"Sponge-O Sponges: They taste damn spongy!" or, A backhanded compliment for THC

Popsugar reports that my beloved Thomas Haden Church is lookin' all buff for Spider-Man 3. (The movie's official site has a bigger version of the same photo - yay!) He certainly is looking better than he did in Sideways.

Of course, Popsugar also reports that she thought Church's mid-'90s sitcom Ned and Stacey was horrible. Gasp!

Of course it was horrible, dear Pop! All sitcoms are horrible - it's part of their nature. There are only so many witty observations you can tell about three to six people who hang out in one house, one restaurant and one office before the jokes become stale. The test of a sitcom's quality is if it can rise above its inherent predictability and genuinely surprise the audience.

Seinfeld did it with its almost stream-of-consciousness sensibility. Arrested Development does it with a complex, intertwining plot. And Ned and Stacey did it – albiet somewhat less consistently than the first two examples – with its absurdist humor. If the show had taken a chance and forgone the predictable "let's make ironic comments about extramarital sex" jokes in favor of the completely off-the-wall lines usually delivered by Church or seen in the closing credits, the show would have been an unqualified success.

Wow. It's way too early for Media Theory 101. Maybe I'll come back to this post later with some of my favorite lines from Ned and Stacey, or perhaps more THC love.

UPDATE: It's been brought to my attention that the letters THC, besides being the initials for, like, the bestest actor EVER*, are also the initials for a chemical found in something called "mari-juana." If you thought I was making a drug reference before - shame on you! My love for THC is pure and unsullied by any of your human addictions.




*OK, that was hyperbole, but he's still awesome.