Honestly, this whole thing reminds me of back in the 90's when "Seinfeld" (showing may age a bit here) started to get a bit too cynical for many people's tastes in the final couple seasons, treating a convenient death like a gag and having the characters engage in some morally dubious behavior. Back then, sitcoms just didn't do that sort of thing. They were supposed to have heart, and you were supposed to care about the characters. There were supposed to be those "awwww ..." moments. It felt wrong to have everything played for laughs. I felt the same way at the time.
Yet a decade or so later I found it very easy to appreciate "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". The characters are all horrible people, and nobody is ever tempted to feel the slightest bit sorry for any of them when bad things happen. You can just laugh your ass off at them making constant idiots of themselves and each other--it's pure, unapologetically unsentimental comedy.
Point being, people's tastes change as their expectations of a medium change. Maybe for me, the intervening years of laughing at political humor or the surrealist stylings of animated comedies like "Space Ghost Coast to Coast", "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", and "Robot Chicken" altered my expectations of what a funny show was supposed to provide. It looks like there's a genre of anime that's exploring that path, and maybe one day people like @FluffyCow will laugh along with it because they've come in with different expectations, despite right now having a 20th-century sitcom-viewer's taste in anime.
last edited at Jun 11, 2025 4:05AM