TV 101: Sitcoms pt. 1

Sitcoms, or situational comedies, are, basically, a television format designed for comedy. They're, generally, not as deep or layered as their counterparts: the hour-long drama. The reason why they're referred to as situational comedies is because the characters remain in a static place with plotlines, generally, resolved by the end of the episodes. In other words, the comedy is derived from the situation of the characters.

(The term "sitcom," I realize can be used to technically describe many shows so I'm going to clarify right here that the term "sitcom" in this post will refer to half-hour comedy shows.)

I've mentioned before that I believe that what makes successful television show concepts is either putting the absurd in the normal or putting the normal into the absurd. Sitcoms are a matter of putting the absurd into the normal.

As an analogy for the absurd/normal relationship, imagine a picture. Just a normal picture. Ok, let's say a digital picture. On your computer. Of... a fisherman standing on a pier next to his boat. Now, zoom in really really close. The picture looks fuzzy, doesn't it? You can't quite make out the fisherman because you're just looking at his blurry arm and the blurry fishing pole. And you wouldn't even know there was a boat there. Now, zoom out really really far. Well, now you know there's a boat and a fisherman but you can't see what the boat's name is. Or if that thing in the fisherman's hand is a pole. Or the color of his hair sticking out underneath his hat.

Ok, so what've we learned? If you look at a picture at just the right distance, you see the intended picture. But, if you zoom way in, you see too much information and if you zoom out, you see the whole picture but it's small and distant. No details. Now, let's make that analogy. If you zoom into characters WAY close, you see details but with no context, which makes people seem absurd. If you zoom out from characters WAY far, you see context but no details, which makes people seem... normal. Boring, but normal.

Now, let's further that analogy so that it pertains to what I'm trying to say about television. If you zoom in really really close on characters in an absurd manner, you get aspects of characters but no context of how they came to be. Ironically, this produces stereotypes (you'd think details defeat stereotypes, but I'm going to try to say the opposite). You get to see that a guy's into sports and working out and is a jock but you only see this one detail and you see no context into how he came to be that way or what else he enjoys. Therefore, jock.

Now, how does this pertain to sitcoms? First off, a necessity in making half-hour television (22 minutes when you minus commercial time) is expediency. When you're dealing in stereotypes, it shortcuts unnecessary exposition immediately. Let's use Friends as a quick example. In the first episode, we see the Nerd in Ross, the Jokester in Chandler, and the Stud in Joey, the Prom Queen in Rachel, and the Ditz in Phoebe. By quickly establishing those characteristics, it became easier to just jump into the stories (and the jokes).

Another part of "zooming in" is that you're able to get away with absurd characterizations (this is where we get to the "absurd" part). Let's use Joey from Friends again as an example. When we first meet Joey, all we really know about him is that he's the "Stud." He flirts constantly and is trying to make it as an actor, not because he can act but because it's the best way to capitalize on his looks. Let's fast forward a couple of years and look at an absolutely absurd moment in Friends. In a flashback in a Thanksgiving episode, we see that Joey once got his head lodged in the turkey Monica was going to cook for Thanksgiving dinner. This is, for lack of a better word, absurd. By all rights, this is something that shouldn't happen to a 20-year old. Ever. No matter what. That makes it absurd. However, in the world of Friends, it does happen and we believe it. Furthermore, it happens to Joey and we believe that it can only happen to Joey.

Why does it make sense for Joey to do something so absurd? Because we can't see the whole "Joey" picture. We only see aspects of him and we make judgments about who he is based on things we've deduced from him. Because Joey was a stereotype to begin with, his absurd behavior makes sense because we don't know that it doesn't. I'll try to clarify a little. We can't see the whole Joey so whatever he does, to a certain length, makes sense.

We can't have free reign, however. We need to ground our absurdities. If a character, or a show, becomes too absurd for too long, there's a disconnect with the show and the audience. If Joey, instead of putting a turkey on his head during Thanksgiving, rides a donkey buck-naked through the Thanksgiving Day Parade, slapping children and juggling sports cars, there is a very obvious level of disconnect. We can't make sense of why Joey's doing that or even what it is that he's doing. In order to make the show good, we need to ground the absurd behavior.

Because you get your absurdity and humor (especially visual humor) from the characters, the settings where the characters live in become your source of normalcy. Friends, in concept, is a normal situation. It's a group of six friends who meet in a coffee shop, live across from each other, and basically hang out all the time. Everybody's lives are encompassed by a certain group of people that they associate with consistently. It may not be as frequent or as isolating as the friends in Friends make it but it's an otherwise normal situation. The trick to making a good sitcom, however, is putting absurd behavior, like Joey's Turkey Incident into an otherwise normal show. The normalcy must be there so that there's something that grounds and connects with viewers.

Wow. This is kind of long. I'll pause here and post more tomorrow. I'll try to focus on a brief history of sitcoms, culminating with the way modern sitcoms are thought of as.