Todd VanDerWerff was nice enough to invite me onto his podcast where he and his wife Libby listed “the top 10 comedies of the aughts.” The podcast can be found here.

I’m recognizable as the guy saying “yes, it is” or “yes, he is” more than might be considered absolutely necessary.

One of the touches that made the Supernatural sitcom parody (see below) better and sharper than most was the brief shot of the products inside the refrigerator: it was all generic products, with a ketchup bottle marked “Tomato Ketchup” and so on. Sitcoms are not the only shows that use generic products instead of real ones, but it seems like the most obvious examples are shows like The Big Bang Theory where characters drink from cans marked “Cola,” or Disney Channel type shows like Hannah Montana, where nobody is ever allowed to use anything real, play a real song, or basically pay for anything. (One of the great educational aspects of TV is what it teaches us about trademark law; the prop people on these shows know just how much they have to change a logo before they’re no longer infringing on a company’s trademark.) Other shows either try to have real products, or just shoot and light everything in such a way that labels are not clearly visible.

One thing to note about the generic products vs. real products issue is that it’s another example of how movies and TV use different rules. In movies, the question is usually not whether the movie will use real products, but how blatant and obvious the use will be; “product placement” is a pejorative term in movies and has been for a long time. But most TV is advertiser-supported, so the networks naturally want a show to be free of any references to products or brands that might conflict with the commercials (you don’t want to see the characters drinking one kind of beer, followed immediately by a commercial for another kind of beer). Seinfeld was one of several shows that helped to break the networks’ resistance to real cereals, real chocolate syrup (Bosco!) etc.

And there are some shows that simply could not work if they were not allowed to mention real stuff. Mad Men, which had its season finale tonight, needs to be able to show and mention real products from the early ’60s; the show couldn’t create an accurate sense of period otherwise, and it certainly couldn’t portray life in an ad agency. Of course there is probably a certain amount of product placement involved here, but the purpose is not to make extra money; they have to do it. But there are still plenty of shows where people are using products from, as The Simpsons once put it, “Panaphonic, Magnetbox and Sorny.”

While I’m on the subject of Mad Men, the season finale made it official: Matt Weiner has given himself a writing credit on twelve of the thirteen episodes in the third season. The first season had the fewest Weiner writing credits (there were six episodes he didn’t have his name on after “written by”), which, again, is a reversal of the usual pattern; normally the creator has the most credits in the first season, and fewer as the show goes on and he trusts his staff more.

The big TV article of the day is “Why Britain Can’t Do The Wire,” by Peter Jukes, about the cautious, executive-driven culture of the present-day BBC and how it has caused the UK to fall behind the US when it comes to making interesting TV. (In the recent Monty Python documentary, the members mention that the show could only have been approved in the good old days when there weren’t so many executives at the BBC, all putting in their oar.) Just as interesting, and shorter, is this accompanying interview with David Simon, where he talks about the differences between US and British television: in the U.S., “the writer is god” (on good shows, anyway) and the head writer supervises a staff of writers, instead of doing every script himself as on most British shows.

It sounds a little paradoxical that having one or two writers write everything could produce a less writer-driven culture than the U.S., where only freaks like David E. Kelly write every script themselves. But it’s true. The reason, I think, is that TV is to some extent an executive-driven medium no matter what country you’re in. And in the U.S., writers are literally elevated to executive positions (it’s right there in the title, “executive producer”). There are many British shows where the head writer/creator has time to write every episode, in part, because someone else holds the power over the other aspects of the show. (This also happens sometimes in the States. Susan Harris wrote every episode of Soap, but left the producing duties to her partners, Paul Witt and Tony Thomas.) A David Simon or Milch can’t possibly write every episode, but everything is subject to his approval. And that can result in a show that more clearly expresses the vision of one person. If they wrote all the scripts, but ceded control in other areas, it would inevitably be different, because the other stuff — costumes, shooting, editing, locations — is hugely important. If one person has the final OK on everything, then it’s more likely that everything will work toward the same goal.

Canada is infamous for having a TV drama culture that (not always, of course, but often enough for it to be a pattern) combines the weaknesses of both systems: a domination by non-writing producers, with the head writer supervising a writing staff but not a whole lot else.

But the U.S. system, making a writer into an executive, is kind of a strange one, and one that goes against normal instincts. The writer’s temperament is not necessarily that of an executive. On the great DVD features for It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, creator Alan Zweibel talks about how difficult it was to adjust from thinking like a writer — protecting his material and his scripts — to being responsible for all aspects of the production, and caring as much about episodes written by other people. The U.S. system essentially asks people like Larry David to do management jobs when they’re totally unsuited to being managers in any traditional sense. And yet it works, because somebody has to be in charge of any production. And while the director is the one most likely to be in charge of a movie, a writer is the only person who can come close to handling all aspects of a 13 or 22-episode TV season.

