1980s sitcoms By Todd VanDerWerff | The A.V. Club

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/articles/1980s-sitcoms,50003/

It was the fall of 1982, and the sitcom was dead.

M*A*S*H, long the top-rated sitcom on television, was set to leave the air voluntarily after 11 seasons in the spring of 1983. Taxi, which won three consecutive Best Comedy Emmys for its first three seasons, had been canceled by ABC after its fourth. (NBC would pick it up, but the ratings for season five would prove so disastrous that it was canceled yet again.) Barney Miller, the incumbent best comedy series Emmy winner, had left the air in May. The social satires of Norman Lear now felt long-in-the-tooth, and James L. Brooks and the other men who had worked for the 1970s’ other sitcom powerhouse, MTM Enterprises, were mostly pursuing careers in film as MTM moved into revolutionizing the TV drama (which it did quite handily). The few popular sitcoms remaining were holdover ’70s hits that were long past their prime or terrible attempts to recapture that ’70s spirit, that feeling of sitcoms being relevant on the national scene.

To make matters worse, the two most promising new sitcoms of the fall—the two most promising new sitcoms anyone had seen in ages—both underperformed. NBC’s Cheers settled into a position at the bottom of the ratings, while CBS’ Newhart benefitted from its time slot, but still lost millions upon millions of viewers from a cushy M*A*S*H lead-in. Despite a crippling recession, American viewers didn’t turn to comedy for comfort, as they previously did in trying economic times. Instead, they looked to glitzy, over-the-top soaps like Dallas and Dynasty, shows that allowed for a few moments of escapism into the world of the idle rich. Critics huffed about this situation. If viewers wouldn’t watch Cheers, Taxi, or Newhart, but they would watch The Love Boat, was there any hope for quality sitcoms that dominated the ’70s?

Meanwhile, the people who made sitcoms—those who hadn’t escaped to the film industry—were increasingly bored with the strictures of the form. Where the sitcoms of the ’70s had reacted against the plastic, single-camera worlds of the worst ’60s sitcoms, the very idea of setup-punchline humor punctuated by audience laughter was beginning to feel more and more reductive to many TV writers. Wasn’t there another way to do this? Sure, Cheers was great, and everybody wanted to get a job in that writers’ room, but wouldn’t it be possible to do away with the audience laughter or the laugh track altogether? Couldn’t something more like a film comedy emerge?

The story of sitcoms in the ’80s is a story of a near-death experience that abruptly became a roaring success. It’s also a story of how iconoclastic creators clashed with networks, following the model of M*A*S*H head Larry Gelbart and Barney Miller creator Danny Arnold, in an attempt to break the sitcom rules as they’d been written. But at some level, it’s a story with a simple basic question at its center: What’s funnier, going to work or staying at home?

[TMC]

The 1980-1983 era was a bad time for sitcoms

[king of comedy]

Great article.

[TMC]

Regarding sitcoms like MASH or Norman Lear's shows (and Lou Grant for that matter, even though it was a drama despite being spun off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show), that began in the '70s and carried over into the early '80s, you can argue that the reasons why by the time the '80s rolled around, the country (for better or worse) was taking to Ronald Reagan. What I mean is that by this point in time, our attitudes evolved as the nation adapted to the more upbeat, "can-do" feel of the Reagan years, (particularly his first term). As a direct result, all of that over-philosophizing (especially MASH once Alan Alda got more creative control) seemed dated and out-of-place. To put it in another way, these types of shows were when you get right down to it, tailor-made for the '70s with their social-political themes and pontificating.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by TMC

The 1980-1983 era was a bad time for sitcoms

Here's another article that I just found that looks into this time period:

In the period between the end of All in the Family and the beginning of The Cosby Show, the sitcom struggled to compete with the soapy glitz and glamour of Dallas and Dynasty and the fast-paced action of Magnum, P.I. and The A-Team. Few bona-fide hits emerged during this period while flop after flop piled up; just ask McLean Stevenson. Many of the lucky few that ran long enough to leave any sort of impression on popular culture featured kids or teens as the main focus.