The Sitcom

For roughly the past five years we’ve been warned that the end of the traditional sitcom is nigh. The mid-2000s saw the final episodes of three long-running sitcoms: Friends and Frasier in 2004, and Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005. These were traditional, multi-camera sitcoms with decade-long runs. Will and Grace also ended an eight-year run in 2006. These were sad times for dedicated fans of the shows and for the networks for whom they had been ratings winners, but they probably wouldn’t have provoked whispers of the Demise of the Sitcom without the premiere in 2005 of The Office.

A little background: the word sitcom comes from “situation comedy.” The sitcom is a half-hour show that aims to be funny. Famous examples include I Love Lucy, Cheers, The Wonder Years, Seinfeld, and the shows mentioned in the first paragraph. Traditional sitcoms are three-camera (now multi-camera) sitcoms. This means several cameras are filming each take of the scene at the same time from different angles. In a movie or a television drama, there would only be one camera, and the scene would be shot many times from multiple angles.

One of the reasons the sitcom uses multiple cameras is because they have been traditionally filmed in front of a “live studio audience.” Because of this, sitcoms are also often contained to a few familiar sets, none of which are fully closed. The fourth wall of each set has the cameras and the audience. This is why you’ll always see the set from the same direction each time—the last wall doesn’t exist. Traditional sitcoms also have a laugh track. (These traits describe the average sitcom; obviously, there are some exceptions.)

The Office, an American remake of a British show, broke the mold of the traditional sitcom and became very popular. Had it only done one of those two things, it wouldn't have been a problem. The Office is an example of a single-camera sitcom. It follows the filming structure of a movie or television drama rather than a traditional sitcom. It films without a studio audience and airs without a laugh track. It defied the rules of Hollywood, but it worked.

So naturally, the industry decided it needed to change the rules. Traditional multi-camera sitcoms became less common, and single-camera sitcoms were more likely to be produced. People started saying the End of the Sitcom was near, and new traditional sitcoms that were expected to do well were hailed as potential saviors from this terrible fate. (In 2007, this came from the uniting of Kelsey Grammar and Patricia Heaton in Back to You, but it did not bring the revival the industry hoped it would.)

Still, much as these rumors keep batting about, things in the sitcom world seem to have settled down. Five traditional sitcoms have debuted so far in the 2010-11 season so far on network television. Two single-camera sitcoms will be premiering over the next few months. It looks like, despite the rumors, the single-camera sitcom will not be killing the traditional sitcom anytime soon. Instead, they’ll just have to learn to peacefully coexist, despite all of their differences.

Which, given that that’s the distilled plot of many sitcoms, is rather fitting.

Cliffhangers

TV is one of the few forms of narrative media that can pull off the cliffhanger with any frequency. Movies rarely know about their sequels ahead of time, and books will use cliffhangers for chapters more often than at the end of the book. Television loves cliffhangers, however, because networks love ratings, and cliffhangers make people want to watch the next episode to find out what happens. And that’s what TV is all about—getting you to watch the next episode.

There are three times when cliffhangers normally occur in television series (not including the “act out”—the “something shocking” that happens before a commercial to keep you from changing the channel). Rarely, a series will decide to end every episode with a cliffhanger. Alias did this for much of its first season; each episode ended with Sydney in some dangerous situation. However, “main character in peril” is not highly effective as cliffhangers go; it will rarely leave the audience with the feeling of “what’s going to happen now?", which is the most powerful form of cliffhanger. Instead, the audience focuses on the how; okay, we know the protagonist is going to get out of this, but how are they going to do so? It’s a cliffhanger with less intensity, and can be potentially dangerous if the audience thinks the showrunners are trying to play them. Generally, viewers like to think that the people who write the shows they love are smart, but not that the people who write the shows they love think they’re stupid.

Occasionally, a show will have a two-parter (or multi-parter), and these can also end in cliffhangers. A lot of times these are also less intense cliffhangers, though occasionally characters will be thrown into peril. The majority of the time, something about that episode’s storyline will be revealed at the end of the episode, throwing what we as the audience know into disarray.

The most common time for cliffhangers, however, is the season finale. TV lives off of buzz, and if you can get your viewers talking for the rest of the hiatus about what’s going to happen, you’ve kept them thinking about the show, and they’re more likely to watch it when it returns. This is also one of the few times when a “main character in peril” cliffhanger can work; few major cast overhauls happen midseason, but they can happen at the end of one. Of course, in the age of internet spoilers, this is a lot less worrisome than it used to be—viewers can confirm whether or not the actor is signed on for subsequent seasons with a quick search.

The most famous cliffhanger of all time is “Who Shot JR?” of Dallas. The season ended with someone shooting J.R. Ewing, one of Dallas' main characters. The next season’s premiere is still the third-watched episode of any show in number of viewers (beaten only by a Super Bowl and the M*A*S*H series finale). One of my favorite pieces of TV trivia is that a session of Turkish parliament was apparently suspended so that members could go home and watch the premiere.

