Its dark really dark.
I have the stirrers, and I have the mustard!
This is modern comedy or, asTransparentcreator Jill Soloway calls it, comedy with melancholy running through.
Credit: Amazon
The genres usually thought of as the one people watch toescapefrom melancholy, to distract them from real life.
No laugh track, no tidy conclusion during the final minutes.
Because of this, their label as purebred comedies sometimes seems inaccurate.
Its laughing at the lonely, stumbling questioning.
Finding joy in the silly of everything.
Jenni Konner,Girls:I wish things werent called comedies or dramas that they werent divided that way.
I wish everything was just [labeled as] half-hour or one hour.
Thats how I feel about this.
Just because its a half-hour doesnt mean you should probably have a structure of joke, joke, joke.
Because it takes around 30 minutes to watch.
It makes no sense.
We have more in common with one-hours if you look at it that way.
Its been happening in film, and independent film in particular, for a long time.
But if you had something in between, you could make it at Fox Searchlight.
But the show doesnt have a high concept, which helps us, I think.
Each episode can be whatever we want it to be.
That evolved over time.
I dont look at it as a box.
Zander Lehmann,Casual:We break the stories like a drama.
My mother thinks the show is very dramatic and very serious; I happen to find it funnier.
I fall on the side of, Theres no such thing as too dark when it comes to humor.
For me, comedy has always been about surprise.
I dont watch broadcast comedy; its not funny to me.
I think the jokes they do never surprise me, so it doesnt really do much for me.
It felt like a show that had bigger humor but also had real dramatic stakes to it.
I think thats the best version of what the data pipe can do.
Its a little mini-trend that Im excited about.
Maybe therell be a newSeinfeld-pop in show that will blow us away.
They push for reality over anything else.
And we looked back, and we said, yeah, youre absolutely right.
That is a sitcom beat.
Were not going to do that.
And we didnt do that, which is good.
[But] I approach this series with the notion that I am making a five-hour feature film.
It was just saying, ensure its still fun to watch.
It doesnt have to befunny,but it has to always be entertaining.
