I've watched quite a few sitcoms in my day and I think I've started to narrow down one of the biggest differences between a good one and a bad one: the avoidability of the ridiculous situations that arise. Sitcoms are all about taking real life situations to utterly ridiculous extremes. In fact, I think it can probably be charted much like the Hot Crazy Scale. The simpler it would be to diffuse a given situation, the less ridiculous the situation should get. So for example, in this episode of Frasier, Frasier needs to get a book of his from Daphne's room and instead of waiting until she gets home and asking, he goes into her room to find it. Now because it's a sitcom (and Frasier's an idiot), he doesn't just stop when he gets the book, but instead keeps looking through Daphne's stuff. Daphne then comes in and (rightly so) gets super upset with him. So if this is as far as it went, it would only be mildly stupid. But, of course, it keeps escalating. In his rush to get out of the room (instead of explaining what he was doing to Daphne), Frasier ends up taking a bottle of pills from Daphne's room. Now, again, instead of apologizing to Daphne and explaining what an idiot he is, he decides to sneak in and put the bottle of pills back and ends up hiding around the room while Daphne comes in to undress and take a shower. Later, both Frasier, his brother Niles (who is in love with Daphne), and their father are all sneaking around in her room to try to fix the situation only to spill wine everywhere and act like complete imbeciles with zero control over their own bodies.
A part of sitcom humor does seem to depend on the characters acting very stupid most of the time, but if they act so stupid so as not to be even remotely like a normal human being or stupid one episode and totally normal another, that makes it very hard to find the stupidity funny. I think this sort of thing always happens at some point to any sitcom, so the question is how long a sitcom can last without depending on this large failure. Or at the very least good writers can try to explain why the characters' brains stopped functioning momentarily. The very worst case is that character becomes the dumb character and perpetually gets dumber and dumber. I'm looking at you, Joey Tribbiani.
Kind of like when everyone is hiding in Barney's apartment in this episode of How I Met Your Mother: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Over-Correction ?
ReplyDeleteKind of, except Robin hiding actually made sense in that episode because Robin was trying to steal something from Barney. Frasier was just trying to take back a book Daphne had taken from him. So, really, they're both the same episode, but the How I Met Your Mother at least had a more reasonable/realistic starting premise for the ridiculousness.
DeleteActually, towards the end of Friends, Joey was the only character I liked because he was still real. The other characters (Ross and Monica especially) became caricatures of themselves.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good explanation of why I think I stopped liking them toward the end.
I think all the characters became much more of a caricature than a character in Friends. Joey and Rachel got dumber, Phoebe got weirder, Monica got more neurotic, and Ross got more...Ross...I think that's the problem of a sitcom that lasts too long.
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