Those of you reading this in the archives won’t care, but for anyone who catches things when posted, this review was so late because due to my posting schedule it would have been Tuesday when it finally went up and I didn’t want to wait. With that….the review.
Anyone whose read enough of this site probably assumes that something like The Great Indoors would go under my radar. And usually you’d be right. I do love a good sitcom now and then but it’s not something I write about. However, I was curious about the premise; that being old versus young, with “young” being portrayed by the generation known as Millennials and some day I won’t need spell check to spell that right. This isn’t that day. I don’t know it was coincidence or sneaky on CBS’s part, but how Millennials (it doesn’t count if I just copy from earlier) are looked at by the current generation is sometimes insulting…although how they’re treated is kind of mock worthy. Yeah, I don’t get the whole “trophy just for trying” thing either. That’s what stickers are for and stickers are fun.
But I’ve seen Millennials that I’m friends with via the reviewing community complain about some of the stereotypes, and these people don’t fall under that stereotype. You know, always on their phones (and let’s face, news reports of Pokemon Go players walking off a bridge doesn’t help that impression), easily getting their feeling hurt, being lazy…it is kind of insulting. And it’s not like this is anything new. Mike Rutherford of Mike And The Mechanics once wrote “every generation blames the one before” (guess where and you might win a sticker) and while that’s true every generation also looks down on the new kids on the block (including New Kids On The Block) and you can bet that’s true for Millennials and whomever takes their place. I wonder what they’ll be called and at what point the next generation begins? Are my cousin’s kids the next generation? Are some of them Millennials? At what point does the generation gap actually start?
If you look at ads like the one above The Great Indoors seems to be poised to take that generation gap and make a comedy about it; again, nothing new. And I was wondering where that would fall? On the one hand you have The Big Bang Theory, which usually appears to be making fun of geeks, just with lovable characters. On the other, the most recent version of Survivor features Generation X going up against Millennials, and you don’t get to be on Survivor without ditching the cell phones and working your backside off. Thus comes the question of where on this scale The Great Indoors ultimately falls.
