The Wednesday Essay Thanks to the awkward realism of The Office,the traditional sitcom has spent the last decade firmly out offashion. But as the success of Miranda proves, a show filmed infront of a live audience can still have the last laugh. By TimWalker
When the second series of the much-lauded, much-derided Mirandacame to our screens last year, it came as part of BBC2's clutch of"precision-engineered" new comedies. There was Rev, Tom Hollander'swonderful comic turn as an inner-city vicar; Grandma's House, inwhich Simon Amstell played "himself" putting up with his neuroticfamily; The Trip, in which Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan played"themselves" putting up with each other; Vexed, a dramedy aboutcops; and Whites, a comedy about chefs.
They were all, as has been noted elsewhere and at length, middle-class sitcoms. But Miranda was unique among them: when its creatorand star, Miranda Hart, claimed the British Comedy Award for BestNew British TV Comedy last month, hers became the first studioaudience sitcom to win said award since the last century. Once, so-called "multi-camera" sitcoms, filmed before an audience on afamiliar set, were the only type of British sitcoms. Nowadays onBBC2 - formerly the home of Fawlty Towers, Open All Hours and YesMinister - only Miranda flies the channel's flag for studio audiencesitcoms.
The most talked-about comedy of 2009 was the semi-improvisedOutnumbered. Before that, it was Gavin & Stacey, Peep Show, TheThick of It - all "single-camera" sitcoms, made on location withoutso much as a laughter track, let alone an audience. You have to goback to 1999 to find another multi-camera sitcom, Victoria Wood'sdinnerladies, winning the Best New Comedy award. Since then,traditional sitcoms have largely been scorned and used as punchlinesby unkind critics: According to Bex, anyone? They are cheaper thansingle-camera shows, and they look it.
The unfashionable elephant in the room is the bafflinglysuccessful My Family - unloved by reviewers, but enjoyed by enoughviewers to sustain it for 10 series. Two Pints of Lager and a Packetof Crisps trundles on, too, regardless of reviewers' ridicule.Otherwise, the multi-camera sitcom has lain almost dormant for adecade. In 2002, the Best New Comedy award was won by The Kumars atNo 42, which featured a studio audience, but only as part of its non-traditional, talk-show concept. Its forerunner was Knowing Me,Knowing You with Alan Partridge, who eventually forwent his liveaudience. Coogan's latest run with the character is a hit internetseries, apparently filmed on a webcam.
The traditional sitcoms of the Sixties and Seventies thatinspired Hart were tightly scripted and conventionally shot,featuring the same characters in the same rooms each week. Mirandais full of catchphrases, slapstick and "hard" jokes in search of animmediate laugh. Its titular heroine runs a joke shop, and thecomedy is the comedy of hand buzzers and whoopee cushions. Part ofits alleged brilliance is surely its knowing awfulness. People hateit because it's kitsch, and people love it because... it's kitsch.
"I wanted to do a sitcom that combined light entertainment," Harthas explained. "I want to do looks to camera. I want a studioaudience. And I want each episode to end with a musical number." Themusical numbers didn't make it, but what did is an outmoded closing-credits sequence, in which the actors wave cheerily to the audience.
The very first sitcoms were, in fact, single-camera shows with alaughter track, which guaranteed their writers and performerslaughs, even if the jokes were rubbish. Introducing an audience wasthe innovation of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, whose I Love Lucy wasfirst broadcast in 1951, using three cameras and a live studiocrowd. The idea was a hangover from the age of radio, when the liveaudience was asked to contribute to the world of the show with itslaughter.
The British made the genre their own during the 1960s and 1970s,epitomised by David Croft, whose creations included Dad's Army, AreYou Being Served? and Hi-de-Hi! A 2004 poll by the BBC, ITV andChannel 4 to find "Britain's Best Sitcom" produced a list almostentirely populated by such old-fashioned fare. At the top was OnlyFools and Horses, and you have to read as far as number 19 beforecoming across The Royle Family, the first show on the list without astudio audience.
Mark Freeland is the head of comedy production at the BBC."During the 1980s and 1990s," he says, "you had a stream of verygood sitcoms: Ab Fab, Men Behaving Badly, Red Dwarf. The turningpoint was I'm Alan Partridge, when they came up with the hybridformat of filming with an audience, but putting four walls up. Theyshot single-camera in a cube, but with the audience watching onmonitors. It teetered between the two formats, and it put a questionmark under traditional sitcom.
"Then in 2001, The Office came along, and that defined comedy forfive years. The sound of the photocopier replaced the sound of thelaughter track. It had a huge effect on comedy practitioners. Newcomedies became single-camera-obsessed. It looked as if that waswhat the audience wanted, and it's difficult in any genre not tochase the last success."
Lee Mack, writer and star of BBC1's Not Going Out, recentlycomplained that the greatest threat to comedy was realism. "SinceThe Office," he said, "everyone has this idea that comedy is onlygood if it reflects the way people really speak. But that's nonsense- and it's a problem that's unique to comedy. If you went to aPicasso exhibition and said, 'I love this painting of a horse,' andsomeone chirped up, 'It doesn't look anything like a horse - it'snot real,' they'd be seen as a real heathen."
