Overrated/Underrated Geek Media

[TiQuinn]

I think we have several female ones, but I feel like male casting has absolutely gone to hell for the under-35s and we can't even blame it on "New" Hollywood, because people like Spielberg, very much part of the older Hollywood, are absolutely a huge part of the problem, casting young male leads in roles where they come across as bland, charisma-free, and untalented. I suspect it's unfair - I doubt they really got that role whilst not being able to act, but if so they're either being miscast or misdirected - Ansel Elgort is a prime example.

Timothee Chalamet exists and is still under 30 though! So it's not like no-one is making it through! And he is a pull - there's no way a Dune with say, Elgort as the lead would have done anywhere near as well as it did with Chalamet.

It doesn't seem to be happening to young women to the same degree - more young female actors actually seem to have charisma and personality and unique looks (rather than just being "white guy who is handsome in a forgettable way") and could have done fine in the '80s or '90s.

Not bad examples here though I'd never heard of 25 or 24:

25 Best Hollywood Actors in Their 20s, Young Stars Ranked

Discover the best actors and actresses in their 20s today...

www.complex.com

(Also man if they ever need someone to play a young, Black version of Jake Gyllenhall for some reason, then Jharrel Jerome is a lock! He even has a similar name!)

In fairness, the age cutoff is arbitrary and works against a lot of actors who may want to take on better stuff, but are being cast because they're young. Guys like Robert Pattinson and Daniel Radcliffe have done some great work but they couldn't even get started until they got out of that "Hi, I'm beautiful and under 30" phase or "I need to finish my high profile series before I can ever do anything else" job.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

But not Cheers, weirdly enough. I think that's partly timing - fewer people alive now saw it when they were younger, and I think almost all '80s sitcoms are sufficiently ugly as to be hard to watch now.

Cliff Calvin just ain’t funny any more!

 

[Bedrockgames]

Cliff Calvin just ain’t funny any more!

I still find him funny. Especially in the internet age where everyone seems to be a Cliff Clavin

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I still find him funny. Especially in the internet age where everyone seems to be a Cliff Clavin

That’s why he isn’t funny! One idiot is a joke, a legion of idiots is terrifying.

 

[MGibster]

I find it hard to take movies seriously when the actors are too young. Some of that is also people just look younger now than when I was a kid. But if a make character was in a leadership role in a show or movie they used to look pretty weathered. However a lot of these actors do grow. People who I had difficulty believing in when they first emerge often surprise me years later.

When I watched Alien: Romulus that was the thought running through my head about pretty much the entire cast. The oldest principle actor was the guy who played Andy the Android (sorry, synthetic person), and he was 30. Most of the rest of the cast were closer to 20 than they were to 30. The actors were fine, but it was like watching a bunch of children flying around in a space ship and burgling a space station. In contrast, Sigourney Weaver was the youngest actor at the age of 29 in the first Alien movie.

Although to be fair, a lot of times actors are older than the characters should be. Brad Pitt in Fury was in his 50s when he made that movie. The average age of an American tank crew during World War 2 was the upper 20s, and Pitt and some of the other crew would have been "old men." There's a memorial not too far from Little Rock where a B-17 crashed, killing the entire crew during World War II. The oldest airmen were 26 and both pilots, one of them the commander, were 24.

 

[Willie the Duck]

TiQuinn -- I know a few other people that have said they re-watch Frasier too. I really meant 'get brought up in discussion' as my metric under examination. Everyone watches what they watch, but people are still talking about Friends and Seinfeld. There are still entertainment journalism articles being written about Seinfeld. Friends had a reunion (checks. oh, wow, four years ago) where they just talked about the show and it became the channel's highest rated thing ever. Frasier, which was almost as big as these two, don't get that. Other than when John Mahoney passed or the occasional person surprised by Grammer's politics (and something something an ex of his was a real housewives of somewhere, I think?), I haven't really heard about Frasier since it was on the air*. That's what I'm bringing up, and that feels different to me**. Like, for the 70s I don't think M*A*S*H and All in the Family get that much more continued cultural cache than Brady Bunch and Mary Tyler Moore, or vice-versa.
*Re: the reboot--I literally heard there was going to be a reboot, and next time I looked up, it was two seasons in and being cancelled, and I hadn't even realized it had happened.
**but again I'll have to think about it.

I can honestly say as someone who lived through the '80s and '90s, that I have never watched an episode of Wings.

So I do think that, at least outside the US, it may have been a little lower-profile (despite getting eight seasons - which was less uncommon then) than other shows. I literally don't even know anything about it - I'll go look it up!

Interesting but unsurprising. It was treated as... I don't know the word for it-- one of those tag-along shows that fills out the primetime tv block for a network. Similar to how Just Shoot Me and Suddenly Susan filled out nights with Friends and/or Frasier. You may have liked or disliked them, but you knew the networks weren't supporting them the way they were their flagship shows. I would be absolutely unsurprised if <whatever platform you saw the U. S. shows you did see in the 90s> didn't have it on, or didn't advertise it as must-watch-television.

Also, there kind of is a pattern - Friends, Seinfeld, Fresh Prince and Everyone Loves Raymond (and maaaaybe even Home Improvement) were lightly (well more than lightly with Seinfeld) transgressive in their humour quite frequently. There's an edge to them (least of those Raymond but even there...), a kind of low cleverness, a willingness to take that extra step for the gag, that wasn't really present in say, Mad About You or The Nanny. Wings I haven't seen, and Spin City I think was similar but maybe I am not giving it enough credit.

