Earl Pomerantz (who wrote "Sam's Women" and tons of episodes for other shows by this group) once said on his blog that he advised the creators to concentrate less on Sam and Diane and more on the people who come into the bar. And, he added, that he was wrong. But you can see the show go back and forth on this through…

I _think_ what he's saying is that CLUNY BROWN is a movie about people who consider it really embarrassing to admit that they have plumbing, and therefore people who dislike JACK AND JILL are acting like the stuffy English twits in that movie. Or something. The possibility that people just don't like JACK AND JILL is…

Ken Levine has said that NBC suggested switching CHEERS to tape to save money, and they made some tests that way. It looked terrible, because in the bright lighting required for tape, the bar didn't look anything like a real bar. NEWHART switched from tape to film after the first season and the difference was huge.

Anyway there's at least one monster single-camera hit, "Modern Family," which delivers old-fashioned sitcom yuks to Real Americans. The argument for multi-camera is that it's an artistically awesome form that can do certain things single-camera can't (which it is and can). Thomas talks about snobbery but when she…

Yeah, that struck me as really defensive and tone-deaf. I mean, there probably is an extra hurdle a show like this has to jump over to be recognized as good (sort of like "Lucky Louie," another sitcom whose pilot was pieced together from standup, had to deal with a lot of hostility) but complaining about that just…

I can't remember who said it now, but someone said that Aaron Spelling's shows were dumb, but they weren't dumbed down. That simply means Aaron Spelling wasn't secretly wishing to make great art; he wasn't contemptuously pandering to a mass audience. He really, really loved stupid trashy entertainment. This was his…

There do seem to be a lot of young people who watch it, especially since it was in syndication. (Internationally I think it skews even younger.) It's been pretty canny about sort of pushing the workplace family element, and the first thing you hear from fans is that they don't watch it for the mysteries, they watch it…

1) Live studio audience
2) Inescapable hype
3) Inaccurate portrayal of hipsters and NYC

"The Simpsons" doesn't have to reset because it's a cartoon. It's possible to do arcs in an animated series.

I sometimes wonder how much less choppy shows like this would seem if they had even one extra minute of running time — network sitcoms have been losing a minute here and a minute there for years, and eventually every scene seems like a haiku. "Big Bang Theory" in its first couple of seasons was one of the few comedies…

This is one of the key things about the four-camera sitcom, that it can't really change much. Most changes are cosmetic (adding more scenes outside the studio) or stupid (that "100 Questions" flop trying to light it like a single-camera show). The style of single-camera television has changed a lot since the '50s,…

Well, if a show works for us, then it has cast chemistry for us — I certainly didn't mean to imply that good single-camera shows don't have cast chemistry. I do think there is a different _type_ of chemistry and interplay that comes with the theatre style and real-time reactions in front of a crowd, which can't always…

In a way the equivalent of the multi-camera sitcom is the multi-camera drama shot in a studio (without an audience) — soap operas and old BBC dramas. The former are dying out in the U.S. and the BBC switched to single-camera drama a long time ago, so there is precedent for a form dying out.

"Lucky Louie" made a big deal of not sweetening the soundtrack (or warming up the audience very much) but the result, while it sounded more "real" than most, still sounded fake to a lot of people. I think that once you edit laughs, maybe even once you record them, they sound fake. Crowd laughter does not record very…

I think most of them use HD now — the Lorre shows do, anyway. One of the producers of FRASIER used to get kind of upset on usenet when fans would say the show was "taping." He wanted very much to make it clear the show was done on film (prestigious, expensive) and not tape (cheap, rough). Now everyone says "taped,"…

I've seen that, but it would be just as agonizing waiting for them to say the next line if you removed some of the devices single-camera shows use to fill in the blanks. (The audience laughter is the reason most multi-cam shows don't have music, except for the "Full House" type shows that pump it in at sentimental…

Yes, and no - it's not a great show, but the good things about it would not be good without the studio audience. The good characters and bits essentially became that way through a process of bouncing off the audience, and without the audience the Sheldon character would be an obnoxious creep.

I would suggest comparing the single-camera (though with laugh track) seasons of "Happy Days" and "The Odd Couple" with the seasons after they switched and added a live audience. The differences are huge — in the style of performance, the style of jokes, everything. This improved "The Odd Couple" but probably didn't…

I think this is an advantage of the no-laughter format: a bad joke just sort of slides by. A bad joke that gets a laugh from an audience gets us angry. How could those people laugh at this (or if we think the laughter is fake: why are the producers ordering us to laugh at this)? "30 Rock" in particular can get away…

I don't think there are any bad episodes from this production cycle, but I do think it's the "least good" of the three episodes they had left over from s3 (the others being Kamp Krusty and Streetcar Named Marge). That doesn't make the classic moments any less classic.