Robert David Sullivan

A backlash against single-camera sitcoms?

Salon's Kartina Richardson doesn't like this season's live-audience sitcoms (few critics do), but she's hoping for a rejuvenation of the format:

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

Perhaps there will be a "skipped generation" phenomenon in which the children of Arrested Development fans prefer the 1970s-style comedies of their grandparents' era. Right now I watch mostly single-camera sitcoms, but I miss the high-wire acting in shows like All in the Family. (It's no spoiler that multi-camera shows will make up most of my Top 100 episodes list.) One barrier to a comeback, however, is that even cable networks seem loath to cast actors with lots of theatrical experience as leads in any kind of programming. They just don't look as sexy blowing air kisses as Whitney Cummings does.

NOTE: I initially wrote  "grandmother effect" to refer to the phenomenon of people adopting their grandparents' tastes in music, clothing, baby names, etc., either as a form of rebellion against their parents or just an a desire to be different. But when I looked it up, the phrase means something quite different. So is there a phrase that describes what I'm talking about, or did I imagine the whole thing? 

UPDATE: The groundswell for a return to decently written multi-camera sitcoms continues with the A.V. Club's Joel Keller, who contributed to a forum on "magic pop-culture wishes":

When a show like Frasier or Everybody Loves Raymond comes along, the comedy seems so natural and effortless that it’s easy to forget the show is being done in front of an audience. Thanks to CBS, TV Land, and—surprisingly—Disney and Nick, the format is far from dead. But with more writers coming up who were “raised” on web shorts, Adult Swim, and single-camera shows like The Office, the legions who were students of the multi-camera form are starting to disappear.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 95: "Gracie Writes About Silky Thompson," George Burns and Gracie Allen Show

95. "Gracie Writes About Silky Thompson," The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1952)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here. 

In my Typology of Stupid Sitcom Characters, I described Gracie Allen as the prototype for the naif, who "takes everything at face value and can't comprehend how anyone else can act with less than pure motives. Her (or, less often, his) anti-kryptonite is a surprisingly tough resolve that keeps her out of real harm and absolves us of any guilt at laughing at her stupidity." (Other examples include Rose on The Golden Girls, Woody on Cheers, and Andy on Parks and Recreation.)

In Gracie's case, the English language is both a shield and a weapon. Poet Lloyd Schwartz, who titled one of his collections  Goodnight, Gracie, cites her as a muse: “I found her slippery use of words, taking them more literally than intended, hilarious and irresistable and mind bending.”

One example, used in both the radio and TV versions of Burns and Allen:

George: Grace, those are beautiful flowers. Where did they come from?
Gracie: Don't you remember, George? You said that if I went to visit Clara Bagley in the hospital I should be sure to take her flowers. So, when she wasn't looking, I did.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 96: "Showdown (Part II)," Cheers

96. "Showdown (Part II)," Cheers (1983)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here. 

"Showdown" is a landmark episode for a number of reasons. It's the prototype for the season-ending cliffhanger in sitcoms (as opposed to dramas like Dallas). It's also an early example of a sitcom "going there" — i.e., changing the relationship of its principals (in this case, bar owner Sam and overeducated waitress Diane) in an irrevocable fashion. Previously, there was a near-universal skittishness about writing sitcoms into a corner (Rhoda's wedding was regarded as a cautionary tale), but since Cheers ended its first season with a shippers' wish-fulfillment episode, viewers have felt entitled to complain when a TV series drags out the "will they or won't they" question for too long.

(Cheers might have been liberated by its atrocious ratings during its first season, and the prospect of a short run might have made a Hail Mary pass like "Showdown" more attractive — in the same way that underdog Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate the next year. Whatever the intent of the producers, I wonder whether a better reception for Cheers' first season might caused NBC to argue against changes, giving us a show more like Who's the Boss? or the Niles-and-Daphne episodes of Frasier.)

More excitingly, "Showdown" also gives us a romantic relationship that's more about lust and one-upsmanship than about the love we've seen displayed between the Ricardos, Petries, and even the Bunkers on other sitcoms. A high-minded intepretation is that the pair are engaged in a clash of philosophies as defined by Nietzsche, with Diane representing rational Apollo and Sam making the case for hedonistic Dionysus. Diane probably sees things this way in her more optimistic moments.

"Don't you think it's odd?"

Yesterday I suggested that "Guy Love," from the Scrubs musical episode, could serve as a love theme for best buds in other sitcoms. Turns out that Felix and Oscar already have one.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 97: "My Musical," Scrubs

97. "My Musical," Scrubs (2007)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here. 

Back in the introduction to this project, I quoted TV critic Jaime Weinman: "All the things that theatre did to make scenery more fluid and less literal have really never become a part of theatre-style sitcom television." Single-camera sitcoms, in contrast, have reveled in their freedom from the literal, to the point that it can be hard to tell when we're watching something "real" on a show like 30 Rock and when we're spending a few seconds in a character's imagination. 

It was inevitable (and I mean that in a good way) that a single-camera sitcom would attempt a full-episode musical after new Broadway shows like Avenue Q started attracting younger audiences. (See a couple of musical moments from multicamera sitcoms at the end of this post.) When the hospital sitcom Scrubs took on the challenge, it even hired Avenue Q composers Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez as part of the team to come up with 10 original songs for the episode.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 98: "Lucy and the Loving Cup," I Love Lucy

98. "Lucy and the Loving Cup," I Love Lucy (1957)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here. 

Multi-camera sitcoms aren’t able to do “odyssey” episodes too often, as stories about characters surmounting various obstacles to get home (or anywhere) are pretty difficult to stage. But I Love Lucy was up to the challenge here, contriving to give its protagonist temporary blindness and then stranding her on the New York City subway.

