Yeah, "Let's Go to the Mall" justifies its existence even if nothing else funny ever happened on the show.

Great. I am totally earwormed now.

Everybody, come and play!
Throw every last care away!
Let's go to the mall! Today

My understanding is that single camera shoots multiple angles by doing the scenes over and over again,and moving the camera and then edits the takes, while multi camera set ups put more than one (stationary) camera and then just shoot all the angles at once.

Hey, apparently Cobie Smulders just got hitched to her BF / baby-daddy this past weekend: [link]

I don't recognize his name but... ZOMG is that the evil sweater-vested Glee club leader from "Regional Holiday Music"?? I think it is!

The fact that I have some residual fondness for HIMYM of yore does not mean that I am not wishing for Ted to meet and marry the freakin' mother already so that Smulders can go off and be in the new SHIELD the TV show.

Here is my understanding: single-camera vs. multi camera.

Multi-camera shows are almost always sitcoms (or, I suppose, talk shows. When Jon Stewart says "meet me at camera 3" and turns and is once again facing a camera, that is because they do multi-camera filming). They usually film in front of an audience. Multiple cameras are filming each take, so it's imperative that they not get in each other's way. This tends to lead to fairly distinctive shooting and blocking styles that I can't explain well. Friends was multi-camera, as is HIMYM.

Single-camera shows look like dramas, since they set up each shot for a particular camera. There is no live audience, so, if the producers want to cue "this is funny" they have to use a laugh track (think Sports Night). Every time the angle switches, you're seeing a different take/performances (not necessarily the case with a multi-camera show). Again, it's hard for me to verbalize the difference, but a quick check would be if there is one wall of every regularly-used location that you never, ever see, then it's probably a multi-camera show.

The impact of single camera, for me, is that the shot is wherever the director and the dop could fit the camera for that shot. With multi-camera, there's a fixed set of angles and framing to work with.

Even though there are only so many ways to film 7 people around a table and the Dean coming in over Jeff's shoulder, you can see the variety in the lack of limitation pretty much everywhere else.

Frankly, I kind of find Ted boring

I read this thinking you meant Ted Crisp, and was horrified. Utterly horrified!

I feel like HIMYM tried hard to be innovative with jumping around in time and unreliable narration and whatnot, but that the story they are telling with all that is actually pretty conventional and even tedious. Most of the characters - everyone except Marshall, probably - have eroded a great deal of any fondness I might have had for them. But I'll probably keep watching because Monday at 7 is a time when I'd like to be able to turn on the TV and have something be there.

Oh, just to clarify, I stopped watching several seasons ago. I may try to catch up on this re-watch, but I lost interest big time somewhere in Season 4, I want to say. The show was definitely feeling conventional/tedious by that point.

A nice profile on Mindy Kaling from The New Yorker: [link]

I find Kaling generally delightful and am looking forward to her show. The trailer looks like the show would have some watch-from-the-hall moments, but hey, I watched The Office for 4 years.

Oh, hey, mother dying of cancer alert. Maybe I'll read the rest of it later.

I can't work out if it's good or bad that there's so much visibility for her show, but relatively little explanation. Raising Hope got me with its billboards, and with Plimpton and Dillahunt--but the billboards looked like the premise might need a look see.

I am getting zero premise from The Mindy Project--which is fine, since I love her to itty bitty bits based on nothing more than her performance in No Strings Attached. Since I'm not interested in The Office, I stuck to reading stuff about her, and she just seems cool. The snippets from her book got enough of my interest that it's on my Nook, although I'm nowhere near it yet.

I do like the discussion of minority in the bit of the article I did read. It's cool to see someone point out how white stuff is, but she doesn't sound like she's going to be so militant that she's just preaching to the choir.

I do hope it's the sort of thing where people go "Hey! Did I just watch a show about not just a woman, but an Indian descent woman? I don't remember doing that before..."

Clearly she needs a review snippet saying something like "I haven't laughed this hard since Beckham bent it!" --Narrowminded Reviewer