Hmmm. I think I see the thread you are pulling at, and trying to decide if I agree. Home Improvement and Raymond are decidedly more family-sitcom-y than the rest and I think that complicates the situation. Raymond certainly has a lot more acerbic bite than Full House or the Nanny. Fresh Prince is also kind of 'transgressive to a teen.' It was a lot less mean-spirited than Seinfeld or Friends let themselves* be (provided you consider Uncle Phil's routine attempted homicide to be lighthearted fun). Mad About You deliberately** hamstrung itself by constraining itself to 'things you would really believe real couples would say in real conversation,' meaning it could have the 'neurotic New Yorkers' vibe of Seinfeld, but not the comedic acidity.
*or decided they had to be. Despite surpassing Seinfeld in the ratings (and eventually outliving it), I guess Friends never escaped the notion of trying to 'be more like Seinfeld,' which is where a lot of the 'did you realize that the characters on friends are actually kinda horrible?'-type articles you see pop up on content aggregator sites.
**Paul Reiser's discussion about this on the Inside of You podcast on Youtube is fascinating.

I guess my issue with this pattern/theory is that some (such as Raymond) of the still-discussed shows in barely fit the pattern, and there are lots of shows of the era that exemplified it more (Caroline in the City, Just Shoot Me, Unhappily Ever After) that are, if not forgotten, certainly in the low tier of still-remembered. Maybe that's because most of them are in the same 'tagalong show' bin I put Wings in.

Spin City had some bite to it. Not Seinfeld-level, but certainly Fresh Prince/Newsradio/Drew Carey-level. Certainly Alan Ruck's* sex-pest character and his vitriolic best-bud relationship with Michael Boatman's gay straight man had some 'aren't we transgressive?' vibes.
*side note: I watched the entire Michael J Fox era of that show without realizing that that was Cameron from Ferris Bueller. Ten years turned him from a milquetoast teenager into a prematurely grey scoundrel.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That’s why he isn’t funny! One idiot is a joke, a legion of idiots is terrifying.

TiQuinn -- I know a few other people that have said they re-watch Frasier too. I really meant 'get brought up in discussion' as my metric under examination. Everyone watches what they watch, but people are still talking about Friends and Seinfeld. There are still entertainment journalism articles being written about Seinfeld. Friends had a reunion (checks. oh, wow, four years ago) where they just talked about the show and it became the channel's highest rated thing ever. Frasier, which was almost as big as these two, don't get that. Other than when John Mahoney passed or the occasional person surprised by Grammer's politics (and something something an ex of his was a real housewives of somewhere, I think?), I haven't really heard about Frasier since it was on the air*. That's what I'm bringing up, and that feels different to me**. Like, for the 70s I don't think M*A*S*H and All in the Family get that much more continued cultural cache than Brady Bunch and Mary Tyler Moore, or vice-versa.
*Re: the reboot--I literally heard there was going to be a reboot, and next time I looked up, it was two seasons in and being cancelled, and I hadn't even realized it had happened.
**but again I'll have to think about it.

I think Frasier still gets a lot of mention culturally. I have definitely heard about it and read articles about it in the past few years.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Interesting but unsurprising. It was treated as... I don't know the word for it-- one of those tag-along shows that fills out the primetime tv block for a network. Similar to how Just Shoot Me and Suddenly Susan filled out nights with Friends and/or Frasier. You may have liked or disliked them, but you knew the networks weren't supporting them the way they were their flagship shows. I would be absolutely unsurprised if <whatever platform you saw the U. S. shows you did see in the 90s> didn't have it on, or didn't advertise it as must-watch-television.

This matches my memory. I liked it, but it was basically a show my mom watched and I watched as a result of her wanting to watch it

 

[dragoner]

When I watched Alien: Romulus that was the thought running through my head about pretty much the entire cast. The oldest principle actor was the guy who played Andy the Android (sorry, synthetic person), and he was 30. Most of the rest of the cast were closer to 20 than they were to 30. The actors were fine, but it was like watching a bunch of children flying around in a space ship and burgling a space station. In contrast, Sigourney Weaver was the youngest actor at the age of 29 in the first Alien movie.

Although to be fair, a lot of times actors are older than the characters should be. Brad Pitt in Fury was in his 50s when he made that movie. The average age of an American tank crew during World War 2 was the upper 20s, and Pitt and some of the other crew would have been "old men." There's a memorial not too far from Little Rock where a B-17 crashed, killing the entire crew during World War II. The oldest airmen were 26 and both pilots, one of them the commander, were 24.

I have to laugh that in a sci-fi group an Army Captain was asked what he thought of Aliens and his first comment is that the troops were all too old.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hmmm. I think I see the thread you are pulling at, and trying to decide if I agree. Home Improvement and Raymond are decidedly more family-sitcom-y than the rest and I think that complicates the situation. Raymond certainly has a lot more acerbic bite than Full House or the Nanny. Fresh Prince is also kind of 'transgressive to a teen.' It was a lot less mean-spirited than Seinfeld or Friends let themselves* be (provided you consider Uncle Phil's routine attempted homicide to be lighthearted fun). Mad About You deliberately** hamstrung itself by constraining itself to 'things you would really believe real couples would say in real conversation,' meaning it could have the 'neurotic New Yorkers' vibe of Seinfeld, but not the comedic acidity.
*or decided they had to be. Despite surpassing Seinfeld in the ratings (and eventually outliving it), I guess Friends never escaped the notion of trying to 'be more like Seinfeld,' which is where a lot of the 'did you realize that the characters on friends are actually kinda horrible?'-type articles you see pop up on content aggregator sites.
**Paul Reiser's discussion about this on the Inside of You podcast on Youtube is fascinating.

Agree here too. In comparison to Full House, sure Home Improvement seems a little more edgy. But it was family friendly entertainment at the time. Rosanne was a much more edgy show in that ballpark IMO