Things that ruin a comedy show - jumping the shark thread

[Glebe]

Sorry Digs I new page twatted your post there;

See, I really like that Alan Partridge seems to be a good Grandad. I think the obvious thing would be to make him a shit one just like he was a shit Dad but it's more interesting to see that he's actually a good Grandparent and he gets on with his Grandchildren. Plenty of real like examples too of people who made much better Grandparents than they did Parents.

Plus you do get the hint he's doing it so that when he gets old he'll have someone to look after him so there's still some of the old Alan selfishness in there.

Possible hot take - Uncle Albert was maybe not better than Grandad but certainly as good as him, and when Lennard Pearce died suddenly John Sullivan did a superb job at introducing Albert into proceedings as seamlessly as it was possible to do so in order for the dynamic to continue.

Absolutely. Inspired piece of under-pressure writing and casting, and Albert would eventually become a much-loved character himself.

[Ignatius_S]

Possible hot take - Uncle Albert was maybe not better than Grandad but certainly as good as him, and when Lennard Pearce died suddenly John Sullivan did a superb job at introducing Albert into proceedings as seamlessly as it was possible to do so in order for the dynamic to continue.

Also, there's an argument that the series took a little while to find its feet or at least for audiences to warm to it, as it could have been cancelled after the first and second series. Because of that, it could be also argued that's it's a bit different to when a show is firing on all cylinders brilliantly from the first.

In a thread not that long along, someone - I think it might have been Utter Shit - suggested that whereas Pearce and Lyndhurst nailed their characters straight away, it took a little while for Jason to do the same. That ties into the above but I think you could make an argument that this underlines why Pearce was such a big loss.

[Ignatius_S]

Not necessarily 'ruining' - but always damaging: Under-estimating the importance of a particular character to the overall 'balance'/ feel of a show: Private Walker (Dad's Army), Wayne (Auf Wierdershen Pet), Mike (The Young Ones vs Filthy Rich & Catflap), Rimmer (Red Dwarf), Grandad (Only Fools & Horses), so many more that I can't recall right now ...

I think in some cases, it's not that the creative team don't underestimate that importance but they have some tricky decisions. If you try to introduce a new character that is too like the one they're replacing, audiences can be understandably judgemental.

In the case of Walker, James Beck was a huge loss to Dad's Army and although I felt that this led to Jones getting more prominent and the show relying more on physical humour, I also wonder whether the change in humour would have happened anyway. I do find it interesting that they kept Walker in the radio series, but recast him - but Croft and Perry weren't involved in that. With Croft and Perry, they needed to recast more than one main cast member of Hi-de-Hi! and think they handled that in a quite a smart way as the replacements were effective but in different ways to the orginal. On here, there's been a fair few who said they did prefer David Griffin to Simon Cadell.

[Glebe]

I'm a Cadell fan, but Griffin was a good replacement.

[Pink Gregory]

I mean there are lots of recurring actors and characters. As well as Blackadder and Baldrick, Melchett, Flashhart and "Bob". George is a rehash of prince George (maybe a descendent from a love child in the same way Blackadder is). Darling is new.

See I don't agree really.  General and Lord Melchett are completely different - the general has no one to suck up to and is closer to Queenie if anything, with Darling sort of playing the Lord Melchett role. 

George and Baldrick split the role of the dum-dum between them, George is a lieutenant but it doesn't really make it into the script, functionally he's not much different to Baldrick.  He's less of an idiot than the Prince Regent but he's still oblivious in a similar way.

Baldrick in Forth is also less downtrodden and basically idiotic.  You could say he's a representation of people being sent out as cannon fodder with very little idea of what they're doing but he doesn't functionally get shat on any more than Blackadder does.

It felt at that point like the self-referencing was all they had.  Up until that point Blackadder and Baldrick (and Percy to a lesser extent) had been the returning characters, but the main cast of Forth are all rehashes of characters from II and Third, even with Bob and Flasheart returning pretty much unaltered.

[elliszeroed]

Characters becoming one-note. Remember when Flanders was a Christian, not a judgemental asshole, when even he lost his temper from time to time? Remember when Moe wasn't pathetic? Perhaps it's due to longevity, the kids on the TvTropes call it Flanderization:

The progressive exaggeration of a single trait or set of traits of a fictional character until it overtakes all other characterization.