Thank you for being a friend: A tribute to sit-coms and their stars

Celebrities die in threes, we’re told.
So far, 2010 is shaping up to be the year we mourn actors from sit-coms. It’s only June, but we’ve already lost three.
Back in February, it was Andrew Koenig, best known as “Boner” Stabone on “Growing Pains.” Recently, only weeks apart, Gary Coleman and Rue McClanahan both passed away.
Coleman is best known as the wise-cracking Arnold from “Diff’rent Strokes.” McClanahan played the senior citizen sex pot on “The Golden Girls.”
These last two hit me the hardest. The characters they played always cracked me up when I was a kid, from Arnold’s trouble with The Gooch, his school yard nemesis, to Blanche Devereaux’s syrupy Southern belle seduction of elderly gentlemen callers.
That’s right, I watched the “Golden Girls” when I was a kid. I’m not ashamed to say it. When I was younger, like many of my generation, I watched a lot of television. Hours and hours of it. So much that it was sometimes too easy to forget the people on TV are actors playing characters. And while the characters will live on infinitely in re-runs, the actors end the way we all end.
In life, though, these three brought a very important gift into our living rooms, that of laughter. Watching characters struggle through “situations” in the half-hour comedy shows, no matter how unrealistic or how far they differ from our own lives, always makes us feel a little less alone in the universe.
They also help divert us away from whatever our own troubles may be: getting lost in a character’s problem on a TV show, a movie or a novel allows our own problems to temporarily drift away.
Talented actors are the vessels through which this process is possible.
So, I’d like to take a moment of silence for these three diverse actors.
I’d also like to take a moment of silence for the sit-com itself.
Now that I’m older and that I’ve had my own “growing pains,” and found out that “different strokes” do rule the world and that my friends and I are very much like “golden girls,” I don’t watch much television.
I don’t have cable, which in Manistee means you don’t have any television thanks to the new digital way it’s brought to us now.
But I don’t need it to know that great sit-coms are a thing of the past. I’m talking about the good old-fashioned sit-coms where families and friends sat around a living room cracking jokes you knew to laugh at because of the laugh-track.
Now, the laugh-track is dorky. Less sit-coms premiere each fall and are replaced by “reality” television, the cultural sign that the end is nigh.
Hit half-hour comedy shows like “The Office” have to pretend it’s a documentary to get people to watch.
Reality shows are vulgar, not only because they’re just as scripted as any other shows, but because they appeal to an audiences’ worst gossip-mongering tendency. That itch to look in through your neighbor’s blind to see what they’re up to. That desire to feel better than people when they’re down.
Half-hour fictions allow for the creation of great characters. They allow the creators -- the writers and the actors -- to participate in an artistic exchange with the audience.
In reality shows, it’s watching to see if “Joe” or “Donna” is going to slap whoever just called them a nasty name. Reality shows are nothing more than middle school on tape. Unfortunately, I doubt programming will change in the near future.
But I will be interested to see if anyone will be mourning Richard Hatch, the dude that won the first “Survivor,” when he dies?
What praises would we sing? What did he or anybody on reality shows bring to us that was special? Did they really have a part in bringing diversionary joy to our lives?
Maybe I’ll keep watching to find out.
Maybe.