For my first topic on this blog, I wanted to talk about something which I’ve learned in the last year that has strongly improved my well-being. It is also partially what inspired me to start this blog, and especially name it after a fictional setting in The Golden Girls. 2011 has arguably been the worst year of my life, not because of the events surrounding me, but because of the person I became. In a matter of a few significant days, I transformed myself into a person that both I and my close friends thoroughly disliked. I began acting like an idiot, treating people badly and expecting them to put up with it. This, I later learned, was just another form of growing up: experimenting with drastic personality changes and assessing what went wrong and what didn’t. From this, I feel I have come out of the year stronger than I went in.
But what I found most important in 2011 was that some of the television I watched helped me more than any of my friends and my family could have. Particularly in The Golden Girls, I learned that you have to take life as it comes and try and keep positive. I know it may sound like a joke, but seriously- the characters in the show put up with illnesses, death, arguments, depression – things that we all see in real life and can send some of us spiralling out of control. Not only are these shows meant to entertain us, they educate us no matter how old we are. From watching the ideas of another human being we see that everyone is the same, we all have these problems and we can all overcome them if we try hard enough.
The sitcom genre is widely underrated nowadays, marked as an aged genre full of clichés and overused puns. Britain hasn’t had a successful sitcom in years (Two Pints of Lager and My Family aside, both which have “jumped-the-shark” enough times to warrant them dead), and even America is struggling to keep the genre on its feet (Mike and Molly and The Big Bang Theory have revitalised the genre overseas, but the mass of Friends knock-offs in recent years has been excruciatingly painful to watch). I worry that one day sitcoms will simply disappear from our screens, leaving the more modern genres of comedy, “dramedies” and “mockumentaries”, which are already becoming widely overused and boring fairly quickly.
An episode of The Golden Girls I watched the other day saw the eldest of the women, Sophia, help her best friend commit assisted suicide. This is something we would never see nowadays (and they tell us television is too risky now?), yet something we all have to learn: sometimes people want to die, because they are too old, because they are too ill, or because they’ve lost everything. I’m not saying whether I agree or disagree, but hiding this from mainstream television is not going to make the world forget about suicide.
A successful sitcom really does require talented writers to create something that people will love and compare to it’s sitcom ancestors, while still finding it new and exciting. It’s a tough act to follow, they’ll probably never live up to the quality of Friends, Frasier and Cheers did, nor Birds of a Feather, Father Ted or Only Fools and Horses on this side of the pond. I fear we might lose this side of television forever, but not before we become engrossed in the offensive and uncomfortable comedy of the twenty-first century.
Life In Shady Pines 