My Least Favorite Sitcom Plot – And the Lesson it Teaches

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https://comforttv.blogspot.com/2024/...-plot-and.html

Lately I’ve been getting reacquainted with The Doris Day Show, and early in that journey I watched an episode entitled “The Matchmakers.” Billy and Toby, the two kids of the widowed Doris Martin, attend a father-son event with their granddad (Denver Pyle, wonderful as always) – and lose every race. So they decide they need to get mom married by next year – preferably to someone younger and more athletic.

And in my mind I thought, yep, here it comes – the story that every classic situation comedy tells at least once, and the one I find the least appealing.

Sure enough, the kids stop by the sheriff’s office and convince Deputy Ubbie Puckum (Noam Pitlik) that Doris wants to get to know him better. And with a name like Ubbie Puckum, you know he’s not going to be Doris’s dream date. He’s not an awful person – no one is truly awful in Doris’s world – but he is shallow and vain, and tries to get Doris into a drive-in movie where he can put the moves on America’s sweetheart.



How many times have we seen variations on this plot? We look forward to spending time in the familiar and comfortable world inhabited by the characters on a beloved comedy series, only to watch their lives disrupted by someone new and unwelcome. It could be a blind date with an obnoxious suitor, or a houseguest that takes over the house, a pushy new neighbor, or an old school classmate that never grew up.

Of course I understand that storytelling requires some conflict to be explored and resolved. But I always prefer when those challenges emerge internally, because they are less heavy-handed. When a character we already know and like faces a moral dilemma or begins to drift off the path of the righteous, it piques my interest far more than when some outsider arrives and makes everyone miserable.

Do I even need to cite examples? It’s such a common trope that you’re probably already ahead of me.