The great American sitcom! With its couches and kitchens, its upstage stairs and stage right doors. So central to our culture and so often mocked – made the emblem of television at its least imaginative and most imitative, at its tritest and tiredest. Witlessness presented as wit.
There is some truth in it; examples, at any rate, may be found to confirm one’s worst opinion of the form. And yet the big intellectual content bidding wars of the streaming age have been over comedies – “Friends,” “The Office,” “Seinfeld.” They leave an impression as great or greater than the Quality Dramas upon which the reputation of Titanium Age television rests. It isn’t that life can’t be gritty or hard, but TV rarely pictures the gritty hard lives people actually lead. But we see ourselves in sitcoms and as a bonus, laugh.
In the pandemic year, they have amazingly kept coming, even as the pandemic itself is not pictured in them or is briefly acknowledged as a thing that’s over. Indeed, we have fallen behind in covering them – so let’s look at several that have recently premiered or are about to. All but one are shot old-school, multicamera, laugh-tracked, live-audience style. All but one are explicitly about family and the other works as a metaphor for it.
Situation comedies typically begin at a moment of change. A new job, a new town, a new job in a new town. An old job in the hometown. An oil strike, a shipwreck. A death, a divorce. A runaway bride joins her friend and her friend’s friends in New York; a runaway bride moves in with her gay best friend in New York; a fussy divorced man moves in with his messy divorced friend in New York. But these are just prologues to be forgotten as the routine that makes sitcoms feel like life takes over. By the second episode of “Mary Tyler Moore,” Mary Richards might as well have been working at WJM for a year.