Sitcoms in Crisis: Do We Expect Too Much of Them?

What should we expect from situation comedies these days? Must they make us laugh out loud, or is it enough simply to be amused or charmed or made to smile while watching?

This is a question that must be addressed, because the new comedy series on the networks this fall are doing little to alter the perception that the sitcom is dying, if not dead.

In yet another indication of how dire the situation has become, two of the six new series included last week in a poll on JackMyers.com that asked readers to indicate which new comedies they were most excited about barely registered with respondents. We’re keeping the poll up for another week, but those two programs, ABC’s Carpoolers and The CW’s Aliens in America, are being eliminated due to a clear lack of interest. ABC’s Samantha Who?, which debuted last night and is one of the better new comedies of the fall, has been added. CBS’ appealing The Big Bang Theory is currently in the lead. Showtime’s Californication, Fox’ Back to You and ABC’s Cavemen are still competitive. (You can find the poll and instant ongoing results on our home page.)

Those of us who grew up watching the sitcoms of the Sixties and Seventies, from the memorably silly (The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Get Smart, Bewitched, The Munsters, Happy Days, Three’s Company, Laverne & Shirley, Welcome Back Kotter) to the unforgettably sublime (All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, Sanford and Son, Rhoda, Maude, Taxi) can only sit back and wonder what in the world went wrong with this most cherished form of television entertainment. How did a genre that gave us such enduring staples of popular culture as I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver way back in the Fifties and, more recently, the likes of Cheers, The Golden Girls, Family Ties, Murphy Brown, Designing Women, Newhart, Seinfeld, Fraiser, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, Malcolm in the Middle and Will & Grace go so tragically and perhaps irreversibly wrong?

I have a theory about this. I think the forty-plus-year-old foundation of situation comedy as we always knew it began to crumble in the late-Nineties under pressure from two crushing forces: The outsize success of Friends (the first mega-hit sitcom about single young people in their twenties) and the power at the time of the youth-targeted WB (which ultimately proved to be not very powerful after all). With Friends and WB shows dominating headlines and feature stories, especially those written by twenty-something journalists, and being embraced by equally young media planners on Madison Avenue and junior agents in Hollywood, established comedy writers and producers over the age of thirty-five were suddenly hurried out to pasture. A youth-quake had begun, and those “grownups” who did not altogether fall out of favor were made to act and write like people half their age. A twenty-five-year-old novice could spend one year on the writing staff of Friends and suddenly land a multi-sitcom deal, not because he or she wrote some of the best comedy to hit television in years and paid his or her dues, but because he or she was twenty-five years old. It has been downhill for the sitcom ever since, the damage so severe that the genre has yet to repair itself.

Which brings me to this season. I don’t know how old the various creators and writers of Aliens in America, The Big Bang Theory, Cavemen, Carpoolers, Back to You and Samantha Who? are, but I do know that none of them have turned out a final product that deserves to be included on a list with any of the comedies mentioned two paragraphs above this one, or those mentioned below.

Television comedy is not dead. There are many fine examples of the single-camera comedy forever popularized by the much-missed Sex and the City on network schedules today, including My Name is Earl, The Office and 30 Rock on NBC; Everybody Hates Chris on The CW; Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, and Weeds on Showtime. Its sniggering sex jokes can be tiresome, but its first-rate cast keeps the traditional three-camera sitcom Two and a Half Men in fine form. Desperate Housewives, Monk, and Ugly Betty are fresh and funny. All three are at the forefront of a relatively new sixty-minute comedy and drama hybrid sometimes known as the dramedy. Psych, another hour-long comedy, is nothing but fun.