....The major networks — ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC — are not giving up as the fall season kicks off this week, rolling out 18 new comedies that will seek to mine laughs from romantic entanglements and family dynamics.

It's not hard to see why. Comedies have long been the ratings and profit drivers of the television industry, cheaper to produce than hour-long dramas and lucrative in syndication long after new episodes have been canceled. Hollywood's production studios bank on them to sustain their businesses. And cable channels rely on sitcom reruns to pad schedules and lure advertisers.

"There is always a desperation for something to hit — and there's been so few of them over the last several years," said Darcy Bowe, a vice president at advertising giant Starcom USA. "There's such a high demand for them."

The major broadcasters in past decades gave life to such cultural touchstones as "All in the Family," "MASH," "Roseanne," "The Cosby Show" and "The Simpsons." The 1990s provided fertile ground with "Frasier," "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Will & Grace."

There have been few blockbuster sitcoms since. "Two and a Half Men" is in its 12th season and running out of steam. "The Big Bang Theory" and "Modern Family" have been out for years.

What happened? Those working in network television point to several factors, including increased competition from cable channels and video streaming services, such as Amazon and Netflix, that are aggressively developing original content.

....."You cannot deny the success of the multi-cams, and people want to try it again," said Bela Bajaria, executive vice president of Universal Television. "Why should CBS have all the fun?"

But there's fun only with success. If the past is any indication, the networks will give most new shows only a few weeks to prove themselves before the cancellations begin.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-fi-ct-tv-comedies-20140922-story.html#page=1

A lot of these sitcoms aren't funny.

I think the #1 problem is the networks and shows depend too much on shock value and crude humor instead of relying on good old fashioned comedy. When will they realize this?

I think the #1 problem is the networks and shows depend too much on shock value and crude humor instead of relying on good old fashioned comedy. When will they realize this?

I absolutely agree! We don't like any of the so called comedy sitcoms that the networks claim are aimed at my age. :rolleyes:

I think the #1 problem is the networks and shows depend too much on shock value and crude humor instead of relying on good old fashioned comedy. When will they realize this?Your'e right 100%. Look at the Seth MacFarland shows and looked what happened to the Simpsons. Do we really need more like them no? No.

I think the #1 problem is the networks and shows depend too much on shock value and crude humor instead of relying on good old fashioned comedy. When will they realize this?
Not to mention extremely unlikable characters who only serve to create annoying internet memes.

I absolutely agree! We don't like any of the so called comedy sitcoms that the networks claim are aimed at my age. :rolleyes:

"Two and a Half Men" to me is VERY unfunny! It just talks about them getting laid all the time and men don't think about sex all the time!

I think the #1 problem is the networks and shows depend too much on shock value and crude humor instead of relying on good old fashioned comedy. When will they realize this?

i can't get into many of today's sitcoms or the ones from the last couple of years. there have been so few multicam sitcoms i have sat through. plus, there were better ones during the 50s-90s.

another problem is that networks focus too much on reality TV and drama shows.

Two And A Half Men has to end their series this season right away!

I agree, almost all of today's sitcoms are not funny. With very few exceptions, you cannot watch these things with the family without cringing. When I was growing up, you could watch one station all night and every sitcom was funny. Now there's only one sitcom in prime time that I watch.

Comedy is dying, both on broadcast and cable, after TBBT ends will it be any comedy with 15+ million viewers, looking at upcoming developments, it would say unlikely, FOX is stuck with those niche sitcoms, NBC with rom-coms, if there weren't laugh track on CBS comedies I wouldn't know the difference between them and dramas, ABC needs more multi-cams.

I'd love for there to be a new sitcom hit that I could enjoy and look forward to tuning in each week. But, I just no longer see it in the cards. Modern comedy has gone off in directions that just don't speak to me anymore. I truly don't expect to see another sitcom in my lifetime that will ever resonate for me again.

Comedy is dying, both on broadcast and cable, after TBBT ends will it be any comedy with 15+ million viewers, looking at upcoming developments, it would say unlikely, FOX is stuck with those niche sitcoms, NBC with rom-coms, if there weren't laugh track on CBS comedies I wouldn't know the difference between them and dramas, ABC needs more multi-cams.

i'd say the multi-cam sitcom is dying, not just on ABC, but CBS, fox, NBC where it has been almost non-existent.

i too want more multi-cam sitcoms, but i wish they were as good as friends, frasier, the jeffersons, fresh prince of bel air, will and grace.

what i loved most a lot about 70s-90s sitcoms was not just the characters, humour, writing. it is the fact that the major networks at the time cared for sitcoms so much that so many of them were produced.

that is the difference- they cared for the genre.

