Why sitcoms are popular

TV lineups have long been indicative of public concerns, fears, hopes, and morale. We spend time with TV—the shows are home bases to return to, as characters become friends and the viewer endures the emotional ups and downs of weekly plot twists and turns. So when TV networks revealed their fall lineups last week and gave the focus, hype, and competitive time slots to comedies rather than dramas, one thing was clear: nearly a decade after September 11th America is ready to laugh again.

The season brought about huge change in the TV industry; it was the first full season with our new, young president in office, and the public sentiment of "out with old, in with the new" meant many beloved shows come to an end. In contrast, the year's most acclaimed series— Modern Family , Community , and Glee —were the polar opposite of the dramas that they were replacing: light-hearted but smart, appealing to our emotions but never exploiting them outright.

The season will feature the same number of new comedies as last year 20 , but the networks are making funny shows the focus of their lineups in ways they haven't in years. The Big Bang Theory —a comedy about science geeks in California—will bump Survivor out of its time slot next season, and the comedy breakout hits of this year like Modern Family , Glee , and Community , along with How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men are all taking over the spots where dramas once reigned.

Indeed, looking ahead to the new additions to Fox's fall lineup, it's obvious the network's energy and money is being directed toward laughs—with shows like Running Wilde reuniting Arrested Development 's Will Arnett with writers Mitch Hurwtiz and Jim Vallely, and a buddy-cop show called The Good Guys , starring a mustache-donning Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks. NBC adds to its already stellar roster of comedies with Outsourced , a show about a call center moved to India, and Love Bites , following the lives of two girls who are the last remaining single people in their circle of friends.

And ABC has Mr. Sunshine , starring Matthew Perry, who plays a sports arena manager alongside Allison Janney. The emphasis on comedies marks a big shift after a decade of drama-dominated television. That means in contrast to telling a joke, a sitcom depends on the context in which humor is performed.

This includes either utterances that proceed or follow the given utterance or the non-linguistic environment Attardo In professional humor the communications as well as the characters are fictional. Most television programs use a standardized storytelling format having about three little stories which occur parallel.

Mainly, there is one major story and two minor ones. This multilayered concept serves to make the sitcom more interesting and versatile. Each of the stories is based around a group of characters. The beginning introduces the thematic context, including a problem, a difficult decision, or any sort of action.

The next section, the middle, contains an escalation, obstacles and sometimes various misunderstandings which is supposed to increase the tension of the show. In the end, everything is solved and everybody is more or less happy.

Even though, surprise is an important and desirable element of comedy, quite often the end is fairly predictable [1]. Moreover, almost every sitcom starts with a short teaser. Subsequent to the final scene and the credits, comes a so called tag. It is about one minute long and can be seen as the final scene after the final scene Mack Holzer calls this the signet of the respective episode Furthermore, the characters of a sitcom are very important for good comedy.

A sitcom depends on traditional stereotypes and repeated happenings or jokes like running gags because the audience needs to identify with the characters and the show in order to follow it continuously. Knowing the background of the characters also supports that we identify with them, that we like them and suffer with them.

Irina Wamsler Author. Add to cart. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction 1. The history of sitcoms 2. Characteristics of sitcoms 2. Strands and stacks 2. Canned laughter 3. I got addicted to the warmth, and then I got addicted to just feeling good about myself.

Lucy, 28, from London, feels the same about Gilmore Girls. The kooky comedy-drama never drew sky-high ratings when it aired on US cable TV between and , but it has become a huge hit in the streaming era. Sometimes, she has it on in the background while she does housework or lets Netflix autoplay her to sleep.

Now that we can consume series at our own pace, our tolerance for convoluted narrative arcs, enormous casts and season-long digressions has increased hugely.

But while dinner party chat still centres on Russian Doll and Big Little Lies, platforms are increasingly thinking about the other stuff: the chewing-gum TV, the long-tail TV, the shows that vaguely brighten up the room.

That could be a random episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that turns into a weekend-long binge, or it may be mids cookery flotsam, middlebrow property porn or makeover TV detritus. Tonnage is increasingly where the platforms are focusing their algorithms and cash as the attention wars escalate.

Netflix is likely to lose Friends and the US version of The Office — a combined plus episodes of non-event TV — as WarnerMedia and NBC, their owners, launch their own streaming platforms at some point in the next couple of years. But, although audiences come for the shiny new stuff, they stay for the old reliables such as Seinfeld, over which there is a bidding war.

Ball reckons Netflix would have achieved similar levels of success with or without Friends — but he stresses that Netflix is popular for precisely the same reasons that Friends is popular.

A semi-forgotten series such as Frasier, meanwhile, can find new life in the streaming era as a meme trove. All this presents an additional challenge to the traditional channels, as the new Ofcom statistics reveal.