I do get annoyed by shows that are either rather lightweight or else portentously meaningful (apparently) which suddenly develop really ghastly endings: the death of the main character, love left unrequited in some horrible twist, and so on. It's a trick to borrow all the weight of a ghastly event to make bad plotting or lack of imagination seem similarly substantial.

I mean, don't get me wrong; some stories need a hard conclusion because it fits the logic of the story. But in any case, you need to be in the right frame of mind, and also, you need to be viewing/reading for that purpose. If I switch the telly on looking for King of the hill (which you're quite right is brilliant. Where else would you find the every day life of a propane salesman. whose entertainment is chugging tins of beer in an alleyway?) then I don't want to watch the gloomier passages of Better Call Saul, or Sophie's Choice or read We Need to Talk About Kevin.

This makes me think of Game of Thrones. The first couple of seasons seemed cool, fantasy shenanigans with a bit more oomph to them than is usually the case.

But it quickly became apparent that at any given point of climax, whatever is the most shocking and devastating thing possible is what's going to happen.

Beyond that it was just entertaining characters being paired up and having interactions. And when it ran out of pairings, there was really nothing beyond that. They forgot to do a story.

And yeah, I agree. I think as 'Brits' we shy away from sentiment and sincerity a bit more than the Americans do, seeing it as unsophisticated or something. And that's a shame.
 

Game of Thrones is a  good example. I think Eddard Stark's death was one of the few justifiable shocks, because it introduced an unexpected tone of jeopardy, which is quite hard to manage in this kind of sword and occasional sorcery tale. But after that it was just ridiculous. Good person? Dies horribly. Bad person? Dies horribly. Kind, compassionate, teenage daughter who has lived a hard life? Burned alive at the stake by her father. 

Sentiment and sincerity? I'm not sure. 

No matter that the British, or the English at least, like to boast about their grasp of irony, and of the more subtle aspects of comedy, there's a thread which is ironic, dark and subtle, evident on both sides of the pond. I mentioned Better Call Saul, which I think has moments of brilliance. It's SO dark, so tied to the inevitability of failure, that it feels like a tragic drama. But it is, especially in the character of Jimmy McGill (Saul Goodman), a comedy played dead straight.

Watching Better Call Saul, I can't help thinking of something like Hancock's Half Hour. Totally different in many ways, but both owing everything to the desparate, depressive personalities of the main characters. Obviously Hancock was more obviously played for laughs in straight comedy style, but both feature lead characters unable to break free from the lure of shooting for success, even though we, and they know that it's pointless. Incidentally, two of the principal writers for Hancock's Half Hour were Galton and Simpson of Steptoe fame. So maybe there's a link.

Hancock the comic actor was, of course, a chronic alcoholic and depressive, given to domestic violence who finally killed himself. Bob Odenkirk (Jimmy/Saul) seems to be a happy and generally good-natured chap, and a very good actor. 

Yeah I wasn't quite talking about that idea that we're better at irony in comedy, which I agree is largely nonsense. If anything I think US comedy is generally a bit drier than ours.

I meant more that US comedy more often has that warmth to/underneath it that I was talking about before. It's not afraid to be earnest. Whereas over here I think we go ew, emotions, how embarassing. I don't think we're "better at irony" but I do think we believe that comedy has to have ironic distance from anything emotionally warm(? struggling for the right word). 

Things like Taxi, Cheers, Roseanne, US Office, Parks and Rec, King of the Hill, Community, even Simpsons and Futurama. They'd often get very sentimental/sincere/earnest/emotional (not quite sure which word is right) in a way that UK comedy generally backs away from or, at best, *immediately* undercuts with a joke to prevent us from the embarrassment of sitting in our emotions.

The US *also* has the other, colder/more distant, stuff - Curb Your Enthusiasm (which I think it excellent but find hard to watch for this reason), Arrested Development, Schitt's Creek etc.. But it seems less the norm.

And I struggle to think of UK comedy with that USey warmth. It's not *entirely* absent, I think it was there in Shameless? Which makes me think it has a class component, which seems likely.

Maybe it's like you were saying with theatre and it's because TV is really still a very oxbridgey, middle class endeavour over here, which I don't think is/was the case in the US. 

I've not seen Better Call Saul (or Breaking Bad) so can't comment directly. They look very good, but the subject matter has always put me off.

I think Saul in particular is pretty magnificent, though the tone switching from comedy to drama to melodrama and tragedy can be a bit whiplash-inducing at times. It usually handles it well.

I could do with a new comedy series. We tried Ted Lasso and it was sort of alright, folksy heartwarming comedy, but it started to lean a bit too hard into the heartwarming for our taste. That and that anything to do with professional sport starts to feel a bit too close to the dayjob for my liking!

Yeah, Ted Lasso is free of conflict to the point where it's hard to tell whether you actually watched anything.

Coupla straight-up comedies I've enjoyed recently: Class of 07 and Abbott Elementary.