T20 & THE CHUCK LORRE SITCOM

May 28th 2011. It had a been a few weeks since yours truly moved to El Ciudad Jardin. I went to a friend's place, who owned a 40+ inch TV, to watch the champions league final between Barcelona and Manchester United. I got there early to have dinner and some IPL match was on. It was purportedly the big final. Between some teams called CSK & RCB. I had to sit through the entire match because of that pesky thing called time zone. It remains till date the only full IPL match I have seen. Other than that I can remember watching one super over by Bumrah, parts of some Bisla innings in a final, a Raina innings, Watto's innings in a final (did he get a 100?), a final between SRH & RCB, some cameos by Jos Buttler. Total overs viewed live would be 75 tops. I did check out Universe Boss' 175 (66) against Pune(?) the day after though. Come on, one doesn't miss something extraordinary like that. Ever.

The only times I'm excited about T20 is when West Indies are winning (I'm the fairest of fair weather fans) or when Mah Man Jos is batting. Like Formula 1 racing, I never got what's fun/exciting/entertaining about this format. Universe Boss will vomit his guts if he simply stands in the slips for 1 session in the heat of Chepauk. Not now when he's 42 but for at least six years. Yet he's bigger than Jesus in this format. Mystery chuckerspinner Sunil Narine (test average 8/ODI average 11) suddenly became Sanath Joy-suri-yah for a while. Simply makes no sense. Until now!

I cannot remember what I did last year when Corona-chan had stopped virtually every sport but this time I simply could not wastespend time in any worthy pursuit and I ended up watching IPL matches virtually every night. Not every ball but majority of the matches. This is despite my most favourite white ball batsman Mah Man Jos not even making the trip to UAE. After watching Venkatesh Iyer (FC average 36.33) become the latest sensation I have finally "got it".

 

One just doesn't have to spend any thought to understand what is happening. It just helps one while away 3-4 hours before going to bed after a long day's work. T20 is like the end of a Sergio Leone Mexican stand-off scene. Fata-fata-fata and it's over. People find that entertaining and that's okay but the best part about a Sergio Leone Mexican stand-off is the slow, patient build up and the heightening of tension by Ennio Morricone's haunting background score. But one has to realize that it is mentally taxing to watch it everyday. Many times one just needs to decompress. Hence, T20. It is the equivalent of a Chuck Lorre sitcom: absolutely no thought required, 20-22 mins of some canned laughter, go to bed.

His 2 most famous sitcoms of this century: Two & a Half Men & Big Bang Theory have collectively run for an incredible 541 episodes. The former was at least tolerably chuckle-worthy till the half man was cute but later on it was plain unfunny. Yet it kept running and running. Even after its star got fired, it ran for, I dunno, 100 episodes. A star recast generally is the death knell of a sitcom and yet this one ran for nearly twice as a long as Arrested Development! An incredible feat of unfunny endurance. 

Take the other one: Big Bang Theory. See this "joke":

Howard Wolowitz : [after everyone cheers for him and his team design going to space]  It gets better! Someone has to go up with the telescope as a payload specialist, and guess who that someone is!

Sheldon Cooper : Mohammed Lee.

[everyone's looking confused]

Howard Wolowitz : Who's Mohammed Lee?

Sheldon Cooper : Mohammed is the most common first name in the world, and Lee the most common surname. As I didn't know the answer, I thought that gave me a mathematical edge.

This guy, Sheldon Cooper, is supposed to be the smartest man on the planet and he doesn't know Mutual Exclusivity in Probability. The "joke" could have juuuuuuust made sense in a general party or setting where there are "commoners" but this is among fellow nerds. Yet I'm not thinking about this when the setup/punchline occurs. The canned laugh behind tells me to laugh and I laugh. On the other end of the spectrum, take this brilliant setup and joke in Arrested Development:

Lucille: How's my son?

Literal Doctor: He's going to be alright.

[Everyone is relieved]

Literal Doctor: That's a great attitude. I've gotta tell you. If I was getting this news, I dunno that I'd take it this well.

Lucille: But...you said he was alright?

Literal Doctor: Yes. He's lost his left hand, so he's going to be all right.

This is such an ingeniously written sequence of events. When I saw it for the first time, I guffawed. Arrested ran for a grand total of 3 seasons and 53 episodes in its original run on FOX. Timely reminder that 2.5 Men ran for EIGHTY FIVE episodes after its star, Charlie Sheen, was fired. It's a different matter that Arrested's quality suffered in the later seasons but originally it was an amazingly well written sitcom with its call backs & foreshadowing and yet it never found an audience. Why? Cos people are too tired to spend their minds on what's happening. Like Kit Ramsey explains:

That's too much for the audience to think about. They have to know the guy's name is Cliff, that he's on a cliff, and that Cliff and cliff are the same. It's too cerebral. We're trying to make a movie here, not a film.

Take the Lord's test a few weeks ago. At the start of the day England were the favourites. The Indian tail broke a habit of a lifetime under Kohli and kept wigging and wagging. England then had to bat out two sessions on a fairly good wicket. The all-time great Indian attack reduced the home team to 90/7 with more than 20 overs left. Ollie Robinson resisted and resisted and took the match to the last hour with Jos Buttler for company. With less than 10 overs to go, Bumrah struck with an absolute peach of a slower ball. What was "peachier" was how he setup the dismissal with a mixture of short and full balls. Pure genius.

Why would or should one care about it? Only the wicket matters. IPL, and by extension, T20 takes this out of the equation. Wicket falls or six is hit and we can all go home. Why discuss such event within events? Booooring. Why would I care about this reference to Aleph-number in Futurama? I have to know what Aleph-nought is, I have to then cross-reference it and understand that the movie complex has infinite screens and chuckle at its impossibility. Eye-roll worthy crap. Instead just reference Dr. Who, Game of Thrones, Thundercats, Transformers, Star Trek, Star Wars all in one sentence that would make even Ranjit Fernando* blush, add a timely laugh track and I will happily laugh to my heart's content.

I finally get it. It took me years to get here but I get it: T20 is the Chuck Lorre sitcom of Cricket.

*-For those that aren't aware, Ranjit Fernando is a Sri Lankan commentator who had this incredible knack of speaking long sentences, not unlike Kannamba, without commas or full stops and would, more often than not, do it in one breath like that SPB song.