Today’s NY Times has an article about the death of the sitcom. This is the kind of article that could write itself every few years. We’ve had periodic deaths of the sitcom and deaths of the dramatic one-hour. Every entertainment rag toots about this every so often—Tamar laughed about Entertainment Weekly’s eulogy to the sitcom not too long ago.
But this time, writer Bill Carter insists, it’s really really different:
Inside the offices of television comedy writers last week nobody was laughing.
For good reason. Amid the hoopla of last week’s presentations to advertisers of the broadcast networks’ prime-time lineups for the fall, it became strikingly clear that the network situation comedy was in as bad a state as it has been in more than 20 years.
It is not just that “Friends” and “Frasier” have left their weekly homes. The trend across all of network television is sharply away from comedy as a staple of entertainment programming, pushed aside by an audience bored by a tired sitcom format, changing industry economics and the rise of reality shows.
No network added to its comedy total in the fall schedules announced last week, one season after ABC and CBS added to their comedy totals. And two networks, ABC and in particular NBC, cut back.
NBC, which built its dominance in network ratings on the backs of hit comedies like “Cheers,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends” (and which at one point in the late 1990’s had 16 half-hour comedies on its schedule), will have only four comedies in its lineup next fall. That total will be NBC’s fewest since 1980, when it had only two, “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”
The impact throughout Hollywood is already profound. “In the comedy writers’ community, it’s pure panic,” said Sue Naegle, one of the heads of the television department for United Talent Agency, which employs scores of comedy writers and performers. She and agents from several other agencies said about 150 comedy writers would be out of work this fall. Those still working, they added, would be making much less money.
The article ascribes blame to the current sitcom drought to:
- the expense of running a sitcom versus a reality show and
- the tried-and-true sitcom format of “setup/joke and four-to-six characters sitting around a sofa on a Hollywood sound stage.”
How true. God knows I had said often enough that I cannot stand sitcoms, which require people to act like idiots and have 22 minute conflicts based on some stupid exaggeration or misunderstanding. And if that were all there were to sitcoms, he might have a point.
However, Bill Carter wrote this entire very long NY Times article without ever once mentioning Arrested Development, Scrubs, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. And when you stack the deck, you can come to any conclusions you want.
I cannot stand sitcoms, and yet Arrested Development is my favorite show. It contains several laugh-out-loud moments per episode, and there have been a few times when we’ve had to stop the show in order to recover from laughing. Scrubs is one of Darin’s favorite shows, and it manages to swing between the ridiculous and the sublime in a heartbeat, being both hysterical and affecting in the same scene. (If the Brendan Fraser episode from this year doesn’t win an Emmy, there is no justice. So I guess it won’t win an Emmy.) And I personally can’t stand Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I couldn’t stand Seinfeld either—and even I can tell that both shows are completely brilliant.
It’s possible to make a great comedic show. It’s just gotten a lot harder because the audience has seen thousands and thousands of hours of the stuff on their hundreds of channels, stupid. They’ve seen your stupid-ass sitcoms before with the stupid-ass one-liners and stupid-ass “Oh my gosh, Janie said WHAT?” variety of comedic setup.
It’s quite possible that neither Arrested Development nor Scrubs has caught fire because they require the viewer to have an IQ slightly larger than their resting heart rate, but both shows have rabid partisans who actively proselytize for them. (Curb Your Enthusiasm is on HBO, which could care less if you like the shows, so long as you pay your monthly fee.)
As soon as the studios worry more about making shows that we haven’t seen before that are, you know, funny and stuff, they’ll have an audience.
What the hell: they cancelled Firefly, so screw ’em.
(Slightly edited for unclear language.)
I felt the cancellation of Firefly showed a keen sense of good judgment on the part of the network. Ugh, after about five episodes I just couldn’t stand to watch that show anymore. Thoroughly unlikeable characters, and the setting rocketed my sense of disbelief into some other galaxy.
I actually liked the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise better. Not that I stuck around for the second season (or even all of the first)…
You know, after the first episode of “Firefly” I would have totally agreed with you.
The next two? Ennh.
After that, I thought they improved a lot. I told Darin it took me a while to figure out who was who and who was doing what.
When the show was cancelled, the last episode they showed was the original pilot, which Fox nixed because it was too slow. Or something.
And I said, My God! If they’d put that on first, I would have had a clue as to what was going on!!
But even the mixed up first couple of episodes were better than ST:Enterprise. I mean, come on…
You don’t see any irony in claiming that sitcoms fail because audiences are smarter than they used to, and then in the next paragraph claiming that the three current brilliant examples of the genre are not run-away-favorites because they require a smarter audience?
Good news: A Firefly movie (I think it’s called “Serenity”) is in production right now.
Bad news: It’s slated for a release in January, that dumping ground for the movies the studios deem crappiest.
Oh, and part of the problem with Firefly was that the network aired them out of order. Heck, they didn’t get around to airing the pilot until after they cancelled the show!
The three best recent sitcoms (besides Arrested Development which really needs not to be on opposite Alias and Criminal Intent) were all in the same season and all suffered the same fate: Greg the Bunny, The Tick and Andy Richter Controls the Universe. And I think they were all on Fox, if I’m not mistaken.
So they pick shows trying to do something really different with the format, then give them five minutes to catch on to the viewing public. I won’t even discuss Firefly, a show that broke my heart when it left me.
On the other hand, TV goes in waves, first comedy is dead, then drama, everyone beats their breasts and claims that it’s all ashes, ashes, and those days of yore will never be seen again. Nor will they, but everything comes around new again, eventually.
Except for TV westerns. They were right about them.
>You don’t see any irony …
Nope. I see a poor choice of words on my part. I meant smart/intelligent in one place and smart/knowledgeable/familiar with the conventions in the other. Thanks for pointing that out!
I enjoy Curb Your Enthusiasm a great deal. Which is strange as I was only a “once and awhile” watcher of Seinfeld and Costanza was probably my least favorite character (blueprinted from Larry David). It seems that amongst my friends, if you don’t like people arguing or specifically people having hour long arguements on TV…then Curb won’t be your cup of tea. As for me, watching Larry get into arguements and the “Three’s Company”-type misunderstandings…it makes my job (which I interact with people constantly) that much less annoying come Monday.
jz
I think that the death of sitcoms is real this time because of reality shows. I think it will be very hard, but not impossible, to have another great sitcom like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Friends, King of Queens, and others like Everybody Loves Raymond.
Many attempts were made, like Cashmere Mafia (which I loved but felt like it was more drama than comedy), and then quickly cancelled.
It seems the entertainment industry is having a hard time coming with new material even for movies. Thus, all the sequels and trequels and remakes. They were so desperate, we now have this LAME version of Beverly Hills 90210 sequel.