Severe lack of posts lately due to being inundated with university work but now I'm off for Easter so normal service (whatever that is) shall resume.
ANYWAY, I've had this post waiting as a draft in my posts for a week or so now. I've recently started a re-watch of Happy Endings after catching an episode on E4 a couple of weeks ago and regaining the urge to watch it all over again. For those that don't know, Happy Endings was a single camera sitcom that ran on ABC (and Channel 4/E4 in the UK) from April 13, 2011 to May 3, 2013.
I got really behind on my TV watching last year and pretty much didn't watch the third season of Happy Endings, telling myself I would watch it when I wasn't so busy with uni work. Now i'm glad this happened, cause I can slowly pace myself through what is in fact the final season of the show. All the while telling myself that the cancellation of this show is one of the most ridiculous TV decisions ever made.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is so good about Happy Endings, mainly because there are so many things that are great about it. It has a classic sitcom feel to it (kind of a Cheers/Seinfeld/Frasier/Friends vibe) with elements of more contemporary comedies like 30 Rock and The Office. The casting is completely solid, and is reminiscent of the same dynamic applied to the casting of "Friends" way back in 1994. Happy Endings is one of the only shows (if not the ONLY) to successfully utilize the "Friends" formula.
Tina Fey summarized this idea really well in her 2011 autobiography, "Bossypants" -
"For years the networks have tried to re-create the success of Friends by making pilot after pilot about beautiful twenty-somethings living together in New York. Beautiful twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles. Beautiful twenty-somethings investigating sexy child murders in Miami. This template never works, because executives refuse to realize that Friends was the exception, not the rule."
Perhaps the shows setting in Chicago rather than in NYC or LA was what allowed it to prosper. But there's a lot more to it than that. The casting is solid. Casey Wilson, Elisha Cuthbert, Eliza Coupe, Adam Pally, Damon Wayans Jr. and Zachary Knighton are all relatively fresh talent, all capable of expressing the comedy material to full effect. The shows clever dialogue and unsurpassed use of pop culture references never seem forced on them, they make the characters so believable that they seem like real people, not weird two dimensional sock-puppets that are so often present in run-of-the-mill sitcoms that fill up the TV schedule every September.
I particularly enjoy the way in which the screen time is distributed. As a general rule, throughout a season of Happy Endings, there has been an equal share of story-line for each of the 6 characters. There are six protagonists, not a couple of main characters and 4 other supporting cast members that only serve the purpose of filling the remaining screen-time. I'd also like to throw it out there whilst on the subject of the characters that Max Blum (played by Adam Pally) is one of the most significant representations of a gay man in television history. Seriously. As previously mentioned, the screen-time of this show is very well distributed, meaning that Max receives the same amount of story-line as his straight counterparts, something which is frustratingly still quite rare on mainstream prime-time television.
In short, i'm still very much in mourning for this show. It is baffling to me how something that was so critically acclaimed with a regular viewership & avid fan-base could be disposed of, whilst dozens of lesser shows continue to be renewed season after season. I really hope that it gets some kind of revival, if not from another network then perhaps by Netflix or something. Here's hoping.
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