If you’re on Twitter, interested in TV news and observations, and want to know who to follow (besides that @weinmanj guy), a good place to look is Josef Adalian’s list of “50 TV Insiders To Follow.” It includes Twitterers who work in TV, like Canada’s own Hart Hanson (creator of Bones) aka @HartHanson, and the many TV critics and bloggers who share their thoughts on the site, including friends of this blog like @TVoti (Todd VanDerWerff of The AV Club).

Twitter seems to be particularly well-suited to TV writers, who don’t usually have time to blog, but are good at making pithy one-line observations or writing brief thoughts on whatever is going on that day on the set. Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield and The Unit and currently running Lie To Me, is particularly good at this. On his Twitter feed at ShawnRyanTV, he plugs his current show, offers quick observations on the writing process, talks about the other shows he likes, and, of course, says nasty things about NBC. Because if you think I’m the only one who is obsessed with NBC, you’re sadly mistaken. (Ryan got a lot of attention because he was the first to Tweet the cancellation of Southland; he also snarked that they  “even managed to lose the Seinfeld reunion to another network.”) And let’s not forget the ferocious campaign for followers; with regards to Hanson, he wrote: “that Canadian has 12,000+ followers? How is a true American like me losing?” (He was kidding. Really.)

Twitter is a conversational medium, and a lot of Tweeting consists of back-and-forth dialogue — but in a way it’s most valuable as a “microblogging” site. By using Twitter, showbiz insiders who don’t blog are essentially blogging in all but name: they’re posting links, sharing their thoughts. But at least at this point, it’s harder for them to get in trouble over their Twitter participation (unless they say something really outrageous), because the medium requires less time and no grammar, and because all but a few Tweets tend to “disappear” in a way that blog posts don’t, meaning that an old Tweet is less likely to come back to haunt them. Of course an individual Tweet can’t provide greater insight the way a good blog post can (in theory). But you can get some valuable information if you find the insider feeds that are mostly about their work and their business, rather than what video game they’re playing and what kind of burrito they ate while playing it.

As an alternative (or antidote) to my recent post on this season’s comedy development, here’s James Poniewozik’s Time cover story about the current state of TV comedy. His thesis: if you don’t expect a Seinfeld or Cosby-like megahit, comedy is doing all right and has actually become more “ambitious and strong.” Especially if you look beyond the shows that are normally classified as sitcoms, and include hour-long funny shows like Glee and HBO and Showtime’s downbeat half-hour shows (which are actually less downbeat and depressing than Glee) in the “comedy” category.

As for the Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm, I’ll probably say more about that once they actually get to the reunion; this weekend’s (very funny) episode is called “The Reunion,” but it’s only the start of the arc, and I’m interested to see what they’ll do when they get to the actual filming of the episode-within-an-episode. But on the subject of Seinfeld, it was also pointed out elsewhere that it is sort of a transitional show — not just because it was a bridge between likable mass-market characters and the modern comedy of dysfunction, but because it was a multi-camera comedy that wasn’t entirely comfortable with being one, and constantly struggled against the boundaries of the form. When Larry David went in to pitch the show, he mentioned the idea that it should be single-camera, but NBC understandably, and quickly, talked him out of that idea. But almost from the beginning, it tended to build episodes out of many short scenes, like a movie instead of a few long scenes, like a play. And the longer the show went on, and the more money it had to do stuff, it started doing more and more of the show out of the view of the audience. In the early seasons they would occasionally do an episode without the audience (like “The Parking Garage”) if they couldn’t do it on the main set; that’s normal. But around season 6, they built a Manhattan street, they did more outdoor scenes, and the show resembled what director Andy Ackerman (who took over in season 6 from Tom Cherones) has called “a blend of single-camera and multi-camera.”

The key to that transition was the way Kramer’s wacky adventures were portrayed. Up until around the fifth season, most of Kramer’s big adventures took place offscreen, and then he would tell us about punching out Mickey Mantle or stopping a criminal while making all the stops on a bus (“People kept ringin’ the bell!”). That’s the multi-camera, theatre-style aesthetic. By the end of the series, any time Kramer did something wacky, we would see him do it, usually in scenes that were pre-recorded and shown to the audience afterward. In this particular case I don’t think that was an improvement — I think some shows, and not just Seinfeld, forgot that some things are funnier when described than shown. But watching that show from beginning to end, you can see a show trying to get out of the studio, away from the couch, even while it achieves more popularity than it ever would have as a one-camera show.