The death of the sitcom

Am I the only one who loves a good ol' fashioned studio-based laugh-track sitcom? Well, American ones primarily, not My Family, that superhero one or the odd thing with Rodney from Only Fools and Horses that was on BBC 2 recently.

But the sitcom is dead. It must be, it said so in the Guardian. Look, a link! It's like the future but now!

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2094419,00.html

Maybe the world has moved on from twenty-two minutes of nicely crafted one-liners but I mourn the passing of the sitcom. Will and Grace was funny, despite many faults (ie not enough lines for Jack and Karen, the disappearance of Rosario for a season or two when the actress was caught shoplifting, Alex bloody Baldwin and Harry cocking Connick Jnr) The last episode was a bit odd - but, hey, I won't spoil it for you as the final season starts on C4 tomorrow night, non-Sky people!

It's come to something when the best hope for American comedy here was actually billed as a drama in the US (starting soon on C4 & E4, the cancelled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip which I saw in the US and thought was very good)

And, yes, there are plenty of 'good' comedies both here and in the US. By 'good', of course, I mean squirming with embarrassment at the psuedo-real wibbly-single-camera no-laugh-track type stuff of The Office (up to episode 100 in the US soon) and that. And, uh-huh, The Simpsons and Family Guy are corkers - but they're cartoons and that's different. For my comedy I want six absurdly attractive people sitting around a ten million dollar NY apartment cracking jokes continuously...

tv secret:
the Friends cast, combined, weighed exactly the same at the end of the ten years or so of the series as they did at the start - all the men got fatter, all the women got anorexic.

Probably.

The only comedy coming up I'm looking forward to is one with Kelsey Grammar being a grumpy newsreader. I know what I'm going to get there and I like it.