The Sitcom

For all you writers interested in comedy TV, there’s a great article in the 12/6/2010 issue of New Yorker on veteran show runner Chuck Lorre. Here’s a summary of the article:

ANNALS OF ENTERTAINMENT about television writer and producer Chuck Lorre. “Mike & Molly” is the sixth sitcom to go on the air that Lorre has produced, created, or co-created. His two most recent shows, “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory,” are the №1- and №2-rated comedies in America, and have been for some time. Not since Norman Lear — who revolutionized the American sitcom in the seventies, with shows like “All in the Family,” and who, at one point, had seven hit shows on the air — has one man so dominated the genre. When “Big Bang” was picked up by CBS, in 2007, Lorre went to see Lear and asked how it was possible to do more than one show at a time. According to Lorre, “His answer was, basically, you run around like a madman.” Once a television show has become successful, most executive producers ascend to a cloudier level of involvement. But Lorre works closely on anything that bears his name. He runs the writing rooms of “Two and a Half Men” and “Big Bang,” and is volubly present for every table read, network run-through, camera run-through, pre-shoot, live taping, and sound mixing for all three of his shows. All of Lorre’s shows are multi-camera sitcoms (also known as four-camera sitcoms). The critically acclaimed sitcoms of the past half decade have tended to be single-camera shows with niche audiences (such as “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Office”), and many television critics regard the multi-camera sitcom as a retrograde, even defunct, form. The apparently unstoppable success of Lorre’s multi-camera sitcoms in an inhospitable television climate seems mysterious, but Lorre’s belief in the format is boundless. Lorre was born Charles Levine in 1952, and by the time he was twelve he was working in his father’s Long Island luncheonette as a short-order cook and soda jerk. After high school, Lorre enrolled at SUNY Potsdam, but dropped out to play the guitar professionally. Lorre turned to television writing in the mid-eighties. His first steady television jobs were in animation. His prime-time break came with “Roseanne,” on which he worked from 1990 to 1992. Discusses a number of Lorre’s shows, including “Grace Under Fire,” “Cybill,” and “Dharma & Greg.” “The Big Bang Theory” is Lorre’s best show to date. Describes Lorre’s work on “Two and a Half Men” and “Mike & Molly.” Tells about the unconventional vanity cards he places at the end of his shows.

If you have a subscription (and why don’t you), you can read more here. For those who don’t, I’ve excerpted this take on sitcoms from the article’s writer Tom Bissell:

Films, perhaps, show us who we want to be, and literature shows us who we are actually are. Sitcoms, if they show us anything, show us people we might like to know. Because of this, the sitcom is a medium designed to reassure. The more reassuring the sitcom, the better its chances become at winding up in the financial promised land of syndication, where multi-camera sitcoms fare far better than their single-camera brethren. Most sitcoms are about families, and, for the millions who watch a sitcom, it becomes a kind of mental family. Week after week, your couch faces the couch of characters you feel you know, characters whose problems can never quite get solved.

A lot of sitcoms are, in fact, darker than you realize. At its core, “Two and a Half Men” is about loneliness. “The Big Bang Theory” is about alienation. “Mike & Molly” is about self-hatred. You would never know it from the shows themselves, but you do, sometimes, feel it while watching them. To laugh at these things with our mental families may allow us to cop with our own loneliness and alienation and self-hatred. It may be that the sitcom’s constant avoidance of any final, dramatic catharsis is its accidental strength. If so, that would make this least lifelike form of entertainment the most comfortingly similar to real life.

Personally I stopped watching sitcoms a zillion years ago and only recently reconnected with it via the wonderful “Modern Family.” But for those of you who are fans of sitcoms or write them, what’s your take on what psychological function sitcoms provide for viewers?

And while we’re at it, what is your favorite sitcom of all time? Multi-camera? Single camera?

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