And when a TV show has enough pull that it is influencing the workings of foreign governments… well, then you know the cliffhanger is doing its job.

Nostalgia Television

There was an interesting trend in television for most of its history, which I’ll be terming “Nostalgia Television”—television series set in the past. Specifically, two decades in the past. There are several highly successful high-profile shows set roughly twenty years before they actually aired.

The 1970s began the trend with two little shows in 1974: M*A*S*H and Happy Days. Both lasted at least a decade and became television classics; the final episode of M*A*S*H is still the most-watched episode of any television series ever. Both shows, despite airing in the 1970s, took place during the 1950s. During its run, Happy Days moved into the 1960s, but M*A*S*H never did, confined to the 1950s by its setting in the Korean War.

In the 1980s, there was The Wonder Years, in addition to the final seasons of Happy Days, set in the 1960s. The 1990s gave us That 70s Show. All had incredible longevity for television shows, and were major hits with audiences.

Then came the 2000s, and Nostalgia Television stopped working for the networks. There were three shows that premiered early on in the decade, attempting to capitalize on setting things in the 1980s. That 80s Show, Do Over, and That Was Then (the latter being an hour long, as compared to all previous Nostalgia TV Shows, which were half-hour shows) all flopped miserably.

There are a lot of reasons this switchover could have happened. Do Over and That Was ThenThat Was Then  9/11 made the country a lot more about the here-and-now. From 2001-2005, networks rarely debuted sci-fi/fantasy shows, and if they did, they were mostly unsuccessful (with the 2004 exception of Lost).  weren’t just shows about the 80s, they were shows about men being sent back to inhabit the bodies of their younger selves (in the 80s) to not remake the same mistakes. ignored the rule of its predecessors in Nostalgia Television by making an hour-long drama instead of a half-hour comedy.

Or maybe people just really hated the 80s.

American Dreams was the closest early-2000s show to Nostalgia Television, but it didn’t follow the two-decade rule, and it was always a low performer in its time slot. It lasted three seasons, none of which made the top 50 for ratings, and each season declined in ratings and episode orders.

It’s only recently that some form of Nostalgia Television has succeeded, but it’s not on a basic network and it also doesn’t follow the same pattern of a two-decade gap. Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, is a gold mine for AMC (at least as far as Emmy’s go). While it’s not twenty years and it’s not a sitcom, Mad Men does give the glimmer of hope that Nostalgia Television could return to your TV. It’s only 2011; there’s a lot of time left for a show set in the 90s to sweep us all off our feet.

Show Structure: Episodic vs. Arc

There are two basic structures of television (and this is being very broad): the episodic structure and the arc structure. Historically, sitcoms tend to be more episodic, and hour-long dramas are more likely to fall under the "arc" umbrella. This is shaken up every once in a while: Law and Order is distinctly episodic, while How I Met Your Mother definitely has an arc structure.

Television structure definitely falls on a spectrum from episodic to arc, with shows exhibiting each to varying degrees. On the furthest end of episodic, you have shows that have more of a recurring theme than anything else—including cast. The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone fall under this heading.

Episodic shows can be described as shows in which the episodes are, for the most part, self-contained. You don’t have to watch every episode, or watch it entirely in order, for the show to make sense or be enjoyable. You can miss an episode here or there, and you won’t be completely lost. You probably shouldn’t mix up episodes from different seasons, and I’m not saying episodic shows can’t have storylines that extend beyond a single episode. Most of the time, though, if you forget to watch or switch a few episodes around, it won’t make a huge difference.

Probably the farthest on the arc end of the spectrum is the season/series-long plot arc. This is often a mystery, exemplified in shows like Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars. The mystery is one of the easier plot arcs to manage, because you can have a contained plot within each episode while still inching forward on the overarching plot with clues and new discoveries.

Somewhere in the middle is the character arc. The showrunners may know where the character or characters are going throughout the season, but if you miss an episode or two, you’re probably not going to be super-confused. A lot of episodic shows will still have a character arc, but it’s less overt than “Oh look, another clue!” and therefore the episodes are more self-contained.

Shows that are arc-heavy are high-risk, high-reward for networks. Chances are, if the viewer gets invested, they’re likely to continue watching with frequency. All other things being equal (like, for example, quality), arc shows tend to be good at retaining audience. On the other hand, the more complex the plot arc, the less likely the show is to gain viewers. It’s a balancing act, and arc-heavy shows that don’t hit the ground running are often quickly canceled. Viewers have begun to take this to heart, and many won’t start watching an arc show until it appears like it will be around for a while. Shows with ongoing plot arcs often hurt the most when they’re canceled, because there are so many dangling plot threads. Arc shows are dangerous for networks and viewers, but when they work out (like Lost), they work out amazingly well.*

*Until 50% of your audience is dissatisfied with your ending. But no one's perfect.