I tried watching a few of the new fall shows and couldn't even get through more than 5 minutes of any of them.Absolutely un-watchable.

Comedy needs time to take a breath occasionally. They used to run 25 minutes. I saw a new one on Demand the other night that was listed as 21 minutes. Everything has to be more rapid fire than ever.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/12/network-tv-sitcom-cancellations-trouble-advice.html

1. Don’t launch a comedy you don’t believe in and aren’t willing to get behind
The incredibly brief lifespans of ABC’s fall comedies Selfie and Manhattan Love Story (both of which will burn off their unaired episodes on Hulu), along with de facto cancellations of NBC newbies Bad Judge and A to Z, were easily predicted before the shows even debuted, mostly because of how their respective networks handled their launches. ABC slotted Selfie and Love Story Tuesdays from 8 to 9 p.m., depriving them of an established lead-in and pitting them opposite the biggest hits on both NBC (The Voice) and CBS (NCIS). NBC bundled the thematically dissimilar Bad Judge and A to Z together on Thursday nights opposite ABC’s juggernaut Scandal while simultaneously announcing their 9 p.m. time slot would be filled by The Blacklist come February. Add in the fact that none of the four shows got much of a promotional push over the summer, and it was pretty clear Alphabet and Peacock execs weren’t counting on long lives for any of the shows. Historically, such obvious burn-offs have been accepted as an unavoidable by-product of a broadcast business model in which widespread failure is baked in. Unlike cable nets, which generally have the luxury of focusing on just one or two big scripted premieres every quarter, the Big Four can find themselves rolling out upward of two dozen new and returning shows over the course of a single month. That’s by design: Networks take a lot of shots because, the theory goes, the more at-bats you take, the better the chance of getting a home run.

But, at least with comedies, maybe it’s time for networks to get out of the assembly-line business. The old model relied heavily on the idea of audience flow, where a sizable percentage of the viewers who tuned in for Friends or The Big Bang Theory would automatically stay tuned for the next one, two, or three comedies on a lineup. Lead-ins are still important — maybe more so than ever before — but we’re now in an age where, save for Big Bang and Modern Family, there simply aren’t blockbuster comedies that can reliably serve as launching pads for newer shows. With a shortage of comedy hits, networks shouldn’t be wasting their energies on shows they don’t believe in, and if they do love a show, they need to have a better game plan for it. Reasonable people can disagree about whether NBC’s lack of faith in its Kemper comedy was justifiable, but this much is certain: Wasting time and money on a show it didn’t believe in would’ve been a far bigger mistake.

2. Stick with good comedies that have a passionate audience rather than cycle through a series of untested shows.
This is a corollary to Rule No. 1: In addition to not green-lighting shows they don’t absolutely love, networks should demonstrate extreme patience with those they do order — as long as those shows are connecting with at least some segment of the audience. This philosophy partially explains why Fox just committed to additional episodes of The Mindy Project, ensuring the low-rated show will survive for at least three seasons. While its overall ratings are minuscule, even by Fox standards these days, a closer look at its demographic composition reveals that among younger women, Mindy is a minor juggernaut. This week’s episode, for example, scored the same rating among women 18 to 34 as lead-in New Girl while handily beating ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and NBC’s About a Boy in that demo. “If I’m a network, I would rather have a show that does a 2 rating with young women than a show that does a 1.4 rating across all demos,” our TV agent says. “The audience has become so fragmented that it’s rare to have a show that hits that quadrant of the audience.” The super-loyal young female fan base for Mindy is also appealing to streaming providers such as Netflix, which has demonstrated it’ll pay top dollar for the right to stream shows with passionate core audiences. If a network owns the syndication rights to a show — as Fox does with New Girl, but not Mindy — it can offset the loss in advertiser revenue that comes from sticking by a lower-rated show.

Historically, one argument against being overly patient was that sticking by a Nielsen laggard, a network was reducing its odds of finding the next big hit or, at the very least, accepting that it couldn’t be doing better with something else. But that was back in an era when it was much easier for networks to launch hits of any kind. “Big broadcast hits take a lot longer now to find their audience,” one network exec says. Plus, many in TV land are now convinced that viewers have become increasingly savvy to how the industry works and might even be holding off before committing to a new series. “There are so many comedies launched each year that we’ve trained viewers to expect [quick cancellations],” another top network suit says. “There’s no reward for viewers to start a habit with a new comedy early on.” None of this is to suggest that some shows don’t deserve a quick death. “If a show isn’t doing what you want it to creatively and it’s going nowhere in the ratings, fine, cancel it, move on,” the agent says. “But you really need to know you can do better.”

