Doesn’t make it better obviously but also doesn’t make it any less par for the course. At least the rest of cast treats him like a punching bag over his behavior

 

The gellars in general suck except for the dad

 

The fatphobia stuff sucks. They return to that well a lot

 

what are the racist episodes?

 

Kramer buying slaves and starting a sweat shop

I also remember one where Jerry does like a pretty bad Native American impression in front of a Native American woman and then spends the rest of the episode trying to prove he’s not racist while he keeps being accidentally racist

Haven’t seen a ton of Seinfeld, mostly just random episodes when I lived with a guy who loved it haha. But these two stick out from what I’ve seen

 

In terms of racism in Seinfeld, two things that stick out are the almost entirely white cast in such a diverse city and some the very exaggerated side characters like Babu Bhatt.

People will cite episodes like when Seinfeld dates a girl that he thinks is Chinese because of her name or the Puerto Rican Day parade, but the jokes are on the white main characters. One tricky episode is the Cigar Store Indian. On the surface it is another episode where the joke is on Jerry, but a scene where he asks a mailman where a Chinese restaurant is and the mailman, who is Chinese but Jerry couldn't see that, freaks out. It paints Jerry as the victim of the oversensitive mailman, which suggests people overall are too sensitive to racial language or stereotypes.

 

Yeah, I totally remember that mailman bit and feeling the same way about it. Not familiar with Babu Bhatt

 

There’s also the episode where George pretends to have black friends and tries to prove this to one of his boss’s after George says he looks like Evander Holyfield and the guy goes, “I’m sure we all look the same to you, right Costanza?”

although I think they try to play this as being meta since Jerry and George talk about how he has no black friends. I wonder if the episode was made after people started complaining about the lack of diversity but not sure when that really started being talked about (same with Friends - live in New York City and apparently there are only like 3-4 black people in the whole city.

 

But how is that episode racist? George is supposed to be a pathetic person so he would go to absurd lengths to pretend he is not. The joke is on George, not any of the Black characters in that episode. In 2023 there are still lame attempts by white liberals to show how diverse they are.

 

Seinfeld, like Succession today, is about a group of equally terrible and superficial people going about their horrible lives, affecting relatively normal people in their wake, and any bad qualities they demonstrate is absolutely deliberate because they are terrible and superficial people.

 

There was a Looper article about problematic things in Seinfeld that was maddening. They didn't understand this at all. The article made it sound like Jerry drugging his girlfriend to play with her toys wouldn't fly today as if it was okay in the Nineties and the show was endorsing Jerry's behavior.

 

The show literally has all the characters thrown in jail based on the character witnesses of people they wronged throughout the show. The only way it could be more explicit is if Larry David and the cast came out from behind the curtain at the end of an episode and explained that while the episode is funny, you should never do these things.

 

Guys I am starting to think these characters on Its Always Sunny are a bit problematic

 

I'm always waiting for someone to do that with the Sopranos.

 

I saw someone doing that with Tulsa King

 

Not for nothing, Ross is basically always the butt of the joke when he does that dumb shit, too.