TV There’s a reason I don’t write much about sitcom. I don’t watch much sitcom. I’ve seen precisely none of the sitcoms you’ve listed though I am looking forward to taking The Trip in one long chunk when I’m enjoying a self-devised Michael Winterbottom season next year (whilst simultaneously trying to deal with my Steve Coogan issues). To increase your shock and awe, I haven’t seen more than half an episode of The Office either. Or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or many of the other “classics” you’re probably thinking of. In fact, about the only sitcom I remember properly making time for this year was The Thick of It.
Since I have most of them recorded, six episodes here and there nestling neatly on a dvd I do wonder why I haven’t sat down with any of them for an evening as I plan to with The Trip. Part of the problem is that identified by Alison Graham in her review 2010 column in the nearly Christmas Radio Times, the one with Matt and Mike and Kathy on the cover. She says that the problem with the modern BBC sitcom is that it isn’t funny and that’s certainly part of my reticence. Very rarely has British sitcom outside of the obvious classics delivered on laughs, more interested in character and drama than the simple joke. The reason Not Going Out worked was because it was unashamed of its own genre.
But paradoxically I become very tired with sitcom if there isn’t much in the way of character development, an element of change. That’s my issue, probably, since sitcom to an extent is based on repetition then variation on repetition. But when I think of the sitcoms I’ve truly loved they’ve had an element of drama, or more specifically soap opera. The Friends changed significantly over their ten years and grew and much of the humour developed from that, discovering marriage and parenthood. Also true of Fraser and to some extent Red Dwarf (though that became less funny as soon as the writers decided it was more about sci-fi concepts than people). Victor Meldrew changed over time as he accepted his life as a retiree, even mellowed to some extent.
The other truth is that I simply prefer comedy drama or drama with elements of comedy. What The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, My So-Called Life, everything Joss Whedon’s ever produced, Moonlighting, Party Animals, 24, Lost, e.r. (in its prime), Being Human, Misfits, Mad Men, Northern Exposure, Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who (to name a couple) all share is the ability to be laugh out loud funny in the middle of the melodrama, funnier even than most sitcoms. Many of these shows are turned out by writers who’ve previously worked on sitcom or both, not least the writing machine that is Jane Espenson, but often somehow manage to produce even better material, I’d wager, because they have much better defined characters to play about with.
Which isn't to say I won't get around to watching your favourite sitcom at some point. I just don't know that they can sustain the amazingly high laugh rate of The West Wing, even in the later John Wells years, especially when Alison Janney is acting at full pelt or those astonishing Gilmore Girls episodes when eighty pages worth of dialogue are hammered through in forty minutes. As the convoluted plotting of Lost became even more convoluted, it had to draw in elements of farce and lashings of irony. And I’m yet to find a more perfectly paced piece of comic television than My So-Called Life’s penultimate number in which most of the young cast find themselves progressively connected to the Chase family’s bed after Rayanne handcuffs herself to it.
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