3. Figure out a way to get good writers interested in making multi-camera comedies again.
For most of the past decade, Hollywood’s best comedic minds have largely been focused on creating Very Cool Comedies that are shot like films (so-called “single-cam” shows). Traditional “multi-cam” sitcoms — ones taped “live in front of a studio audience,” à la Big Bang or Cheers — have fallen hopelessly out of favor among comedy elites. Even multi-cam vets such as Modern Family creators Steve Levitan and Christopher Lloyd (who cut their teeth on Frasier and Wings) and The Middle’s DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler (Roseanne) have now become converts to the gospel of single-cam. This exodus has resulted not only in TV’s best writers largely ignoring a form, but also a diminished number of opportunities for younger scribes to get training in the ways of old-school sitcoms. “Writers are being groomed and schooled on single-camera comedies,” one network exec laments. “They’re not doing multi-camera. And multi-cam is a real skill and a real art. These people are real craftsmen in the art of story structure and joke writing.” While networks — particularly CBS — have tried to keep multi-cams going, they’ve been doing so largely without the help of the genre’s best veteran talent and with a collection of younger writers who haven’t had enough training in the form.

It’s tempting to think that maybe this isn’t really a problem, that perhaps market forces and viewer evolution are simply conspiring to push multi-cams to extinction. But if networks are serious about producing hit comedies that can live forever in syndication and streaming, it seems silly to limit the odds of success by focusing their efforts on one type of half-hour (single-cam) while neglecting a format that still clearly has an ability to draw big crowds (as demonstrated each week by The Big Bang Theory and its audience of 20 million viewers). This doesn’t mean broadcasters should produce multi-cam comedies just for the sake of doing multi-cam (see The Millers or Dads). Instead, networks ought to beg creators who’ve hand single-cam success — think Mike Schur (Parks and Recreation), Greg Daniels (The Office), or Liz Meriwether (New Girl) — to focus on multi-cams for a couple of years. Why not a Manhattan Project for multi-cams, where the best and brightest comedy minds are encouraged and empowered to freshen up the format, to find the next Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, or Frasier? At the same time, nets should shore up their support for existing multi-cams with even the hint of a pulse. CBS’s Mom and ABC’s Cristela, for example, boast solid writing and strong points of view at their centers; they need to be supported in every way possible.

As part of a push to take more multi-cam chances, some observers also believe network development execs need to stop gravitating toward projects that appeal to their own personal tastes rather than mesh with what else is working on a given network. This, they say, is how NBC ends up programming quirky shows such as Go On or About a Boy behind a broad-based smash such as The Voice, or why ABC spent years banging its head against the wall trying to convince the Modern Family audience to embrace the sex-crazed singles of Happy Endings, Don’t Trust the B---- in Apt. 23, and Super Fun Night. “Too many people who work in comedy develop shows they like rather than the shows a network needs,” says one network exec frustrated by his colleagues’ inclinations.

4. Take more chances on unproven talent and ideas.
As networks have become more desperate for hits, they’ve started emulating their peers in the film business — relying more and more on established writers/producers and developing an endless parade of remakes and reboots of past movie and TV hits. Want to get depressed in a hurry? Check out the long list of movie and TV titles currently being eyed as possible TV comedies: Bewitched, Hitch, The Greatest American Hero, Real Genius, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Problem Child, Bachelor Party, Big, Marley & Me, and Monster-in-Law. Networks seem convinced they need instantly recognizable titles to help them cut through the programming clutter, even though they know better than anyone that TV’s biggest hits have been wholly original. The problem is even worse when it comes to who works on shows: Stars still trump unknowns most of the time, and established showrunners are far more likely to get the best time slots.

“There’s such risk aversion,” says a longtime broadcast warrior depressed by the fear-based philosophy that guides so many decisions. “We should be taking chances on new voices, but the talent pool we choose from is too thin. And we’re recycling a lot of the same stars on shows. You want to find the next Ray Romano or Sofia Vegara.” This doesn’t mean broadcasters should turn over their futures to folks just starting out in TV: ABC’s Black-ish and The Goldbergs both come from writers who are pushing 40 but didn’t have a long list of created-by credits. Rather, execs ought to worry less about managing “relationships” with current business partners (sorry, Chuck Lorre and Tina Fey) and focus more on giving a shot to folks who haven’t had as many at-bats creating comedies. Or, if network suits just can’t stand the thought of handing over prime-time real estate to someone totally untested, maybe they ought to compromise by letting writers and producers from other genres bring a fresh set of eyes to comedy. We’d check out a Shonda Rhimes sitcom in a heartbeat.

