Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Iseerphia All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

sonya90028 Thirtysomething isn't a show, that anyone can really take seriously. It revolves around a group of 80s Yuppies in their thirties, who spend too much time obsessing about their own angst. The show tried too hard to be 'deep and meaningful', and wound-up becoming a parody of itself. Virtually all of the male characters on this show, suffer from arrested emotional development. They never seemed to come to terms, with the fact that they couldn't have everything their own way, all of the time. The thing is, they got their way ALMOST all of the time, which is more than most people do. Still, that wasn't good enough for these guys. They just didn't appreciate the fact, that they were better off than 90% of the general population.Like the male characters, the women on Thirtysomething also seemed to concentrate too much on navel-gazing, so to speak. Most of these women are intelligent, capable, and pursued interesting careers. Yet they were still consumed with insecurity about themselves, and their lives in general. Worst of all, they were too willing to be excessively accommodating, towards the often immature men in their lives.The fact that the females on this show were frequently demeaned, was a reflection of the 80s backlash against feminism. In her book entitled "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women", Susan Faludi eloquently pointed-out that Thirtysomething was guilty, of negative portrayals of the females characters. Especially compared to the male characters, who were much less evolved, than the female characters. So for those hoping to see a show that gave women adequate respect, Thirtysomething definitely disappoints in that regard.Thirtysomething's only real entertainment value, is it's campy quality. After all, a show that tried so diligently, to convince viewers that over-privileged Yuppies are so riveting, has GOT to be camp of the highest order. I'd like to see a quality TV drama created about the poor, and/or minorities, who have truly harsh realities to deal with in life. A show like that would be much more compelling, than Thirtysomething ever was.

petelush For a few seasons I compulsively watched this show the way one might keep checking a closet to see if the bad smell is still there. Who can explain what drives us to watch what annoys us? After a few months I figured out that the spine of the story was based on apologizing. Subtract apologies between these characters the day after they find miniature ways to offend each other, and you've hardly got a plot. My favorite bit was when Timothy B-something, I think his name was (the red-headed actor) got his big chance to direct a commercial, and showed a black guy how he wanted a 'hood walk performed. Worst moment was when a most annoying woman character went ballistic because on a date the guy (the boss at the ad agency) tried to kiss her! Imagine trying to steal a kiss from your thirty-something date! Take back the night, and keep this show.

Victor Field The line above was how Lifetime plugged this show about yuppies when they repeated the four series; Fascinating Aida chose to describe the likes of Michael, Eliot et al as "Yawningly Uninteresting People Paid Irritatingly Excessive Salaries." Many non-fans of "thirtysomething" tended to agree, but despite not turning thirtysomething myself until well after I'd seen Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz's compelling series, I begged and beg to differ.Focusing on Michael and Hope Seligman and their daughter Janey, Eliot and Nancy Weston and their children (Ethan and the other one), and their single friends - professor and Bjorn Borg-lookalike Gary, husky-voiced businesswoman Ellyn and photographer Melissa - they exhibited an Alfie-like tendency to wonder "What's it all about?" but it was done with sensitivity and more humour than you would expect considering the misery they went through, from Michael and Eliot's advertising company closing down to Nancy's battle with cancer. They were prone to indulging in fantasies throughout (the episode "Whose Forest Is This?" was virtually all fantasy, revolving as it did around the children's book Nancy and Ethan wrote together), but unlike a certain Boston lawyer, no dancing babies were involved and the only singing was on the soundtrack (Carly Simon notwithstanding)."thirtysomething" was essentially the soap for people who hated soaps, but better than that; the creative team proved that it wasn't a fluke when most of them came up with the marvellous "My So-Called Life." But I still think they shouldn't have killed off Gary.Footnote: Miles Drentell, the slimy rival advertising man who Michael was compelled to work for, returned (again played by David Clennon) in Zwick and Herskovitz's later series "Once and Again," in one of those crossovers you almost never see in the hermetically sealed world of British television, which is one reason I always liked this show and was not happy when Sky One dropped it. (Another reason was Sela Ward, but that's another story...)

tostinati Spoilers may be here, if you haven't seen the series all the way through.I recall the criticisms of this show at the time of its original broadcast: It was called a wine and brie look at self-absorbed, privileged babyboomers that every self-respecting lumpenprol should be insulted to be expected by the network to care about. (This was the time that saw the launch of Rosanne and Married With Children, after all, as well as the escalation of trash TV/talk TV into a national phenomenon.) I never watched thirtysomething until it reran for years on a popular cable network. Then I stumbled on a single episode one day while scanning, and I was immediately hooked. It hit me hard: How could I have missed this gem the first time? Had I been turned off to it by the universal invocation of yuppie imagery used to condemn it in its time? Probably so.I taped the entire series in its eventual reincarnation in a matter of weeks. I never missed an episode, and watched each development voraciously, as one imagines an earlier generation may have a serialized novel by Dickens. But ya know what? Aside from certain episodes I have shown to friends, to turn them on to the show, I have seldom re-watched any of these shows. The tapes wait in the hangar for a time when a desperate nostalgia drives me to check this series out again. I do mean that one line summary, the title of this note, in the best possible way. But there is something here, in this decade+ old series, that is totally lacking in most TV and film today. That something would be a sense of what I will call emotional verisimilitude. Whether it was nudging your funnybone or tugging your heartstrings or mordantly evoking the battle of the sexes, thirtysomething rang true for anybody who has ever been there. --And for anybody with a brain and empathy and imagination who hasn't been there.I believe it is the truth, as in The Truth, that makes it painful to look at a lot of times. Far from coddling a bunch of self-absorbed adults who refused to grow up, it put a mirror up to a good part of the generational demographic, forcing us to relive scenes from our life that we'd rather forget, or reminding us that there are hard days ahead. The quintessential episode goes like this: Michael's father comes to visit the family at holiday wearing an obvious and somewhat ill-fitting hairpiece. After general whispering within the family (they think he's getting vain in his old age, too) and a bit of hard ribbing by Melissa, he makes a nearly inaudible statement. "It's the chemo." That's how the episode in which Michael loses his father begins. And it ends with Michael Steadman crouched on the floor of a dark room, crying. Strong stuff. Throughout the run of the show marriages failed; more people got cancer; a major character gets killed on the bike ride to and from work; people are mistreated with impunity at work and then fired; some of the characters' ambitions, their hope that they might be somehow talented or special, are trashed. Just like real life. If TV wasn't a low common denominator vehicle for commercials, I think we might be tempted to call thirtysomething high drama, or art, or something that really mattered. Despite the vehicle, I think it was all those things, anyway.Ten Big Stars.