Forget about class for a moment. Does the BBC have a pro-realismprejudice? Not Going Out, a multi-camera comedy, is now on itsfourth series, but Mack has a right to feel persecuted. Despite itshealthy ratings, his show was slated for cancellation in 2009, andsaved only when fans submitted a petition on its behalf. The Officeset a benchmark for realism in comedy, and in his next sitcom,Extras, Ricky Gervais explicitly mocked the old-style studio comedywith "When the Whistle Blows", a parodic show-within-a-show. Manyargue that the multi-camera format is defunct - beloved, likeItalian opera, by a few connoisseurs, but essentially a heritageactivity.
The tyranny of realism enraged Graham Linehan, one of the menbehind Father Ted, whose most recent show, The IT Crowd, broke therule that critics despise studio audience sitcoms. In 2006, when TheIT Crowd was first broadcast, he told an interviewer: "I find allthe post-Office shows that are shot with a shaky camera reallydreary, with the exception of Peep Show. This is very much areaction against all of those. But everyone seemed surprised that Iwanted to do it this way. Let me put it like this: The Office was anon-traditional sitcom because it had to be. If you'd put thoseactors in front of a studio audience, it would have dropped dead:they wouldn't have been able to hear it, as it was sonaturalistically done. On the other hand, if you had shot Father Tedvery naturalistically, it would have been a disaster. It's aquestion of things suiting the format."
For both performers and writers, the multi-camera comedy can bethe greater challenge: it forces them to make an audience laughthere and then, sharpening both the jokes and their delivery.Without the format, for example, Happy Days would never have beenthe hit we recall so fondly. Originally shot as a single-camerasitcom, its network, ABC, planned to cancel the show after twoseasons. Then they tested it in front of a live audience. Suddenly,viewers could hear the teenage girls in the crowd scream likeBeatles fans every time Fonzie walked in; Happy Days survived for 10years. Moreover, fans suspect the moment it started to decline was asequence shot on location, far from the studio audience, in which awaterskiing Fonz famously "jumped the shark".
In the US today, the studio audience sitcom remains in ruderhealth than here, thanks in large part to Chuck Lorre, producer ofthe country's two top-rated sitcoms: Two and a Half Men and The BigBang Theory. "It's a very intimate genre," Lorre told The NewYorker, explaining his love of the traditional sitcom. "There's nomusic. There's no camera magic. There are no editing tricks. It'snot a visual medium. It's about people and words."
For at least its first two seasons, The Big Bang Theory wasconsidered first-rate by critics. Even Two and a Half Men originallyearned credit for the mild edginess of its set-up: Charlie Sheenplaying a washed-up, sex-crazed former star called Charlie. That wasuntil Sheen's off-screen antics became too edgy for even the mosthardened critic to stomach. Neither show, however, has theresilience of the great US sitcoms of the 1990s - Friends, Frasier,Seinfeld - all of which were filmed before audiences. It's six yearssince a studio audience comedy, Everybody Loves Raymond, won an Emmyfor Outstanding Comedy Series.
And while the multi-camera sitcom may still dominate the genre inNorth America, sitcoms in general have plummeted in popularity.Twenty years ago, eight of the top 10 most-watched programmes in theUS were studio audience sitcoms. By 2006, just one sitcom made thetop 20 - and, gallingly for its detractors, it was Two and a HalfMen.
Jaime Weinman is a critic and blogger for the Canadian magazineMaclean's. "In the last decade, the live studio audience sitcom inthe US went through a bad patch," he explains, "while the single-camera shows went through a good patch. Arrested Development, whileit wasn't a commercial hit, was a big influence. Then The Office andMy Name is Earl and a handful of good single-camera shows all camealong at once. The fact that the best shows on TV were single-camera created a leap of logic whereby it seemed there was somethingnecessarily better about the form, so right now most fashionable andsuccessful writers prefer to work without a live audience, becausethey like the lack of limitations on where they can go and what theycan do."
During the 1990s, the big television networks relied on the multi-camera's sitcom monopoly: the shows were cheap to make (until theirstars started demanding huge salaries, at least) and they sold wellin syndication. It was left to independent production companies suchas HBO to experiment with single-camera sitcoms such as The LarrySanders Show. Now, however, the networks' cash-cows are notcomedies, but glossy dramas and reality television talent shows.
HBO still makes great single-camera sitcoms, such as Curb YourEnthusiasm and Entourage. The networks, in search of hits, havefollowed suit, with The Office (the US version), Community, ModernFamily, Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, to name a few. But doesthat mean the multi-camera comedy was just a passing phase? Not atall, Weinman argues. "When Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld firstpitched Seinfeld to NBC, they pitched it as a mockumentary aboutJerry's adventures. But the network said, 'No you're doing it onthree cameras, in front of an audience.' So they accepted that, butthey did it their own way. They broke the rules and changed people'sidea of what you could do with that format. All that has to happennow is for some network to force some writer to produce a sitcom fora studio audience. He won't know the old tricks that people aretired of, so he'll come up with new ones."
Modern Family, Parks and Recreation and The Office are allmockumentaries, a trend that will surely go out of fashion soon -or, like Fonzie, jump the shark. When it does, Miranda and her wackychums may just be there to fill the breach. The BBC's next bigcomedy launch, Freeland explains, is Mrs Brown's Boys, "a full-onstudio audience sitcom starring Brendan O'Carroll as a kind of IrishMrs Merton. In the first episode, Brendan/Mrs Brown forgot hishandbag after a scene change, and he/she got up and walked acrosstwo sets to retrieve it. We've kept that in - just to nudge the formforward a bit."
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