Of 71 scripted pilots in contention for slots at the five networks, 33 are half-hour comedies and 19 of those are multi-camera formats -- shows taped before a live audience, and sometimes enhanced by laugh tracks. Today, only CBS airs multi-cam sitcoms.
The multi-cam sitcom, such as legendary hits "I Love Lucy" and "Cheers," was once the dominant format in which to televise comedies, as much for conveying a theater-like intimacy to home audiences as for its relatively cheap production costs. But within the last decade, multi-cam sitcoms began to disappear, while single-camera comedies like "30 Rock" and "The Office," with its movie-like freedom, started to rise in prominence.
"The industry had been moving away from multi-cameras out of a sense that other formats offer more creative freedom," said Jamie Erlicht, president of programming at Sony Pictures Television. "But there's room for both and there's a real appetite in these economic times for the tried and true multi-camera format."
Sony, which produces the multi-cam "Rules of Engagement" for CBS, is also behind 10 of the comedies under consideration this pilot season. A year ago, Sony commissioned a study to determine how a change in government or the economy could affect television habits. Its conclusion was that this pendulum would swing away from dramas. Six of the shows on Sony's slate are traditional sitcoms, including "AB FAB," a remake of the popular British series "Absolutely Fabulous" for Fox.
While Fox has a healthy animation comedy block on Sunday nights, it has failed to successfully develop a live-action series for some time. Its pilot slate includes two multi-camera comedies, two single-cameras, one hybrid, and a one-hour comedy.
"Post-9/11, reality TV was very, very fresh to the audience and took up a lot of the space that comedies did," President of Entertainment Kevin Reilly said. "Right now, people are angry. That's where comedy historically has come into play -- when you need someone to voice something in a way that you can hear it."
So there it is. It'll be interesting to see -- if even ONE of the multicam comedies hits in any significant way, watch for all the "death of comedy" talk to simply disappear.
3 rumbles:
The key, I would imagine, is to get younger audiences interested in the multi-camera format. The Big Bang Theory is doing fairly well these days for CBS, for example.
But by now it should be clear that it's not the multi-camera format that makes a show a comedy. The 'non-traditional' single-camera and animated series have added a welcome dose of diversity to primetime comedy and by now are pretty much just as well-established.
Consider King of the Hill (on its way out, but possibly to be saved by ABC), which has been on the air since 1996, though it never had the high profile of The Simpsons. That's as staid and steady as TV gets.
Apples, Kumquats and hairballs.
The engine that was comedy on TV proceeded from the multicamera fount. None of the single cam half hours has even approached the dominance of the mutlicam at its height. That's just accounting and math. And yup, the 3 or 4 animated shows on FOX are a nice garnish. But they've always been tangential to the 'death of comedy' discussion, predicated as it is on the relative lack of new multicam hits, and the fact that the biggest single camera success is still a pale, pale shadow of influence, reach, and profit that ruled when multicam shows roamed the earth.
Well, let's take Fox, for example. Even with King of the Hill ending, it's not being replaced by a live-action multicamera sitcom. Fox just keeps developing more animated comedies for Sunday nights. It's settled into that pattern for the forseeable future.
Meanwhile, when Fox tries multicamera sitcom formats, it usually gets likes of Stacked, 'Til Death or (notably from cartoon machine Seth MacFarlane) The Winner.
Only That '70s Show managed to become a hit, but it's been gone almost three years now.
That said, I could totally see NBC going back to the multicamera live-action sitcom. They're desperate and Jay Leno at 10pm (which is already being rejected in Leno's own hometown) will need very solid lead-ins to work.
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