The brain often has nostalgic bouts for informative times, and last night as I watched a film featuring Tea Leoni, my mind started wandering back to the late nineties, when I would gorge myself into the dawn hours each night on The Paramount Comedy Channel.
It took me a moment to realise this was because of the sitcom The Naked Truth. We’ll come back to that though, because while so much of the channel’s output has stuck with me – Seinfeld, Newsradio, The Larry Sanders Show, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) – some of it has sort of congealed into one gestalt sitcom, made up of elements of Dharma & Greg, Caroline In The City, Almost Perfect, Becker, Grace Under Fire, Just Shoot Me, Mad About You, Spin City, Suddenly Susan, and Veronica’s Closet*.
That’s not to say those sitcoms weren’t good (some of them were fantastic), it’s just there’s only so much room in my head these days. And it makes me want to revisit them all to remind myself of them.
So, I think I mostly conflate The Naked Truth with Dharma & Greg for some reason, even though they’re totally different shows. The reason for this is because of Tea Leoni’s previous sitcom, Flying Blind, which must also have aired on Paramount.
* I’m aware that some of these shows may not have aired on this channel, but in my mind, they did, all the time, on a constant loop, surrounding Seinfeld.
