The Last Time the Sitcom Died

FOR A MEDIUM that's almost sixty years old now, Television has a perilously short view of its own history. Historical trends come and go, and nobody blinks, and nobody digs any deeper.

One of the big bugbears I've had for a while is that there's no shortage of ponderous people who want to declare the sitcom dead. Even those who are still greenlighting comedy want to call them "Half hour comedies" or something, like the word "sitcom" is covered in anthrax. And then they say stupid things like "do we have to be so jokey?"

So jokey?

You wish, son.

Anyway, the dumbest thing about the trend has always been the utter failure of most of these people to contextualize the last time the sitcom was dead. It's around the time that a little show called The Cosby Show came along and blew that conventional wisdom. Now, thanks to Earl Pomerantz (whose blog I will greedily devour if I ever get a free second) by way of Jaime Weinman, you can return to those thrilling days of yesteryear -- and the reaction to the Cosby pilot presentation:

in particular, he talks about the impact of the most famous moment in the presentation (which of course was incorporated into the full pilot:

Accepting people for who they are. A bedrock liberal principle. The studio audience is clearly conditioned to respond sympathetically. If you listen to the soundtrack, you can hear them starting to applaud Theo’s unequivocal plea for acceptance.

But just as the audience members are about to put their hands together…the doctor proclaims,

“Theo, that’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard!”

The audience members stopped dead in their tracks. And then, they went nuts!

I mean, the roof came off!

It’s like someone had opened a window, and a liberating truth had come rushing in. Theo wasn’t mentally challenged; he was lazy. And the doctor was calling him on it, accusing his son of being afraid to try, for fear that his brain would explode and come oozing out of his ear.

The audience was enraptured by the message of personal responsibility, refreshing only because it had been abandoned. Theo would do better. And so, not incidentally, would the sitcom.

The bottom line: One show. That's all it takes. One.

But it requires thinking outside the box. And not being concerned about the word, or being too jokey.

Pomerantz's original post is here. (But if you click the link above you get Weinman's usual excellent contextual commentary.)