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Matthew Perry & TV's snarky heart
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Former Friends cast mate Matthew Perry, quoted in Entertainment Weekly regarding his planned ABC sitcom about the manager of a sports arena: "At it's center is a character who's only thought about himself. In the pilot a series of events happen that will change that, and he'll reluctantly come out of his selfishness and learn to actually try to give a s---- about other people. So, you see, it's funny and it has heart. And, if you put that sentence in, please note that I did it with some kind of irony."
While I wish Matt well on his new show, may I suggest it will more likely find success if the "heart" is sincere rather than "ironic."
While sitcom producers finally seem to be waking up to the idea that that audiences like their comedies with a touch of warmth and humanity (as opposed wall-to-wall snark), they still want to seem cool to their Hollywood friends that find such displays of softness to be trite and, generally, uncool.
Hence, the sort of (wink-wink) "we don't really mean it" warmth oozing from recent offerings such as Community and others.
It is possible to be genuinely intelligent and genuinely funny with genuine heart. See Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond as two (relatively) recent examples. But to do so requires a willingness to drop the snark and drop the cool. It requires being real.
