Let’s make a couple of things perfectly clear …

Now let’s get something straight from the start – I’ve got nothing against the sitcom itself. Hell, some of the best comedies of all time have been flung from the womb of situation comedy: Fawlty Towers, Yes, Minister/Prime Minister, The Young Ones.

Not that I’m an anglophile, either. Some of the funniest stuff the Yanks have done also follows this time-honoured format. There’s Cheers, Night Court, and of course the Bible of the modern age, those fabulous yellow dudes from Springfield. Not as original or subversive in tone as the Brits, maybe. But there’s a lot to be said for a regular cast of characters appearing on our screens on a weekly basis, sometimes surprising us, but most often acting and interacting with one another in amusingly familiar ways.

But perhaps I’m not alone in thinking that this genre has played itself out. And maybe – just maybe – we should just stop making them for a while. Just a while, that’s all I’m saying. A moratorium on bad sitcoms.

A brief history of sitcom

In the early days of television, if you were going to do comedy, it made sense to introduce regular characters and throw them into different situations every week. The sets (and gags) could be re-used, some thought endlessly. A limited number of cast and locations, filmed in front of an enthusiastic audience, and you had everything you needed to keep the masses chuckling. It wasn’t really that much different from live theatre; you could even get the actors to do the toothpaste and cigarette commercials. Shows like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy did well in the US through the 50s and 60s, competing with the sketch and variety shows on offer at the time.

In the 70s sitcoms started to get a little preachy, a trend which reached its nauseating peak in the 80s with “socially relevant” scripts on shows like Family Ties, Growing Pains and The Cosby Show. Every week an issue de jour was trotted out to confront the young members of the family, only to be settled by some wise words from Mom and Dad across the kitchen table before the final credits rolled. A far cry from Jackie Gleason’s “One of these days, Ethel …” wife-beating threats, or Ronnie Barker taking the piss out of stutterers in Open All Hours.

I think most viewers would agree that Cheers represents a high-water mark in the history of the classic sitcom. A likeable ensemble cast, easy (rather than forced) humour, semi-believable situations. Frasier was not as good, but could at least hold its head up in polite company. A few years later The Office and Extras came along. These shows possibly deserve a league of their own, spawning many imitators.

With few exceptions, there’s been a steady deterioration in the format since. Each new “hit” is lamer than its predecessor, more reliant on the canned laughs and far less likely to produce the real thing. A quick scan of the paper reveals how dire the situation is: Two and A Half Men, Back to You, Will & Grace, endless repeats of Friends.

Fetch me my gun.

Seinfeld, often held up as the embodiment of wit, was not as clever as people liked to think it was. Once it had explored the self-referential possibilities of charting its own creation, the show had nowhere left to go but highlight the increasingly insignificant detail of every day life. Hey everybody, this week we’re talking about chewing gum! Isn’t chewing gum zany? Yeah, right. There’s only so many times you can chuckle at a closet member of the KKK bursting through a door. Yawn.

Cut-and-Shut TV

The existence of current sitcom Back to You is a good example of where the Hollywood churn factory has gone wrong in recent years. Let’s take Kelsey Grammar, from highly successful but played-out sitcom Frasier, and weld on Patricia Heaton from highly successful (I’ve never understood that) but played-out sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. Created by Steven Levitan, of the not-very-successful but very played-out Just Shoot Me!, stick the two likeable stars on a classic three camera sound-stage and wait for the inevitable sparks of Unresolved Sexual Tension to fly.

But they don’t. This is lazy cut-and-shut rebirthing TV at its worst, watching lumbering caricatures going through the motions. The jokes are lame, characters unlikable and plotlines uninteresting. And this is in its fourth season, I can only assume because some Americans are too lazy to find new batteries for their remotes.

When interviewed about the new show, Patricia Heaton owned up and said that the best thing about the show, from her point of view, was that it gave her a good wage with regular hours, which is important when you have young kids. Well, that’s great news for her, but the sad consequence is a show where it looks like everybody is just hoping they’ll get the chance to leave early and beat the traffic. I’m not saying that the cast of a comedy show ought to slice off their own ears as part of their commitment to their craft … but I wouldn’t be objecting to it if they did.

Censor-tivity Training

In his autobiography Dirty Jokes and Beer, Drew Carey blames some of the shortcomings of modern sitcom on the pressures of in-house commercial censorship: You can’t say this, you can’t say that. He argues that a vague, internally-enforced system on the US networks leads to a more restrictive creative environment than if the rules were imposed by government (which, of course, freedom-loving Americans would never tolerate). Whilst this might reek of the stand-up-comic-turned-sitcom-star-turned-gameshow-host trying to justify himself, there might also be some clues to the real problem here.

Nothing good ever comes out of a committee. There, I said it. It was the elephant in the room, and that elephant was designed by a committee who was discussing a low-cost alternative to the internal combustion engine. Committees are the proof that, after reaching the level of maximum intellectual occupancy, the more people you add to a conversation the less productive it becomes.

I’m not saying that people can’t work together to make something greater than any one of them could have done on their own. But I do suggest that the synthetic process of hiring talent and sitting them in a ring with pads and pencils is not the birthplace of inspired comedy. Yet this is exactly what the studio system of sitcom production relies upon for its scripts; a room of comedy writers recruited from college revues, community radio and (dare I say it?) the street press, hoping to parade the main characters through one hilarious situation after another until they reach the holy grail of sitcom; heavenly syndication.

Lost in Translation

Look at what a mess the Yanks make every time they try to adopt something from the other side of the Pond. Everything from Sanford & Son (Steptoe & Son) to Cybil (Absolutely Fabulous) to Cosby (One Foot in the Grave). Whatever the merits are of Kath & Kim, they weren’t apparent in the one episode that Channel 7 aired before erecting the screens and asking the determined-looking man with the rifle to drop by for a visit.

Here’s a novel suggestion; if you don’t have any good ideas, don’t make the shows. By making this dross with no inspiration, they are killing the format. Of course, if this advice were followed The Simpsons would have ended five years ago. Meanwhile, the Yanks have axed all of the innovative sitcoms produced in recent years: The Tick, Greg The Bunny and Help Me Help You didn’t even make it to the end of their first seasons.

Local doom and gloom

We don’t have a good track record on sitcoms historically either. There’s Mother & Son, and bugger-all else. We watched Kingswood Country and Hey Dad! as a patriotic duty, to hear laughter in our own accent, but few people actually laid claim to enjoying them.

There was a slight revival in 2003 with Shaun Micallef’s Welcher and Welcher, and more recently The Librarians, Very Small Business and Hollowmen. I tend to watch these the way a parent watches their child on a bicycle with the training-wheels off for the first time. They’re wobbling along, making progress, but really you’re waiting for the moment where it all inevitably goes wrong and it’s time to go and pick up the pieces and kiss away the tears.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the reports of the death of sitcom - like modern sitcom characters - are all just overly exaggerated.

But keep the Dettol and the band-aids close to hand, just in case.

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