When A Bad Review Makes Me Want To Watch Something… Whitney

In this week’s Muppet Issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived, I sped through all the muppet-related articles to get my “fix” and am waiting with baited breath for the movie to come out. After finishing all the Henson-esque articles, I perused through the rest of the magazine. For those of you who don’t read Entertainment Weekly, it’s a very inexpensive subscription because the entertainment companies are basically paying for ad space all over the mag.

I was one of the people who got sucked into the hype of “Whitney”, the new show with Whitney Cummings. I only know her from the Roasts on Comedy Central, so I didn’t have any type of opinion of her. Before the show started, it looked like it was going to be the only thing on television, that being determined by the number of commercials and promos for the show.

I watched half an episode… maybe even less than 1o minutes of the first episode. That’s how uninteresting it was. It’s not that it’s a bad show, it’s just that it wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny. Like Two and a Half Men. If it just happens to be on, I may watch some of it, but I don’t go out of my way. Scrubs was another one of those.

Back to this week’s entertainment weekly. There was an article by Mark Harris entitled, “Who Are You Calling Funny”, that stated that Whitney was the most hated show on TV. That got my attention, but one of the things they pointed out was there was an overbearing laugh track/studio audience. I guess I didn’t watch it long enough to notice. But right before the close of the article, the reviewer, Mark Harris, says:

“After 90 minutes of rueful wit, the haunted-house shrieks of laughter in Whitney play like American Horror Story.”

I am still laughing about this comment. This affected me so much that I now want to watch it, listening for that one woman in the audience, who is obviously Whitney’s sister, screaming with laughter. When I am attending something staged and someone is doing that, it’s annoying as hell, but now I want so bad to hear someone actually screaming with laughter on that show.

I doubt that I spend any time watching it, though. If I like a show, it ends up being cancelled.

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