crazy how many nineties sitcoms were like "five people in an office" or "a married couple on separate armchairs" and that's...
crazy how many nineties sitcoms were like “five people in an office” or “a married couple on separate armchairs” and that’s pretty much the whole show.
Yeah, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show or WKRP in Cincinnati or All in the Family, the 90s were so weird that way.
perhaps the real question is when exactly did sitcoms die
1999, with the debut of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Then you had Survivor in 2000, the US Weakest Link and Fear Factor in 2001, Deal or No Deal in 2005. Game shows and competitive reality TV was less expensive to produce but pulled ratings anyway, the sitcom was widely considered a dead format when I arrived in screenwriting LA until 30 Rock (which, I keep reminding, was not the SNL riff out of it and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that was expected to survive)
so how do you classify Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men in that scheme?
Chuck Lorre sopping up the dregs of the three-camera tradition like a crust of bread cleaning a plate of stew. No one was trying to prove they could write in that style.
$600 million worth of dregs, well done that man!
Well OK there was Scrubs before 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother (which was mostly a Friends update with a framing device) after, has any sitcom mattered since then?
Community? Brooklyn 9-9? I mean, I recognize them at an “I’ve seen gifsets” level, maybe the issue is that’s what’s replaced “water cooler conversation”?
At least the King of Queens-era “schlub husband with an attractive wife” (I almost said “hot wife” but I guess that phrase is spoken for now) thing seems done now