Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Crappy film

The first must-see film of the year.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

(Oh come on RDamon, don't hold back now, tell us what you REALLY think. And must you post your tirade THREE times??)Actually, I kinda liked "Watching Ellie" (or should I say I liked watching Watching Ellie?) because I like Julie Louis-Dreyfus. Alot. To me she's always been a really charming and likable person. She definitely added sparkle to the old "Seinfeld" series - methinks I wouldn't have watched Seinfeld if JL-D hadn't been in the cast. Moreover, she is one of those kinds of ladies whom one so seldom encounters in the REAL world. (Believe me, I've looked...) Alas, it seems the likes of JL-D can only be found on TV sitcoms, and unfortunately, her sitcom has now been cancelled by NBC.So goodbye, Ellie. What a bummer. It was fun watching you while it lasted! Think reruns... (And Julie Louis-Dreyfus, I hope you get a cool new show someday, because your fans really want it to be so!!)

Sorry, let me rephrase that: it was the best of shows, THEN it was the worst of shows. After its brilliant initial run proved it too sophisticated for a mass network audience, the lovely and genuinely charming Watching Ellie disappeared. Now it's back, in a grotesque, dumbed-down version with the same actors playing characters who have the same names and I guess are supposed to be the same characters. The only problem with this is that there is no character consistency; and indeed in the new version there are no characters at all, only are sit-com stereotypes. The 'humor', now that it can't be rooted in the characters (as, again, there are none) is reduced to the utterly predictable and insultingly stupid. (The man Ellie gave the finger to could have been her big break - what a shock! Her boyfriend isn't cheating on her, he's trying to further her career - who could have guessed?!) In lieu of the laughter that will no longer be forthcoming from the audience, the producers have kindly supplied the canned variety.The original Ellie, as fans will fondly recall, allowed amusing events to happen naturally, preferring a handful of genuinely funny moments in a half-hour to five lousy punch-lines per minute. They didn't even require that each episode end with a joke. Audiences, confused and perplexed by the lack of formula (duh, what am I supposed to laugh at? duh, this sure isn't Will and Grace!) stayed away in droves.Rather than making 'Ellie for Dummies,' why couldn't the show have been transferred to, say, HBO, where intelligent, laugh-track-free comedies seem to flourish? (Dare I point out that even Fox network, which airs Bernie Mac and Malcolm in the Middle, has recognized the value of the laugh-track-free, single camera, half-hour comedy?) Watching the 2003 version of Ellie is like having dinner with a former best friend who has since been lobotomized. And the food and the service are lousy too.

I note how some people here were berating the unusual elements of "Watching Ellie" in its original brief run (oh the clock, it hurts my tiny head!), but now that it's accommodatingly been turned into "Just Shoot Will and Grace's Friends in Veronica's Closet," I don't yet see their follow-up critiques. Just as well. Give the show a chance to get going again.Indeed, it's hard to argue with anyone who simply states that something is not funny to them, but one of the reasons that we see idiotic phenomena on TV like 50 or 60 almost indistinguishable "reality" shows, or "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" five nights a week, is that anything that deviates from the familiar is heartily urinated-upon by the loudest, most reactionary complainers. At the risk of sounding like a pointy-headed art house goon, maybe my real beef is with the taste of the general public.Anyway, we have now been dutifully given a more conventional version of "Watching Ellie." Given the talent and money invested, I guess it was worth a shot. Try to give it a chance, at least, and watch a few before kicking it around. For those who instinctively compare it to "Seinfeld," although there's really no good reason for such a comparison, try watching the VERY FIRST episode of "Seinfeld" again. Whenever I see it, I'm reminded of how tedious it seemed to me and a lot of other people at that time. That show was very lucky to have survived its slow start, and last night's "Watching Ellie" at least seemed to hit the ground running, so to speak. I got some laughs out of it, and it has the potential for a lot more in time.

This show has a number of great things going for it. The 22-minute realtime episodes follow the trend of shows (like 24 and Andy Richter Controls the Universe) that reach to new or rarely utilized filming and editing techniques that add a new dimension to television viewing. In fact, in each of the 3 episodes I have seen, one of the cast members refers to the time left to the end of the episode [e.g.: "Would you two shut up and help me out of here? We've only got 11 minutes left to wrap this up!" or words to that effect...].The lack of laughtrack harkens to one of the finest seriocomedies ever produced - M*A*S*H, in which the laughtrack was banned from all surgery scenes. This decision allows the writing to speak for itself, without the need to tell you when to laugh.Hopefully, this show will not fall prey to the Seinfeld curse. If the network can keep it on the air long enough for viewers to give it a fair chance, this could be a real hit. Don't forget, Seinfeld started out as a lone pilot episode called The Seinfeld Chronicles in July of 1989, came back in May of 1990 for a 4-episode run befor starting a regular series schedule in January of 1991. By this time, we finally see the characters and their inter-relationships start to develop and gel into a show that really worked. In my opinion, Watching Ellie deserves the same consideration and should continue through it's regular season before it is judged at all.