Why do sitcoms work?

A story including complication, suspense, surprise, conflicts, high stakes and resolution jammed in a time slot of a mere half hour sounds impossible to do. It really does. Why would one rush such a story? Wouldn’t it be great to stretch it all out to a full film and allow the audience to actually sit back and relax? Guess what? Sitcoms do it all the time! Sure, look at Friends – a sitcom full of laughs, inside jokes, conflict, high stakes and all that wonderful jazz – nearly every episode runs for thirty minutes. Granted, we don’t really do a great job analyzing the show, we tend to sit, watch, relax and enjoy. At least I do, I don’t really enjoy taking the time to point out when the complication is set up and when the high stakes takes place. It all works cohesively, the process is magical. We as the average audience do not do a good job recognizing this. Miller writes about the structure of films and television shows with crucial elements that help the characters stay alive in terms of keeping the audience’s interests. We can only love a character to a point and the structure keeps us going.

I actively watched an episode of Cougar Town (Modern Family was not available) and with my analysis brain on, I noticed, amazingly, the elements Miller talked about throughout the entire half hour episode. Right from the start of the show, the complication, conflict, and suspense were all set up in the first 7 minutes. Pretty impressive right? Wait ‘til you hear this – not only did they set up all of that, but they also set up three different story lines, two major and one minor ones. Can you imagine the intensity? The next 12 minutes or so were packed with suspense in each story line. I had never seen the show before and I had become hooked. I wanted to know how it would all end up, would the couple successfully tell the ex-husband about their relationship. Would the 18 year old son finally learn how to apologize to his girlfriend for forgetting their 7 month anniversary without pissing her off? Would the other couple finally learn why their 11 month old son keeps saying Bobby? Honestly, it’s pretty cheesy but it works. The characters become stronger and when that happens, the structure becomes stronger which makes the story better and it draws us deeper into the story.

The other show I watched was Melissa and Joey, not quite popular show. Interestingly enough, with my analysis brain, I actually had a bit of a hard time pinpointing some elements. The conflict is immediately set up in the beginning, the topic being bad boys are bad. With this particular show, two story lines were set up but they were parallel to each other. The aunt began dating a bad boy at the same time as the niece did and the aunt was against the niece dating the high-school-dropout-bad-boy. The tension would build right up to the end when the aunt is hiding her bad boy in her bedroom and scolding her niece in the kitchen for going out with her bad boy. The niece caught the aunt with her bad boy and then the show ends with both of them deciding to ultimately swear off bad boys. This show was not as interactive or interesting as Cougar Town. It might be the fact that there was a single story line and the end was predictable, at least it was to me.