Virtually all American (and American-style) sitcoms follow the same simple formula.
In the UK, the rules of sitcom are very different. The BBC commissions a large proportion of sitcoms, so the standard length is a full 30 minutes. Our series (seasons) are typically just six episodes long, and few programmes are commissioned for more than three series.
As a result, huge committees of writers are unnecessary, and most programmes are written by just two people with help from a handful of editors and consultants. Scripts can reflect the idiosyncratic voice of the writers, rather than having to conform to an industrial process where writing can be delegated within a team. Characters and plots don't have to reset to zero by the end of an episode, because there is no expectation that a successful series will run indefinitely.
An obvious comparison would be the British and American versions of The Office. The British version finished after just 12 episodes (plus two Christmas specials), following a clear dramatic arc; The American version ran to 201 episodes. The British version was written wholly by Gervais and Merchant, while the American version had over 40 credited writers. One is a work of art, the other is an industrial product.
Not all BBC sitcoms are like that, look at Not Going Out (which I do love), Citizen Khan and Mrs Browns Boys. While not as sickeningly produced as American sitcoms they do follow a common pattern not dissimilar to the one in the article.
I do agree with you though, I'm just playing devils advocate. The Office isn't a great one to choose because the American and English versions cannot really be compared as they are very different beasts, and while the American series shares inspiration it is trying to be something completely different while the English series is a one off stroke of genius (and not really a sitcom).
Whenever I watch a British show, I always feel like the writing is much better than American sitmcoms. Don't get me wrong, I love American TV too, but watching British TV doesn't feel like "TV". It usually feels like a series of movies.
This completely backs up what you said, and makes a lot of sense in the context that it's ok for characters to change and that most shows only get a limited run.
Yes, it's true that American series run for a long time. In many cases it's really bad for the story - but for comedy,i find that the story is of less importance and good jokes at a rapid pace are the core - and good comedies can do quite a few great seasons before they lost their charm.
You might explain this better to our American friends by reminding them of the fact that they have a highly commercial film and TV industry, where the profit and loss of individual shows is monitored very closely.
What works gets repeated and hence the industry is highly formulaic, with those in control of the money going for the explainable and repeatable.
That is not the case in other countries, where the lack of business sophistication has given more room for the creatives to flourish.
Given the constraints of a typical sitcom - 22 minutes, comedy, resets each week (no new characters, no major changes to character's lives), the "formula" is basically the only option: You present a problem, you wrestle with the problem, and you resolve the problem (maybe with a subplot or two). What else can you do?
You can avoid having a problem at all. But that loses all the usual dramatic structure and tension that we expect, not just from comedies but from tragedies all the way back to ancient greece.
Or you can have multiple problems, each resolved in turn. This was done by the Simpsons in several seasons (but not in the earliest or latest). One problem would occur, quickly get out of hand, then either get resolved or morph into another problem. It made the Simpsons feel much more "chaotic" and "dense".
Otherwise, the "formula" is basically the only way to do it. Maybe I missed something the article was saying?
The Simpsons also had a few episodes where the initial plot would kind of fizzle out 1/3 of the way through and then suddenly they'd get to the real plot.
I remember hearing about the sitcom formula watching an interview with the Simpsons writers. They were kind of reluctant to talk about it the same way a magician wouldn't want to talk about how the tricks are done.
The part that stood out was when they said they always reveal the main conflict just before the mid-episode commercial break so you'll stay tuned.
From then on I can't help not see it every time I watch a half hour show.
I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them.
There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned.
The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes.
Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting.
If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution.
Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.
> How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory
HIMYM was innovative in another way, too. The first person narrator is somewhat unreliable, leading to the same story being revisited multiple times. Sometimes this was all in the same episode, being revisited from each character's perspective. Other stories are told and retold through the entire run of the series, up to and including the very end of the show.
I'm not too impressed with Louie's attempts at 2 to 3 stories per episode. The show is hilarious, but I think that experiment failed, personally. However, I think when he does outlandish episodes like the one where he has a dream about his "Uncle Excelsior" are much better examples of throwing the rules out the window and making something really interesting and memorable.
> television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand
What are some examples of this "visual shorthand"?
Preferably examples from a popular show (like The Simpsons) so I can really understand what you mean.
Would a 1950's audience understand the visual shorthand if they saw today's TV, or is this something you have to grow up with?
Weren't multiple plots already common in soap operas before the 1980s? In fact, I believe Soap (the sitcom, from the late 70s) already had them, as well as long running storylines, much like the shows it was parodying.
Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) seemed to be quite good at having a few subplots that all come together at the end for a harrowing but entertaining ending...
I'm reminded of a scene in Louie where Louis CK is approached by a Hollywood producer to discuss movie ideas[0]. The producer asks him for his best idea for a movie.
Yeah? All right, well well, you know how movies, there's always a guy and his life is, you know, okay?
