The sit-com is slowly on its path to extinction, and I don’t mean in general, but the sit-coms filmed in front of a live studio audience are. Since the dawn of television, sit-coms have become a staple in the American family home, with classics like The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Bewitched and steadily going throughout the rest of the century. But once the year 2000 hit, the live studio audience became a rare commodity and instead most TV shows today, comedy or drama, are not filmed in front of an audience and this past decade has produced some of the best shows on television. These days it seems almost impossible to get a good live audience sit-com right, but why is that? There have been millions of cheesy sit-coms in the past, Full House, Boy Meets World, The Brady Bunch, so why is it so hard to get it right today?
Let’s think back. Friends, Seinfeld, That ‘70s Show, not only are these some of my all-time favorite shows, but they all had laugh tracks, and they were damn good. Seinfeld was good because it wasn’t the atypical sit-com, and its premise was about nothing. Seinfeld also was never cheesy. It was always outrageous and the four of them got into the most insane situations, most of them based on real events that happened to Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. Friends, was also another great show with an audience. It was never groundbreaking, six friends living in New York that date, have sex and get into “everyday” situations. I was heartbroken when I had to send my monkey back to the zoo, and who hasn’t had their brother’s triplets? Regardless, the relationships of the six of them were so close that you wanted to be in that group. You wanted to have a cup of coffee at Central Perk. You wanted to have sex with Joey or listen to Phoebe sing Smelly Cat. This show worked so well because of the relationships that were built over those ten years. This show worked because you rooted for them, for better or for worse. Another great example is That ‘70s Show. I never saw this show as a show about the ‘70s. It was a show about a group of teenagers growing up, and all the stuff that gets thrown their way. The cast worked so well together, and even though Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher left that last season, the show still had a major impact on the television world. I will always bob my head when I’m hanging out down the street.
All of those shows began in the ‘90s which was a prime real estate for sit-com shows. Today, that formula is really hard to come by. Excluding children’s sit-coms on Disney or Nickelodeon, (Those scripts are too cheesy that they need that laugh track.) most 2000 and beyond sit-coms don’t work. I’m not saying they aren’t picked up or fail after a couple years or are even poorly reviewed. Two and a Half Men for example is one of the most famous sit-coms in the past decade, especially now for reasons that need no explanation, but despite the critical and fan acclaim and the fact that it’s going into its ninth season, what is really all that special about it? Maybe I’m too harsh, because statistically it’s been ranked in the top 20 shows ever since it first aired, but having seen it I just don’t get why it’s so special. If someone can enlighten me then please do so. I watched the season premiere with Ashton Kutcher for curiosity sake. I will admit it is nice seeing Kutcher on TV again, but not in this show. I can see where they’re going with this and hopefully this will be Men’s last year.
I watched some new shows that just premiered this fall, both actually involving Whitney Cummings. In case you don’t know who she is, she’s a shitty comedian who yells a lot and had a bad face lift. I wanted to give them a chance to see if they had any decent qualities. While 2 Broke Girls starring Kat Dennings was mediocre at best, they were a couple moments that made me chuckle. I attribute that to Kat Dennings spot on performance. So far this has yet to be picked up for a full season, but the freshman comedy Whitney starring the Botox queen herself was just recently picked up for a full season, which just goes to show how much people love D-list celebrities with bad plastic surgery. You’d think this show would be on E! This show was just god awful. Despite my distaste for Cummings I wanted to put my judgment aside and take a look regardless, going in without bias, but I barely escaped only five minutes in when I changed the channel from one of the most trite, awful, unfunny pieces of television I have ever laid my eyes on. The forced laugh track was played after every sentence each character said, making it difficult to even find the funny things funny, but then again nothing was funny anyway. Everything from the stereotypical drunk, perverted friends to the terribly written dialogue made ABC Family’s Melissa and Joey the next Seinfeld.
Why the laugh track has to be used so forcefully after every line of dialogue is ridiculous and completely unnecessary. Even when you watch an old episode of Friends there wasn’t a laugh every two seconds, rather a witty dialogue, while not always a gem, but still funny, then the laughter goes where it’s supposed to go. One live audience comedy created after the year 2000, 8 Simple Rules, was a pretty big hit, and was extremely funny. If not for the untimely death of John Ritter, that show could’ve gone on for much longer than three seasons, but I suppose it worked out for Kaley Cuoco in a way, although I don’t know many people besides my parents and the critics who are crazy about The Big Bang Theory.
Good Times, The Jefferson’s, Green Acres, I Love Lucy; this was when TV was great and the laughs of an audience meant something to the dynamic of the show. Even The Flintstones had a laugh track and that worked well too. Besides the already existing shows today, is it a good idea to get rid of the live studio audience for good? Obviously for late night talk shows, Saturday Night Live, stuff like The Daily Show among others need their live audiences, but should the future of sit-coms kill the idea of laugh tracks? I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I know that if Modern Family had an audience, would be the Emmy power house it is today? My guess is no. This was written in front of a live studio audience.
