When we talk about "art" or "culture", we would never use a sitcom as an example of them. Who would dare to even compare the great art of the cinema with what we normally know as a "sitcom"? However, one of the most brilliant and profound expressions of art of the 20th century was indeed a sitcom. Certainly the term may sound demeaning to some people to describe such an amazing work of art like Newsradio, but incredibly, a TV genre that never produced more than good laughs at well written gags, suddenly released in 1995 one of the most brilliant works of art in history. The inability of most people to understand its elaborated and intelligent sense of humor, plus the shortsightedness of television network executives didn’t let it complete its full cycle, but still we have 97 episodes of extremely profound comedic art for which we must feel very fortunate of. The ones of us that understood and share the same sense of humor of this masterpiece most likely have piles of VHS tapes with recorded episodes, and we know that no matter how many times we watch each episode we won’t stop laughing and getting diverse feelings from it, because something that was so intelligently well written doesn’t wear out on us but instead keeps marveling us at the perfection and brilliance of its construction.

We can’t say that every single moment of it was perfect, but we can say for sure that every episode of Newsradio was an extremely exhilarating experience, not only far superior by comparison to anything else on TV, but in itself: watching Newsradio is to witness comedic and cinematic art of the highest level, accomplished by a unique gathering of talent. We had the immense luck of having who is in my opinion the greatest comedian in the history of cinema and television, Dave Foley, in a role thought and written especially for him, and to which he filled with a brilliant performance. We had on top of that another fortuitous coincidence, the fact that when the show was being cast Dave Foley picked up among two candidates a woman that was practically unknown up to that moment and whom I regard as the greatest female comedic and dramatic actress of all time, and the most beautiful woman that ever existed, Maura Tierney. To have two talents of this caliber on the same work of art is something incredible, and even more, to have them paired with the great, unforgettable Phil Hartman is something we can never be thankful enough for. But if as having the three of them together wasn’t more than sufficient, we had the chance to see them with other performers that were also unknown at the moment but that would provide an extreme showcase of talent, and have the opportunity to develop their acting in ways they didn’t have the chance before, such as the revelation of the amazing Stephen Root as one of the greatest comedic actors in history. We also had the immense luck of having a brilliant mind like Paul Simms gathering them as well as all the people that made it possible. In essence, Newsradio was the most sublime team work that ever existed. There was no stardom, no cheap gossip, silly fights or demands for sky-high salaries; it was a group of hard working artists committed to provide the best of themselves and produce an excellent theatrical piece.

This is a brilliant in-depth analysis of this show written by Adrian Foo, who already gave us an excellent analysis on Maura Tierney, and who now brought us a larger, methodical, insightful examination of every aspect of this masterpiece, with the collaboration of Jennifer, who has proven to be an amazing source of information for everything related to Newsradio and its members.

I had the honor to be in charge of the graphic design and publishing of this great work. As it is very long, I provided three ways for reading it: the website version, with full graphics, recommendable if you have a direct connection to the internet for which you don’t pay the time you’re online; a downloadable, full graphic PDF version which can be downloaded in about ten or fifteen minutes and then viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader 4, which in case you don’t have, you can download for free at www.adobe.com, and soon to come, a text only PDF version.

Adrian Foo, Jennifer and I were committed ourselves to this project for quite some time now, and it’s been a huge amount of work, so we hope readers have enjoyed reading it as much as we did working on it.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Alvarez

 

Adrian and Sebastian would like to thank Marcello Romero for his invaluable assistance in proofreading the text when our eyes were just too tired to do so.