And then something happens, like a conflict and he has to resolve it, and then his life gets better?
Well, I always wanted to make a movie where a guy's life is really bad and then something happens and it makes it worse but instead of resolving it, he just makes bad choices and then it goes from worse to really bad, and-- and things just keep happening to him and he keeps doing dumb things, so his life just gets worse and worse and, like, darker and-- Like-- like he has-- lives in a little one-room apartment, he's not a very good-looking guy, he has no friends and he lives-- he works in, like, a factory, where they-- like a sewage-disposal plant, and then he gets fired, so now he doesn't even have his job at the shit factory anymore and he's-- and he's going broke and he takes, like, a trip and it rains, like, just stuff, just shit keeps-- horrible.
But then he meets a girl and she's beautiful and he falls in love, so you think that's gonna be the thing, the happy thing, but then she turns out to be a crook and she robs him, she takes his wallet, and now he's, like, stuck in the middle of nowhere and he's got no wallet and no credit cards.
Virtually all movies of all genres follow a minute-by-minute plan also. It was popularised with the book 'Save the Cat'.
http://www.savethecat.com/ It is hard to watch a movie without mentally ticking them off...
He's become somewhat famous for this, having produced several "how-to" videos of varying levels of seriousness about sitcom writing. His writers on Community have even slipped references to this into the background of episodes, where set decorations (e.g., drawings on the study room whiteboard) sometimes subtly acknowledge which part of a character's story circle a scene depicts.
No surprise - lots of works of art have constraints that make them formulaic. Haiku. Greek tragedies. Sculpture. Oil painting. TV commercials. Its helpful to study the formula e.g. for teaching others how to succeed. No need to denigrate it.
I'd like to see a followup article on how the meat of different sitcoms is presented. For example, I remember figuring out the formula for Three's Company, where in almost every episode the "muddle" mostly involves a misunderstanding between characters, or where the audience has information that one or more of the characters doesn't have. Whereas other sitcoms have information that is kept from the audience until the end, which builds a different kind of suspense (in the first case, you are wondering when and how a character is going to "get it", and in the second case you are waiting for the characters to reveal final information to you).
The muddle type is called a comedy of manners - where misunderstandings arise because the characters are too shy/ polite/ embarrassed/ intimidated to say what they really mean. There are many good books on this subject, but you could do worse than dig up Aristotle's Poetics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 hasa helpful list of translations, including links to multiple public domain versions. Also, while it doesn't have breakdowns for individual shows, the TVTropes.com website is enormously useful for figiuring out story structures. The only downside is that like wikipedia every variation on something eventually gets its own entry and it can be hard to get a good view of the forest for the trees.
A friend of mine spent some time reading movie scripts for a major film company. He told me the business was so standardized (5 act play) that people would go straight into asking "so what the big change that happens to the character" and such.
It's not surprising given that it's such a big industry. If your wares don't fit, it just gets hard to get in the door. And on the producer side, there's a machine built over the years to create a specific kind of product.
You can take everything in that article and replace it with just one metanarrative: Transition from problem to solution. The similarity of start up pitches, or any sales pitch for that matter, is explained by the function of a pitch: to demonstrate the benefit of a product. I think the article you linked to needlessly complicates the matter. If you're writing a pitch, just tell them how your product improves someone's life.
Then there's Aqua Teen Hungerforce. The plots are mostly random and nothing ever gets resolved at the end. The movie was full on surrealism[1]. It's almost hard to remember what the plot of any episode was because they seem to take completely random directions.
[+] [-] jdietrich|11 years ago|reply
In the UK, the rules of sitcom are very different. The BBC commissions a large proportion of sitcoms, so the standard length is a full 30 minutes. Our series (seasons) are typically just six episodes long, and few programmes are commissioned for more than three series.
As a result, huge committees of writers are unnecessary, and most programmes are written by just two people with help from a handful of editors and consultants. Scripts can reflect the idiosyncratic voice of the writers, rather than having to conform to an industrial process where writing can be delegated within a team. Characters and plots don't have to reset to zero by the end of an episode, because there is no expectation that a successful series will run indefinitely.
An obvious comparison would be the British and American versions of The Office. The British version finished after just 12 episodes (plus two Christmas specials), following a clear dramatic arc; The American version ran to 201 episodes. The British version was written wholly by Gervais and Merchant, while the American version had over 40 credited writers. One is a work of art, the other is an industrial product.
The medium is the message.
[+] [-] orf|11 years ago|reply
I do agree with you though, I'm just playing devils advocate. The Office isn't a great one to choose because the American and English versions cannot really be compared as they are very different beasts, and while the American series shares inspiration it is trying to be something completely different while the English series is a one off stroke of genius (and not really a sitcom).
[+] [-] jedberg|11 years ago|reply
This completely backs up what you said, and makes a lot of sense in the context that it's ok for characters to change and that most shows only get a limited run.
