The History of Sitcoms

From I Love Lucy in the 50's, to the 60's Brady Bunch and the 80's Cosby Show, Full House, Seinfeld, sitcoms have been a prominent source of television.  Sitcom stands for situational comedy and (according to Wikipedia) is set in a common place where comedy, for the most part, ensues.  Many sitcoms have been placed in front of a studio audience and some use a laugh track.  Recently more and more modern sitcoms don't have either, but instead banks on the person at home watching laughs.  In fact there are a great deal of sitcoms these days that don't have an audience/laugh track including 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Modern Family to name a few. So what makes up a good sitcom? And how have they changed throughout the years? Let's take a look.

Sitcoms first began on the radio. It was before the era of television and had a large listeningship (yes, I did make that word up).  Because this is a blog about television, I'm just going to skip that part.  Television was invented in the late 40's and many people starting buying their own set to watch popular sitcoms such as The Honeymooners and The Trouble with Father. As I learned in AP U.S. just recently, many of these shows centered around the idea that men should be working and the wife should be at home with the kids.  The mothers in the shows were always at home making meals for the family and cleaning up after them.  They were the "ideal" wife and mother at the time.  This was a common idea at the time and women were looked down upon if they wanted to work instead of staying at home.

By the 60's, sitcoms were getting a lot more creative.  There were more interesting concepts that just the plain old nuclear family.  Shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Addams Family, and many more took creative turns in television. This is a change that is definitely expected. As society was modernizing and changing their ideas of gender roles and what a "normal" family was, television was continuing to change with it.  Unfamiliar families with peculiar life styles became to be the norm, and became families we know and love. 

And the hypothetical ball kept rolling into the 70's when sitcoms took on more controversial topics. This included issues such as war in M*A*S*H, women's rights with female-led sitcoms like the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and many other social issues from racism to homosexuality in shows like the very popular All in the Family. The 80's also continued in breaking barriers both with more social topics incorporated in shows like Full House and Family Ties, but also began to stray away from the monotonous "perfect family" shows and came out with sitcoms starring working-class families such as Roseanne and Married with Children.

Even today, sitcoms continue to change.  Although many of them still are mostly set around a family such as Modern Family, Malcolm in the Middle, and According to Jim, there are many more that are not.  Shows such as 30 Rock, Parks and Rec., and The Office are in a workplace and other shows such as The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother star young adults as roommates living in an apartment together.

How have sitcoms persisted through all these years as one of the strongest sources for quality television? Well, first of all I must point out that many of them fail.  People are trying to make new sitcoms ALL the time.  If you have a good concept, decent actors, and an excellent writing staff, then the show has the recipe to be successful. Sadly, some sitcoms concepts, although may be creative or comical, will not catch on with the audience.  Many factors like writing, actors, or network can affect the quality, but concepts are really what drive sitcoms. If given a good idea to run with, writers are very innovative.  They can make a government run parks and recreation building or a paper making Dunder Mifflin office interesting and entertaining. That's how sitcoms have become some of America's most loved television shows of all time.