In his classic book Classic Sitcoms (now posted entirely online), Vince Waldron writes that in the best I Love Lucy scripts, "a perfectly ordinary situation — [such as] packing the family car — soon blossoms, in small, logical steps, to heights of absurdity."

The difficulty of coming up with those small, logical steps is the reason that there have been so few successful sitcoms in the Lucy mode, despite its huge popularity. (Well, that and the difficulty of finding a performer who can give an impeccable comic performance even when her head is completely hidden.) I quite like the elegant way Lucy's writers get that loving cup stuck on her head at the beginning of this episode. She doesn't fall down the stairs while carrying it, and it doesn't fall from a window onto her noggin. No, she deliberately wedges it on, wearing it as a hat to get back at Ricky for making fun of her haberdashery. But then she can't get it off, Ethel suggests the subway as the quickest way to get to a silversmith who's about to close up shop, the girls get separated in the crowd...

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 99: "Opie's Ill-Gotten Gain," The Andy Griffith Show

99. "Opie's Ill-Gotten Gain," The Andy Griffith Show (1963)

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here and an introduction to the project is here. 

There aren't a lot of episodes from the 1960s on this list, and I think a lot of sitcoms popular in that decade (The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island, Family Affair) will fade from memory as they no longer serve as nostalgia fetishes for Baby Boomers. One series that's likely to hang on is The Andy Griffith Show, partly because of its memorable characters but also because of its high production values. Instead of running the same snatches of incidental music over and over, the producers commissioned original music as needed, and in a wide range of styles. (You can hear some examples on this CD, though it stresses country music more than the show actually did.) And TAGS had some effective cinematography; surely, one reason the color episodes are not as well-liked is their flat look compared with the more stylized black-and-white episodes.

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time, No. 100: "Divided We Stand," Steptoe and Son

100. “Divided We Stand,” Steptoe and Son (1972)

A list of the episodes revealed so far is here and an introduction to the Top 100 project is here. 

The inspiration for America’s Sanford and Son, this British show about junk dealers started in the early 1960s and set the template for the “odd couple” sitcom in which two men are trapped in a relationship that perpetually swings between love and hate. I say “two men” because female roommates on sitcoms, like Laverne and Shirley, almost never seem to resent living with each other. But no matter how luxurious the surroundings, male roommates in sitcom usually act as if they’re sharing a prison cell.

Case in point: In “Divided We Stand,” ambitious Harold is going crazy from sharing quarters with his lazy, cheap father, Albert, whose idea of redecorating the house includes stitching together fabric samples to make a free carpet. "I don't mind the place looking rotten when it doesn't cost nothing," he reasons. (Wilfred Brambell, who plays Albert, was best known in America for playing Paul McCartney's grandfather in A Hard Day's Night.)

Top 100 sitcom episodes of all time: Introduction

Welcome to the “100 Best Sitcom Episodes of All Time,” a countdown for winter 2012. Each episode will get a separate blog post, counting backward toward No. 1.  A list of the programs revealed so far is here.

When I decided to make a “best sitcom episodes” list last year, I had two goals in mind. One was to make the case for the sitcom as an art form to people who were unfamiliar or dismissive of it. The second was to contribute to the making of a canon, or a consensus set of episodes that critics should be familiar with so that we have some shared points of reference.

In both cases, I was also pushing back against the current assumption that the only way to watch a TV series is to start at the beginning — and then bail out if the first couple of episodes don’t grab you. (The A.V. Club's Noel Murray took issue with this foolish rule of TV etiquette last year.) Sitcoms in particular tend to get better in their second seasons, after the cast and writers have figured out how they best work together (like a sports team or repertory theater company), so it’s not a bad idea to start with season two, then go back to the season one to see how the show evolved.

I didn’t think much of the timing of my project, other than last fall's 60th anniversary of the first major hit sitcom, I Love Lucy. (It was preceded by more primitive attempts, such as The Goldbergs, pictured above. Here's a video of an opening segment, which is basically an infomercial for the sponsor.)

But lately there’s been a serious discussion about whether the sitcom is about to go extinct. Neil Genzlinger declared the “End of Comedy,” at least in sitcom format, last fall in the New York Times. His evidence was the lazy recycling of jokes on shows like New Girl and Up All Night: “comedic time has shrunk and comedic tone has degenerated; shows don’t want to risk building their humor slowly or subtly because they’re afraid audiences have already seen too many dumb-dad or balky-toaster bits and will grow impatient.” 

Little Footprint, USA: states where it's not unusual for your ceiling to be someone else's floor

Lately I've been acutely aware of living in an apartment building, thanks to the noise (some of it, alas, my own) and a number of fire alarms going off in the middle of the night. But I still prefer communal living to having to worry about gophers in the driveway and snow on the roof. And most of my friends live in multi-family dwellings -- apartments, condos, and two-to-three-family starter homes that allow you to collect rent to go toward paying the mortgage. 

A little more than one-third of all residents in Massachusetts live in multi-unit housing, second only to New York (see all the states' data after the jump). But what's common here is pretty weird in the rest of the US. Only 20% of all Americans live in multi-unit housing, and the number is as low as 8% in West Virginia. And my guess is, when that number is lower than the poverty rate (which is 18% of the entire population in West Virginia, compared with 15% nationally and 11% in Massachusetts), pretty much everyone with shared roofs are poor. Which must make the idea of voluntarily living above or below other people seem even weirder.

Apartment dwellers are commonplace in TV sitcoms, but American politics has a bias toward homeowners (think of the tax deduction for mortgages). The map above shows an extremely theoretical Electoral College majority of states with the highest shares of people living in multi-unit housing. What's interesting is that Florida and Texas are more urban, by this measure, than the older industrial states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.