[+] [-] minthd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james1071|11 years ago|reply
What works gets repeated and hence the industry is highly formulaic, with those in control of the money going for the explainable and repeatable.
That is not the case in other countries, where the lack of business sophistication has given more room for the creatives to flourish.
[+] [-] azakai|11 years ago|reply
Given the constraints of a typical sitcom - 22 minutes, comedy, resets each week (no new characters, no major changes to character's lives), the "formula" is basically the only option: You present a problem, you wrestle with the problem, and you resolve the problem (maybe with a subplot or two). What else can you do?
You can avoid having a problem at all. But that loses all the usual dramatic structure and tension that we expect, not just from comedies but from tragedies all the way back to ancient greece.
Or you can have multiple problems, each resolved in turn. This was done by the Simpsons in several seasons (but not in the earliest or latest). One problem would occur, quickly get out of hand, then either get resolved or morph into another problem. It made the Simpsons feel much more "chaotic" and "dense".
Otherwise, the "formula" is basically the only way to do it. Maybe I missed something the article was saying?
[+] [-] philwelch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ourmandave|11 years ago|reply
The part that stood out was when they said they always reveal the main conflict just before the mid-episode commercial break so you'll stay tuned.
From then on I can't help not see it every time I watch a half hour show.
[+] [-] shalmanese|11 years ago|reply
There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned.
The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes.
Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting.
If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution.
Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.
[+] [-] zrail|11 years ago|reply
HIMYM was innovative in another way, too. The first person narrator is somewhat unreliable, leading to the same story being revisited multiple times. Sometimes this was all in the same episode, being revisited from each character's perspective. Other stories are told and retold through the entire run of the series, up to and including the very end of the show.
[+] [-] vitd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shutupalready|11 years ago|reply
What are some examples of this "visual shorthand"? Preferably examples from a popular show (like The Simpsons) so I can really understand what you mean.
Would a 1950's audience understand the visual shorthand if they saw today's TV, or is this something you have to grow up with?
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkhattab|11 years ago|reply
Yeah? All right, well well, you know how movies, there's always a guy and his life is, you know, okay?
And then something happens, like a conflict and he has to resolve it, and then his life gets better?
Well, I always wanted to make a movie where a guy's life is really bad and then something happens and it makes it worse but instead of resolving it, he just makes bad choices and then it goes from worse to really bad, and-- and things just keep happening to him and he keeps doing dumb things, so his life just gets worse and worse and, like, darker and-- Like-- like he has-- lives in a little one-room apartment, he's not a very good-looking guy, he has no friends and he lives-- he works in, like, a factory, where they-- like a sewage-disposal plant, and then he gets fired, so now he doesn't even have his job at the shit factory anymore and he's-- and he's going broke and he takes, like, a trip and it rains, like, just stuff, just shit keeps-- horrible.
But then he meets a girl and she's beautiful and he falls in love, so you think that's gonna be the thing, the happy thing, but then she turns out to be a crook and she robs him, she takes his wallet, and now he's, like, stuck in the middle of nowhere and he's got no wallet and no credit cards.
---
[0]: Louie S2E10 "Halloween/Ellie"
[+] [-] thret|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evan_|11 years ago|reply
http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_...
He's become somewhat famous for this, having produced several "how-to" videos of varying levels of seriousness about sitcom writing. His writers on Community have even slipped references to this into the background of episodes, where set decorations (e.g., drawings on the study room whiteboard) sometimes subtly acknowledge which part of a character's story circle a scene depicts.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|11 years ago|reply
Saying every show has "a beginning, middle, and end" isn't really much of an observation.
[+] [-] cdcarter|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_%28improvisation%29
[+] [-] chrismealy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derekp7|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 hasa helpful list of translations, including links to multiple public domain versions. Also, while it doesn't have breakdowns for individual shows, the TVTropes.com website is enormously useful for figiuring out story structures. The only downside is that like wikipedia every variation on something eventually gets its own entry and it can be hard to get a good view of the forest for the trees.
[+] [-] pervycreeper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|11 years ago|reply
It's not surprising given that it's such a big industry. If your wares don't fit, it just gets hard to get in the door. And on the producer side, there's a machine built over the years to create a specific kind of product.
[+] [-] gweinberg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirk21|11 years ago|reply
Applied to startup pitches: https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-...
[+] [-] normloman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw...
The book itself is worth a read.
[+] [-] narrator|11 years ago|reply
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Mo...
[+] [-] nchelluri|11 years ago|reply
> As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television.
[+] [-] Keyframe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenyoda|11 years ago|reply
formula: 2. any fixed or conventional method for doing something: "His mystery stories were written according to a popular formula."
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formula
[+] [-] nkozyra|11 years ago|reply
You can lump a very large segment of historical and contemporary fiction into a similar dissection.
[+] [-] j45|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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