I was never much of a Seinfeld fan. It was a well made and funny show, but I always find it hard to get excited about shows where I don’t like any of the characters. And Seinfeld was very much that. Even by sitcom standards, it had shallow characters. The sitcom that I liked — loved even — was Newsradio. But I don’t know if I would go as far as Todd VanDerWerff who says that, NewsRadio Was the Best Sitcom of the 1990s. Or maybe I would. But what VanDerWerff really thinks is that Newsradio was the best sitcom ever. I’m also not really interested in the question. The main thing is that Newsradio was a really, really good show.
I first watched the show because it starred Dave Foley. When I was in grad school, I was a big fan of Kids in the Hall. So it was exciting that Foley had made it to the big time. Most people no doubt watched because of Phil Hartman. But overall, it was the ensemble that worked. I immediately fell in love with Maura Tierney. And I thought that Stephen Root was one of the funniest actors I had ever seen. He has gone on to be one of my favorite character actors. The rest of the cast was excellent as well. But even without the great cast, it would have been a funny show. The writing was excellent.
What I didn’t know was just how troubled the show was. Despite initial good reviews and ratings, NBC really messed with the show. In five seasons, it was put in 11 different time slots. I’m not sure why a network would do that except if it was trying to kill a show. And for all I know it was. Hollywood is known for some of the most spiteful behavior, like network heads trying to kill off shows of predecessors. But the show managed on, even stumbling on for a season after Phil Hartman’s death.
As a result of DerWerff’s article, I went back and watched the Newsradio I could find online. The shows from the third season just blew me away. I still find them as funny as anything that I’ve ever seen. What I didn’t remember about the show was just how slapstick it is. I think I was so focused on Root’s Jimmy James and all his sly silliness, I didn’t notice, for example, Andy Dick’s amazing pratfalls. In addition, much of the writing is pure farce with people coming and going — often repeatedly to great comedic effect.
At this point in my viewing history, I would say that Newsradio is probably most like Fawlty Towers. It isn’t as tightly plotted. But then again, there were a total of 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers, produced over the course of four years. Over the exact same period of time, Newsradio produced 97 episodes. Regardless, Fawlty Towers is the pinnacle of television comedy. The fact that I can even compare Newsradio to it says a great deal about it. Yet the show still doesn’t get much respect. My public library, for example, doesn’t hold a single DVD of the show. It does, of course, overflow with Seinfeld — even though you can watch three hours of it each night in syndication on the television. It’s sad. But apparently, there are a lot of people like DerWerff and me who greatly admire the show. And that’s something.
The amount of household debt and even more recently of student debt in the US is something that is really troublesome… This exemplifies a particular problem with inequality in the United States, which is very high inequality and access to higher education. So in other countries in the developed world you don’t have such massive student debt because you have more public support to higher education. And I think the plan that was proposed earlier this year in 2015 by President Obama to increase public funding to public universities and community college is exactly justified.
Ted Cruz got a lot of razzing for his “Imagine” speech where he asked a lot of confused students at Liberty University to imagine a conservative world with things like a flat federal income tax. It was the “imagine” part of it that got the scorn, not the ideas — they are just standard Republican ideas. But I think it is really interesting that the Republican Party is so wedded to this idea that everyone ought to be pay the same federal income tax rate. This would make overall taxes in the United States regressive: the poor would be paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the rich. But that’s what Republicans like Cruz believe, and after they got their flat tax, they would start pushing for an explicitly regressive tax. After all, why should people pay the same percentage of their income in taxes?! One man can only walk on one road at a time; every man should have to pay the same amount. And so on.
Ezra Klein wrote an interesting article that touched on both of these points, 
I just heard a tiny bit of Ali Gharib talking on 
Similarly, Monday morning, Jonathan Chait wrote, 
In 1964, Curtis Mayfield wrote a little song called “People Get Ready.” It is a gospel song, but like the very best gospel song, it seems like a political song. And it can read as a political song — and I choose to do so. Because political action is a matter of faith. For any person who is politically engaged, there are two options: cynicism and faith. And we are at our best when we have faith that things can get better. But it is hard — something I struggle with all the time.
On this day in 1811, Percy Shelley was thrown out of Oxford for publishing a little book,