The fall TV season is now well underway, and one thing is clear: the sitcom is a dying breed. Even NBC — home to such legendarily successful sitcoms as “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” “The Cosby Show,” and “Friends,” among many others — now airs only four sitcoms on two nights. The season’s new sitcoms — such as the John Goodman vehicle and Jason Alexander’s second comeback vehicle — are getting savaged by critics.
A canny observer of the genre can look at a lineup of sitcoms and figure out which ones sold because of who’s in them, which ones might have been good ideas at some point but have since had all the creativity and invention scrubbed and focus-grouped out of them, and which ones the networks took a flyer on just so they could say they did.
Best Sitcom “Arrested Development” is this last kind, and credit is due to Fox for finally realizing that you can’t build a network schedule by cobbling together nine different iterations of “Joe Millionaire”-style shock-reveal reality shows, and that you do sometimes have to invest in a show in the long term.
But that’s an isolated story of a risk that panned out. In today’s TV landscape, what are the networks doing wrong in launching successful sitcoms?
1. Building shows around talent that viewers like a lot less than the networks think.
See:
Casting a recognizable name might get people to watch a show’s first couple of episodes, but if that star doesn’t have a huge amount of charisma and star power, and Tom Hanks-caliber appeal across all demographics, then that’s all you’re going to get. If the vehicle the star is driving is poorly written or executed, viewers are going to find something else. And, lest we forget, all of the “Friends” were nobodies in August 1994; the show was well-written and funny, so the show made them stars. Invest in talent on the writing side; actors are thick on the ground in L.A.2. Buying shows with high-concept premises that are stupid.
They're newlyweds, but her parents are two gay men! They're newlyweds, and they live in the sticks! They're a owned by Siegfried and Roy! I mean, my God. "Everybody Loves Raymond" isn't my thing, but at least they're not trying to reinvent the wheel. And "King of Queens" has nearly the same premise except that it's much better written, with less hammy actors, and I watch it in syndication every day.
"He's gay, she's straight, and they're roommates." "They all work for a news-radio station." "They're doctors in a crappy hospital in L.A." All those premises are fine. If the show's premise is too overwrought, the writers are quickly going to strain to find storylines that remind us, every week, of what that premise is, and that's hard on both the writers and the viewers.3. Making 19 copies of every successful show.There are just two basic kinds of sitcoms — the family/home sitcom (“The Cosby Show”/”Family Ties” model), and the workplace sitcom (the “Cheers”/”Night Court” model) — but there is actually quite a lot of leeway there. And seriously, isn’t one family/home sitcom at a time plenty? “Still Standing,” “Yes, Dear,” and “My Wife And Kids” are all the same show.4. Giving insufficient attention to scheduling.
The main problem with “Arrested Development” in its first season is that its time slot was DEATH. The kind of people who are going to want to watch “AD” are probably already committed, in that time slot, to watching “Alias” or whatever HBO happens to be showing. A smart show needs a time slot that’s already filled with stupid crap that dumb people watch: If “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” were still around, that and “AD” would be an irresistible rock block at 9 on a Monday.
All those family shows still hang on because they’re not all opposite each other. People who like “Still Standing” will probably also like “According to Jim,” so they’re on different nights. Meanwhile, every show I want to watch is stacked on top of each other. But having said that...5. Moving shows when they’re trying to build an audience.“Futurama” and “NewsRadio” got jerked around so much that you had to be seriously committed to finding them in order not to miss an episode. And, again, credit to Fox on “AD”: that time slot stank, but at least they stuck with it so that fans didn’t have to work to find it. If you have a subsidiary cable network (and all the networks do), use it to double-burst your show and let viewers catch up with it if they’ve missed it. I know a ton of people who weren’t watching “Alias” until ABC Family ran a New Year’s Day marathon, and then they were hooked.6. Promoting shows badly, or not enough.Cut a whole bunch of good, inventive, promos for your new shows and scatter them throughout your schedule, but also match similar existing and new shows; in the case of “AD,” I’d have put more promos for it during “Futurama” (R.I.P.) and maybe “Malcolm in the Middle,” and maybe not so many during “That ’70s Show” or “The Simpsons.”7. Not showing reruns.
Reruns can be bad. But when the TV landscape is as crowded as ours is now, sometimes you miss an episode, or your VCR chokes, and you want to fill in the blank for yourself in the summer. Increasingly, you can’t — “Scrubs,” for instance, reran maybe two episodes in all of last season – which is bad if you want people to be loyal to your show or try it next season. This is yet another thing Fox did right with “AD” — showing episodes over the summer. “Without a Trace” gained huge between its first and second seasons by attracting summer viewers who’d watched “ER” during the TV season. This was reported in the press when it occurred, so why didn’t the networks pay attention and learn?8. Buying dumb mushes of middle-of-the-road shows.The networks are in kind of a bind, because cable caters to smaller slices of the demographic pie. The networks’ mandate is to make shows that, in theory, appeal to as many people as possible, but that’s kind of a ridiculous mission in this day and age. At some point, The WB decided it was going to make teen dramas, and it did that well for a while before deciding it also had to make shows like “Studio 7,” which, no. ABC’s mission seems to be to embrace their Disney parenthood and be the family-friendly network. The other major nets should take some time to figure out what their niches are and then buy shows that fit within them.9. Thinking of reality TV as a monolith.There are good and bad drama series, good and bad sitcoms, and good and bad reality shows, and in the end, smart viewers are going to watch the good shows regardless of what genre they fall into. If there were any lesson the networks could or should learn from the reality “phenomenon” (and the success of “The Office”), it’s that there is something intrinsically appealing about short-run TV series; if you know there are only going to be 13 episodes in a season, and then you’re free to do something else with that chunk of time, then it becomes appointment TV. (This probably also gets better work out of the writers, if they have fewer half-hours to produce.)
This is not to contradict what I said about reruns above; run the whole short season, and then four months later run it again. Or run it on FX or Bravo or UPN. And as for the argument that reality shows are so much cheaper to produce than scripted shows are — maybe, but they have virtually no repeatability (maybe I’ll be proven wrong if the “Apprentice” Season 1 DVDs sell like crazy, but I doubt it). A sitcom, if it’s good, can run twice on network, dozens of times on cable, and then have healthy sales on DVD.So that’s my pitch to become a network executive. Do I get the job?
Tara Ariano co-created and co-edits Fametracker.com and Television Without Pity.com