It was inevitable, I guess.
The state of the TV sitcoms is dire, and it’s a long time coming. While television dramas are improving exponentially each year—so much so that TV is arguably the most dependable medium through which to receive any kind of quality product—sitcoms are struggling to maintain a foothold. Fewer and fewer audiences watch sitcoms anymore, anyway, and they (sitcoms) have certainly lost any kind of water-cooler cache (do people still gather around water coolers?). Probably that began with the advent of the single-camera, laugh-trackless sitcoms of the turn of the century, a phenomenon we at the time found to be unequivocally a Good Thing, and yet it also kind of fucked things up, reliability-wise. The multi-camera sitcoms of the second half of the twentieth century were mediocre, sure, but they were reliably mediocre. Like the verse-chorus-verse, three-minute pop song, the form had been carved, and the quality was easy to gage. The only variable was the quality of the jokes.
Not so anymore. Sitcom writers were encouraged to go off on their own for a while, gain some experiences, Thoreau-like, then experiment when they came back. So we got Arrested Development, and we got Scrubs, and we got My Name is Earl. Most impressive was the fact that, in this brave new sitcom world, the squares weren’t kicked out altogether; the conventional sitcom form was allowed to stick around as well, and nobody shat on it for being itself—so Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother got their days in the sun, too.
After a while, though, network heads got a little nervous, wary of this culture of chance-taking, so they looked for some stability, a surefire new formula that couldn’t miss. Around this time, NBC imported The Office from Britain and had moderate success. At the very least, it was successful enough to spawn two new phenomena: the mockumentary and the rebirth of the workplace comedy. Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Two Broke Girls, and most significantly, the powerhouse ratings juggernaut that is Modern Family were created in this wake, the latter of which being the only true, no-bullshit, unquestioned hit in the lot.
We were warned pretty heavily last year that the family sitcom was going to come back—hard. Underseen gems like Happy Endings were yanked off the air last spring, making room for some family-friendly fare. Here’s the problem: family sitcoms are 1. horrible, and 2. cynical. They are horrible for pretty obvious reasons—the kids are watching, so make sure everything’s watered down, and never end an episode on a note that doesn’t suggest that Family is the Most Important Thing in the World (barf)—but the ways in which it’s cynical are trickier than all that. Network TV exists because of one thing, and one thing only: advertising. Advertisers put up crazy amounts of cash to have their product pushed on the air. And advertisers only give to shows with audiences who’ll buy either really expensive stuff (hence the mid-90’s push for upper class urban dwellers in shows like Friends and Frasier) or buy their stuff in bulk. And who buys stuff in bulk? Why, two-parent, firmly established, financially stable groups of people living in one house, of course. Families.
All of this is a very, very long-winded way of saying that the network heads must have been very happy that Modern Family hit it so big, so they could justify making all these family shows again, and the networks have all but sprayed a new crop of shows at us about moms and dads (like, off the top of my head, Mom and Dads). The question is, are any of them any good?
I watched Dads (Fox), Trophy Wife (ABC), The Goldbergs (CBS), and The Michael J Fox Show (NBC) to find out what they had to offer. One of these shows is alarmingly good, one is potentially good though it’s not good right now, one is totally fucking lame, and one is so godawfully bad that I’m wondering whether there’s a joke I’m not getting, as though it’s actually supposed to be a parody of a horrible sitcom rather than a bad sitcom itself.
Check back this week each day as we reveal Ted’s thoughts on each of the shows he watched.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.