The unbearable lightness of sitcoms

Before you buy box sets of Steptoe and Son, Arrested Developmentand 30 Rockas Christmas presents, ask yourself this: when was the last great new sitcom, asks UNA MULLALLY

AS TELEVISION has become increasingly overcrowded with cheap reality programming, sitcoms have taken a back seat. Big-budget drama gets all the glory now, and moments that should be exciting for the genre – such as Ricky Gervais's new Life's Too Short– are met with apathy. The format isn't dead, but it is changing, perhaps not for the better. So where have all the good sitcoms gone? If the 1950s were the so-called golden age of (American) television, then the early 1990s saw the golden age of sitcoms. Seinfeld, Frasier(which arguably holds up better than most of the era), Friends, The Simpsons, Roseanne, the tail end of Cheers, The Wonder Yearsand Ellenall shone. While these might not be the greatest sitcoms of all time, the glut of quality at the time can't be ignored.

In Britain there hasn't been a golden age per se, with classic sitcoms arriving and departing consistently for decades: Are You Being Served? and Fawlty Towersin the 1970s; Only Fools and Horses, The Young Onesand Blackadderin the 1980s; The Vicar of Dibley, Absolutely Fabulous, The Royle Familyand Drop the Dead Donkeyin the 1990s; and more recently The Office. British comedy is a galaxy in which bright stars shine sporadically but with greater frequency than the graveyard of American pilots and one-off series. Ireland really has just one lone planet in this galaxy, Father Ted, which first aired on Channel 4.

In the 2000s, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Developmentand now Modern Familyhave brought the American sitcom back into the spotlight. But a shift in the type of humour audiences respond to is putting a strain on the format. It's quite difficult for sitcoms to develop past two key attributes that typified them over the past decade: surrealism and bleakness. Segues or parallel fantasies that created colourful little vignettes in Scrubs, Family Guyand The Mighty Booshappealed to the increasingly ADHD way with which we ingest all information. But no other form of humour has typified the sitcoms of the past decade more than black humour. Little Britain, The Office, Extras, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, The League of Gentlemen, Shamelessand Nighty Nightall made us chuckle and cringe in equal measure.

In dark times, however, in the same way that film retreats to fantasy, the bleak humour of Shamelessand co becomes less desirable for an audience. And without a reinvention, sitcoms have regressed. In Britain, BBC's comedy commissioner Kristian Smith has said that comedy formats are making a move back to slapstick, with nostalgia also highly valued. Slapstick done well (as in Del Boy falling backwards through the gap in a bar or Mrs Doyle falling off the roof, rather than The Simpsons-style parody of "football in the groin" humour) is at times unbeatable. But the current retreat is to safe territory, along with commissioners tripping over themselves to find the next Miranda Hart.

The BBC recently commissioned the sitcom Citizen Khanfor a slot on BBC1, written by and starring Adil Ray. The programme will be an unashamed tribute to John Sullivan's writing ( Only Fools and Horses, Just Good Friends, and the format this is based on, Citizen Smith.) The channel Dave has commissioned a new series of Red Dwarf. You can't really get any more nostalgic than resurrecting a series that first left our screens 13 years ago.

And the BBC last week commissioned a third series of Brendan O'Carroll's Mrs Brown's Boysbefore the second one even aired. The series, which is enraging and bewildering critics in equal measure, is another old fashioned, unsophisticated sitcom trading on slapstick and see-them-coming- a-mile-away gags.

Stateside, Tim Allen is leading the charge for nostalgia with his latest sitcom commission, Last Man Standing, which is pretty much Home Improvement in a slightly different setting. Allen is calling it "comfort food for the entertainment industry", summing up what networks want at the moment, or at the very least what networks think audiences want.

Right now in the States, networks are also driving the commissioning of female-led sitcoms. This is down to Bridesmaids, a film that made studios wake up to what most people thought was pretty obvious: women want to see female-led comedy and, not only that, but men will also watch it. Shocker. Female-led sitcoms have been rare, aside from I Love Lucy; Roseanne; and Ellen. But now, following the success of Bridesmaids, and indeed the trail blazed by The Sarah Silverman Program(Silverman's latest pilot got the green light from NBC last week) and Tina Fey's 30 Rock, a crop of female-led sitcoms are being harvested; Zooey Deschanel's New Girl, the adaptation of Chelsea Handler's Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea,and 2 Broke Girlsand Whitney, both created by Whitney Cumming.

Still, few sitcoms are connecting with a mass audience. Modern Family, now in its third series, is holding the fort, racking up Emmy nominations and proving that a traditional format, with slightly less traditional character sets than we're used to seeing on sitcoms, can work. Modern Family'strick, outside the brilliant writing, fantastic acting and great gags, is that it has taken types of characters who would have traditionally been on the periphery of other sitcoms and positioned them centre stage. Yet even as successful and acclaimed as it is, its viewership has only ever peaked at 12 million in the US. When you think that the last series of the X Factorpeaked at 20 million in the UK, it shows how the (scheduled) power of the sitcom has depleted. Back in 1976, when Happy Dayswas on top of its game, it was raking in more than 22 million viewers, which dwarfs Modern Family'sinfluence, especially considering the US population has grown by some 90 million in the meantime.

Soap operas used to start national conversations, and sitcoms used to challenge social norms, be it the depiction of an upper-middle-class African American family on The Cosby Showor The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or the then edgy bed-hopping antics of the cast of Friends. Now, dramas are the more likely to inject life into topics, or justify something being discussed just because it's on HBO.

Should women be as sexually promiscuous as the cast of Sex and the City? Should men regress to the model of a Scotch-swilling Don Draper? What does the affection for Tony Soprano say about our collective psychology? Has Gleechanged teenagers' attitudes to homosexuality? Does Downton Abbeymake the British yearn for a bygone era? Should the realism of The Wirekickstart a greater debate on the war on drugs? Does Love/Hateglamourise gang crime? These are the types of discussions that sitcoms no longer create.

But there’s also a greater shift happening. In many ways, watching television is now part of “the olden days”, and a catch-all sitcom finds it hard to exist in that environment.

Sitcom box sets are massive sellers, but they’re distributed and consumed almost virally on recommendations. Because sitcoms aren’t consumed from the outset by everyone at the same time, and audiences now self-schedule, everything becomes niche. It’s harder to know what audiences want, and playing it safe appears to be the only viable option.

In addition to that, with broadcasters desperate for viewer participation as media surfing overtakes channel surfing, interaction is now in the first line of commissioning briefs. Texting and Twitter interaction and commentary is now more valued than many other elements in programming. The viewer is no longer passive, something that sitcoms require.

Brilliant writing will always win over everything else, but whether those opportunities are actually available for sitcom writers in an utterly changed television industry at the moment is another question altogether.