You’re point about the harshness of audience expectations and also the success of predictability and meeting audience expectations was a good. After all, people still turn out for romantic comedies, which more or less follow the same plot structure every time, and if they don’t get that happy ending, they get pissed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining yet about Apatow. I mean the very reason I was excited about Sarah Marshall to begin with was becuse I wanted to see an Apatow comedy. I just worry (and mourn) that one day that might go away if we get too many of them.

P.S.: I think that lily-pad jumping poisonous frog analogy is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.

I guess there’s something to be said for finding your niche and sticking to it. After all, the audience is still laughing its butts off, as you said, and I think we all know that we don’t expect the Apatow movies to be gut-wrenching thrillers with Shyamalan-trademark twist endings.

Writers can’t win - too much repetition and people complain that they’re one-trick ponies; too much stylistic lily-pad-jumping and they become multi-coloured poisonous frogs that are nice to look at but that we wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

Predictability and meeting the audience’s expectation in almost any art form have proven to be formulas for success. Vonnegut’s novels all have the same basic themes, and many fans of his (myself included) feel at some level that if you’ve read one or two of his books you’ve read them all. This doesn’t mean his whole catalogue is devalued - in fact, its integrity is further cemented in the overall canon by having clear and concise messages and themes that connect each work.

So are all of Apatow’s movies the same? Probably. Would we have it any other way? Probably not.