I think Alan Alda expresses what I was trying to say yesterday about shows like 30 Rock and Community. The appeal to these shows is the sense of meta-awareness by both the characters and the audience that these people could not be real. Most shows are concerned with the illusion of reality and real life, but Community and 30 Rock are not. Each character represents the extreme version of the person they are trying to portray. For example, to some degree Jack Donaghy represents what an Irish-Catholic businessman is like. The scenes with him and his mother where they both love and hate each other reminds me of my grandfather and his mother, but an extreme version of them. Basically, each show removes the need for illusion that Manovich talked about in Chapter 4 in Language of New Media. We don't have to think of these characters in the real world because they could not exist in the real world. That allows the constant genre manipulation and cultural references.

So, how does this work for semiotics? These shows are completely up for interpretation. The author is essentially irrelevant to the show structure. The jokes are written in a way where you have to get what the references to pop culture and culture in general and if you don't too bad. This means that the shows can be analyzed in any style the audience chooses because they are an active part of what makes the show work. So, the meaning extracted can be unique to the viewer, which as Mr. Alda suggests is a new style of comedy. That is why I reference these shows all the time in class. Still, I see the whole world as open to interpretation. If you would prefer I can bring up other topics. I just choose TV most of the time because as Joshua pointed out "It's easy". That and I've noticed that since I moved here people don't get a lot of the references I make to people and places in New England, but TV is universal.