TVSquad

(S01E13) Marry. Boff. Kill. Tina Fey. Jane Krakowski. Rachel Dratch. Scratch that. Marry. Boff. Kill. Alec Baldwin. Tracy Morgan. Judah Friedlander. Man, I could play this game all night. Markie Post. Shelly Long. Tina Yothers. I only wish I had the cojones to make that my entire review. Five hundred words - all of them "marry, boff, kill." I'm always looking for an easy, gimmicky way to approach this review because, like I said last week, it's hard to not just recount the funny lines, comment on Alec Baldwin's genius and compare Tina Fey to Mary Tyler Moore. It's never easy to write about something that's just plain solid week-after-week, and well, my job didn't get any easier this week.

Watch your backs, Harvard alum. Yale's looking to take on the Crimson mafia's domination of televised comedy. For the uninformed, this is the fast track to a job as a television comedy writer:

1. Be a man - preferably a Catholic or a Jew. (More guilt = More funny)
2. Go to Harvard. (Legacy, class privilege, whatever it takes to get you there.)
3. Write for the Lampoon.

That's it. Within a year or two of graduation, you should be writing for Conan, The Daily Show, SNL, The Office or The Simpsons. Guaranteed. Or, is it? Certain Yalies are looking to challenge Harvard's stranglehold on the writer's room. The Yale Daily News paints a picture of Yale's growing influence on comedy or, at least, Comedy Central. The article name-checks Yalies Lewis Black, Demetri Martin, John Hodgman, Daily Show writer Steve Bodow and Colbert Report head writer Allison Silervman. Hodgman offered, "By accident, maybe there is the beginning of a similar - extremely feeble - Yale network of professionals that may give the aspiring comedy writer on Cross Campus a glimmer of hope." And, so the elitist pissing contest commences.

For those of you who want to pursue a career in comedy and can't afford the Ivy route, you will be happy to know that Jon Stewart attended the College of William and Mary, Tina Fey is a woman and Bob Odenkirk is an atheist.

[Via CCInsider]

Longtime readers of this blog know how much I love this show. I pretty much became a writer because Rob Petrie was one. I also hoped I could get a woman like Mary Tyler Moore. It's my favorite show. Here's more proof: even though I had already bought three seasons of this show on DVD in individual sets, I still bought this complete set.

A quick background on the show, as if you don't already know: Dick Van Dyke plays Rob Petrie, head writer of the hit variety show The Alan Brady Show, husband to Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), father to Ritchie (Larry Mathews), best friend to his neighbors the Helpers (Jerry Paris and Ann Morgan Guilbert). He lives in New Rochelle, NY and commutes to New York City to write the show with fellow staff writers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell (Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam) and deal with exasperated producer Mel Cooley (Richard Deacon) and egotistical star Alan Brady (Carl Reiner).

Got all that? Good. Let's get to the nitty gritty details of the set.

I came across an interesting article while perusing Ken Levine's blog last night. He was quoted in an LA Times article that came out on Christmas day; the article discusses the fact that most comedy writers intensely dislike Studio 60 and think that the show is completely unrealistic.

But here's the interesting part: like the rest of us who have mixed feelings about the show, they're so fascinated by it that not only do they keep watching, it's also all they can talk about the next day. The comedy troupe Employee of the Month even does a weekly sketch show imagining what the sketches conceived for the show would be like. Because the sketches themselves weren't funny, they inserted jokes about the program as part of a "backstage" portion of the show. Other writers have cited the fact that the S60 writers are way too smart for their own good and never laugh at anything, which many writers think is the best part of the job. Ironically, many writers like 30 Rock, because the sketches are goofier and the depiction of a sketch show's writers' room is much closer to reality than it is on S60.