The 5 Best THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE Episodes of Season 1 & 2

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The Five Best THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE Episodes of Season One

Ahead of 30 Rock, I have decided to slot in a quick look at The New Adventures Of Old Christine, which was voted in by readers last year. Personally, I don’t think it’s an A-tier sitcom; there’s nothing brilliant or special about its design or how it exists in written practice. But it’s very watchable because of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the funniest sitcom ladies of all time. She makes everything worthwhile – in the same way Lucille Ball makes watching her later shows worthwhile. Oh, Old Christine is not as rough or embarrassing as Here’s Lucy could be (not to mention Life With Lucy), but it’s a bit like The Lucy Show, which lacked the guaranteed excellence and therefore influential cachet of I Love Lucy (whose analog here would be Seinfeld) yet still proved to be a reliable venue to showcase its star. Of course, Ball wasn’t as lucky; after Old Christine, Louis-Dreyfus went on to the even more impressive Veep, one of the winningest (and most enjoyable) ambassadors of the genre’s evolved sensibilities in the 2010s as a high-concept single-cam cable comedy with an anti-heroic character in a more literally realistic world. Existing as a successful endeavor in between Seinfeld and Veep, two flashier and better regarded series, Old Christine has been overshadowed in the 15 years since it ended, for it wasn’t strong enough to make an impact within the genre like the former did and it isn’t as perfect a sample of its era as the latter. But it is the vehicle that formally broke the so-called “Seinfeld Curse” for that show’s four leads – including Louis-Dreyfus herself, who had failed a few years prior with her first attempted sitcom comeback, the high-concept and somewhat gimmicky Watching Ellie.

The Ten Best THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE Episodes of Season Two

Although it doesn’t look it, The New Adventures Of Old Christine is a different show in Season Two than it was in One, as the central Christine characterization — once defined, from the premise, as a divorced single mom so willing to do good on behalf of her son that she’d subject herself to abject humiliation for his benefit — is moving away from this structurally implanted specificity and becoming more self-serving and inept: her own worst enemy. This is a broader depiction that feels closer to Late Stages Elaine Benes — which is unsurprising, given that one of Two’s new key scribes (Jennifer Crittenden) was a Seinfeld alum — and while the expansion of Christine’s personality for story is understandable, it’s an unmotivated shift at the expense of her character as established, for now that she’s becoming a more generally chaotic mess, and far less self-sacrificing than the setup calls her to be, both episodic plots and her function within them get less tethered to the situation and thus less earned by it. Oh, sure, some heightening is okay — a stronger cause-and-effect between character and narrative is usually welcome — but not to the detriment of the premise and not this early. (Two of the worst entries are “Oh God, Yes” where she’s self-obsessed and extremely bumbling for no good reason, and “Strange Bedfellows,” where her vapidity stands especially counter to her premised design.)