Sunday and Sitcoms

A Sunday during vacations can be tricky. On an ordinary week of an ordinary month it is a fresh recess from the commonly referred to, extremely subjective, often empirically stumbled upon drudgery of work. Not only does it provide the much needed break from monotony, it also relocates our belief in the theistic conception of a God, who according to Christianity needed this break on the seventh day of the week. Now, if God needed to take a day off, we mortals act only natural in following His league. This brings us much closer to Godhead and as a child of modern political India evokes in me an apparently innate and ‘ambedkarly’ rightful demand of reserving mortal privileges of a second holiday in the week to construct an opaque distinctive boundary line between Man and God. But we have digressed hugely from our original point. Let us get back to Sundays.

Ah Sunday, our saviour, the one we cherish for its enzymatic attribute of coaxing one into switching off the alarm on its eve and missing the rise of its pagan celestial namesake. Now, imagine a medicine as authoritatively potent as a Sunday being ripped off of its powers and thrown in together with hundreds of other capsules of multi-vitamins, reducing it into just another pill that will only be flushed out of the bowels the next morning with only a 50% chance of being absorbed by your body. From rags to riches, from a prince to a frog, from Manmohan Singh the FM to Manmohan Singh the PM, that’s the magnitude of the fall when a regular Sunday metamorphoses into a Sunday during vacations. It loses its edge and turns into a round ball of faded wool that even cats play with only when bored.

It is on such an impotent, incapable, just another day that happens to be a Sunday that I am writing today’s blog. As my Saturday was no different from my Sunday in any significant sense I woke up super late on both these days without an altered bubble of caustic composition popping in my gut. And here I am still awake at an hour that humanity has taken turns to call as ghastly, ghoulish, insanely late, nocturnal, or what people in the west call it much to us Indians’ amazement-- morning.

I was planning on deleting some stuff from my laptop and I bumped into three extremely popular sitcoms FRIENDS, How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. I know this must be the side effect of the radiation from this once active now dormant conundrum of a lethargic Sunday that I got into thinking about them. I found that even though I watch each new episode of a new sitcom with an open mind without any prejudices, I still like FRIENDS the best followed by HIMYM and BBT the least even though it’s funny in a sadly smart way. My dizzying analysis shows that probably FRIENDS always tops the list because it touches a psychological chord of nostalgia, having stayed by my side through school and college and now in the professional sphere. But analytics dare this simple explanation.

An emotionless postmodernist analysis deconstructs the situation into yet simpler terms of what manages to seep into the subconscious state of my mind. It is beyond the people who play the roles or what the storyline is. It is the basic things like what sets are used and how is the lighting managed. We consciously hardly ever take notice of things like sets while watching something that’s more appealing owing to its actors or the plot or the script. But that is not true also with our unconscious self furthermore observing and storing each and everything we come across ever more piercingly than our eyes.

In FRIENDS more public places like the coffee house are used as settings where most of the action takes place, where many unrelated people come and go and add to the dynamics of the scene. When showing the indoors the walls are painted in more vibrant and lively colours, hosting cheerful posters and paintings. Monica’s flat in particular has windows and even a balcony making it much more appealing than Joeye’s flat across the hall that has hardly ever been shown with a window; very claustrophobic, something that my subconscious would never allow. But most of the action takes place elsewhere or there is a healthy (call it remedial) movement between Joeye’s apartment and the rest of the places.

Taking FRIENDS as an accepted standard setting margin, the rest of the two sitcoms appear smaller. HIMYM has most of the action taking place indoors, most of the time at night. Now let’s not go back and rewind on our basics why the sun often symbolizes happiness and cloudy or darkness is for sadness and depression. This plays heavily on my psychology and I always miss an opportunity to build a rapport with the sitcom, but right then the costumes come to rescue. With Marshall as the only exception, to which however he occasionally creates a counter exception thus becoming in line with the trend with no exceptions at all, all characters wear bright and happy colours, creating a vibrant atmosphere not with the painted walls but with the painted costumes. Barney’s character too leaves a positive impression in the mind for obvious reasons.

This brings us to the BBT. Like Barney, Sheldon is a talker who loves himself and likes to believe that he is always correct. Now, many people find him the best character in the sitcom, the sole reason why they watch the programme. This is indeed true. He is so irritating and we (read I) find him so annoying yet we want to see him and wait for his next move however irritating it be. Once again I am digressing from the main point. BBT offers a strict indoors setting in a house full of nerds proposing very little fun. There is hardly ever a glimpse of the outside world. This could have been happening well in an alien soil and so it loses the terrestrial touch, bringing it at the bottom of my preference among these three options.

Suddenly everything looks quite meaningless. This could mean only one thing, I am sleepy. I may do extreme things like write a blog like this which is nothing but a blot to my otherwise decent blog page, and even post it, but I can never compromise with sweet sleep, which on a worthless, futile Sunday is anyway hard to come. Goodnight.