Saturday, October 9, 2010

Always Sunny

Several years ago I saw my first several episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I thought it was a pretty straightforwardly (objectively) bad show. If you had caught me on a less aggressive day, I would have backed off and said "I think that anyone with tastes that resemble my own would regard it as a straightforwardly (objectively) bad show." But I would have stood by this weaker claim as something in which I was reasonably confident.

Over the years I've realized that a lot of people like this show. Then I realized that I had talked to several people, perhaps a dozen or so, with whom I share broadly the same tastes in entertainment, and who also love the show. People who I think of as having worse taste than me, people who have far better taste than me, and people who are by and large the same: The all love Always Sunny. I'm not sure I know anyone who dislikes the show. And I'm worrying that what seemed at first to be an objectively correct aesthetic judgment, and which was then weakened into a confident sociological prediction, may turn out to be a potentially universally rejected opinion. I think I'm the only person who thinks that It's Always Sunny is anything other than awesome, and I think it's terrible.

Does anyone else think that the humor on this show is contrived, effortful, rarely funny, and altogether dumb? Does anyone else think that the characters are one-dimensional, uninteresting, despicable in a non-endearing manner, and that the narrative structures are all predictable amalgamations of ridiculousness, reaching an apex of insipid buffoonishness that lacks even the dignity of thoughtfully constructed slapstick? Am I really alone here?


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