I'd love for there to be a new sitcom hit that I could enjoy and look forward to tuning in each week. But, I just no longer see it in the cards. Modern comedy has gone off in directions that just don't speak to me anymore. I truly don't expect to see another sitcom in my lifetime that will ever resonate for me again.

I agree with you. :(

1. Don’t launch a comedy you don’t believe in and aren’t willing to get behind
The incredibly brief lifespans of ABC’s fall comedies Selfie and Manhattan Love Story (both of which will burn off their unaired episodes on Hulu), along with de facto cancellations of NBC newbies Bad Judge and A to Z, were easily predicted before the shows even debuted, mostly because of how their respective networks handled their launches. ABC slotted Selfie and Love Story Tuesdays from 8 to 9 p.m., depriving them of an established lead-in and pitting them opposite the biggest hits on both NBC (The Voice) and CBS (NCIS). NBC bundled the thematically dissimilar Bad Judge and A to Z together on Thursday nights opposite ABC’s juggernaut Scandal while simultaneously announcing their 9 p.m. time slot would be filled by The Blacklist come February. Add in the fact that none of the four shows got much of a promotional push.
Selfie got a ton of advertising. I was glad it was pulled just so I wouldn't have to see any more obnoxious ads for it.

this is why Girl Meets World should be moved to ABC and made for a PG to PG 13 rating

you guys notice CBS no longer annoys the hell out of us with 2 Broke Girls commercials during NFL games??


in 2013 that's all they freakin did

Comedy is dying, both on broadcast and cable, after TBBT ends will it be any comedy with 15+ million viewers, looking at upcoming developments, it would say unlikely, FOX is stuck with those niche sitcoms, NBC with rom-coms, if there weren't laugh track on CBS comedies I wouldn't know the difference between them and dramas, ABC needs more multi-cams.
Multi-camera sitcoms now with supposedly a live audience just doesn't work for me anymore, sure TBBT is a juggernau hit but I can't seriously believe there's an actual filmed audience laughing at every stupid punchline being said on the show.

And ABC's only two multi-cam shows like Last Man Standing and Cristela are just garbage.

I don't see how Max and Caroline can be remotely annoying to the mostly male audience of NFL games, even if one thinks the show is awful (and it is).

If studios were smart they'd look at what they've done in the past (especially the 70s, 80s, & 90s) and copy it! It worked when ABC basically did a new updated version of "The Brady Bunch" in the 90s and called it "Step by Step". They seriously need to create more family oriented shows. I'm not saying everything needs to be all cutesy like "Full House" but at least give us a few family shows. I'd love to have another T.G.I.F. block without having to tune into the Disney channel.

I do enjoy "2 Broke Girls". For some reason that show ALWAYS makes me feel better and keeps me laughing. However..and there is a big however..I wouldn't feel comfortable watching it in front of someone who was conservative (and there's a lot of those people in my family) or a child who is full of questions.

I think the title of this thread suggests two things:

1. If there was a brand-new hit sitcom that launched right now and averaged a 5.0 or maybe a 6.0 in the 18-49 demographic, then The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family could force themselves out of first-run anytime soon.
2. I think comedy on network TV right now would be a disaster without TBBT and/or MF.
3. I still think The Simpsons needs to get out of first-run (for real) in the next couple of years.

I do enjoy "2 Broke Girls". For some reason that show ALWAYS makes me feel better and keeps me laughing. However..and there is a big however..I wouldn't feel comfortable watching it in front of someone who was conservative (and there's a lot of those people in my family) or a child who is full of questions.
And not to sound like an old fuddy duddy but 8pm is not an appropriate timeslot for how raunchy the show can get, I laugh at it but then there are times when they're really pushing the envelope to the point of desperation.

I agree with you. I tried watching it a few times, was too much for me. I can't imagine having a child these days with lack of real family shows. My brother pops in DVD's for his children because nothing is really suitable for kids. A while back they were watching a show on Disney and the kids were bullying another child that had a gluten allergy. That is not the type of thing my brother wants his kids learning from Disney. After that show parents all over the USA were outraged and contacted Disney but IMO the damage was done.

Here's How Eight Network Chiefs Would Solve the Industry's "Comedy Problem" (http://splitsider.com/2015/01/heres-how-eight-network-chiefs-would-solve-the-industrys-comedy-problem/)

I don't think the shock value is the problem at all. The networks have put wholesome shows on the air and they didn't do well in the ratings. They have done the same with shows that contain alot of sex jokes. Those also didn't do well. I think now days people just prefer dramas over comedies.

In this day and age it is hard to keep any show on the air. There are so many channels for the public to watch.