30 Rock v.s. Community

I watched fist three episodes of 30 Rock from Season 5 and Community Season 2 for this assignment. I will analysis their production style, intertextuality and what I learn from situation sitcoms as follow.

1. Production Style 

This two situation sitcoms are all produced in single-camera setup so each shot has single lighting setup. They also both shoot in studio. There are too many dialogues so they use lots of over the shoulder shots and clean shots. 30 Rock has several season-long story lines happen in the same time. There are amount of two person dialogues in this show. In this case, the OTS shots are easy to show the communication between characters and their facial expression. In the other hand, Community based on the story that happen in a community school so the group of students are the interesting points of this show. Every episode has a single story so they use clean shots, 2S and 3S to express the stories between the students. This sitcoms focus on the group of students and their background environments so they also use some wide shots to show the background.

2. Intertextuality

I still confused about the word “Intertextuality” actually so I cannot explain how these two sitcoms make intertextual references in difference way but they did use a lot of different types of pop-culture references. Based on the different background stories, 30 Rock make intertextual references that related to the life of the whole members in production team. Such as Jenna kept talking about the movie Twilight because she thought it would help her pretend young. On the other hand, Community makes pop-culture references about the popular and common activities in students’ life. For instance, in the beginning of Community season 2, they mentioned the movie Toy Story 3 and Bat Man which were all popular in young group. After that, they started discussing “Old White Man Says”, which are Piece quotes that Troy posted on Twitter. I think different sitcoms attract different area audiences so they make intertextuality references based on their story, audiences and the storylines.

3. Something else I want to say….

As a foreigner, I am not quite familiar with situation sitcoms. It’s an uncommon type of TV show in China. I think situation sitcoms require audiences have the specific knowledge or cultural background to understand their humor such as my favorite sitcom Big Bang Theory. It makes lot of intertextual references about physics and the characters’ hobbies like watching Star Wars, collecting comic books and playing video games. It’s difficult to attack the audiences who unfamiliar with their basic contents. In this case, I think situation sitcoms have limit to attract audiences.  I miss the jokes from those sitcoms sometime because I am not American. I still have not enough cultural background to understand them. I think it’s also my biggest weakness to learn media criticism. In addition, the sitcoms has different director in each season so I think the continuer story lines and production styles are the other reasons to help keep audiences following them. They have challenge to keep audiences’ interesting and add more fancy story in every new season. Overall, I think situation sitcoms can represent the pop culture in many specific fields directly so I can learn a lot from them.