With both
Fraiser and
Friends having ended their run, I have been reading that the sitcom is dying, if not already dead. I don't believe it for a minute. After all, this is something I have heard before.
I will admit, that the new crop of sitcoms debuting this season do not seem very promising to me. I do not have high hopes for
Joey, the spin off from
Friends. While I do believe that actor Matt LeBlanc has talent, the character of Joey is not one that will allow him to display it. For me Joey was always the most boring character on
Friends. He seemed to be the token fool on the cast, with not a lot of depth or complexity. On an emsemble cast such as
Friends, Joey could be quite funny, but only because he had other people to play off of. I'm not sure that as a lead character he will be able to anchor a show. The rest of the characters are going to have to both be very interesting and they are going to have to be able to act as straight men for Joey. Of course, beyond my concerns over whether Joey could hold his own on a show, there is the fact that the writing team being
Friends is the same one behind
Joey. Given the fact that I think the quality of
Friends declined significantly in its last several years, I don't have high hopes for the quality of scripts on
Joey.
As to other sitcoms debuting this season, some of them boast big names, but none of them seem very interesting.
Center of the Universe features John Goodman, Ed Asner, Olympia Dukakis, and Jean Smart. Unfortunately, the show does not seem particularly original. Unfortunately, the concept does not seem very original. It concerns a couple (Goodman and Smart) who have problems because of their off the wall family (Goodman's parents Asner and Dukakis). Despite the collective talent of the cast, I don't think the series hold much promise.
Listen Up features Jason Alexander as a sportswriter/TV host. A lot of the series centres on his homelife. The series is based on Tony Kornheiser's
Washington Post columns, which I have heard are very funny (I've never read them myself). And Jason Alexander is
very talented; he was by far the best actor on
Seinfeld. Unfortunately, the concept behind the series, despite being based on Kornheiser's columns, reminds me a lot of
Everybody Loves Raymond and
Dave's World. In other words, it doesn't sound particularly original. ABC has re-arranged their TGIF line up, adding
Complete Savages. The show centres on Keith Carradine as the father of five sons. Now I do have to give it marks for centring on a single father, something we have not seen in some time on television. The problem is that the show is on ABC, the network that has given us
Hope and Faith and
My Wife and Kids. I have to seriously wonder about the quality of the show.
As to returning sitcoms, the only one I really like is
Scrubs, although it can be inconsistent at times. I do think
Everybody Loves Raymond,
The King of Queens, and
The George Lopez Show are quality shows, although they aren't really my cup of tea. As to the rest, I am still a bit puzzled as to how most of ABC's sitcoms and most of CBS's sitcoms have managed to survive. Indeed,
Still Standing seems to me to simply be
The King of Queens with kids.
The outlook for sitcoms is then not exactly cheery this season from my point of view. But that does not mean the format is dying or dead as many in the media would have us believe. In the early Eighties many thought the sitcom was dead. It was at that point that
Cheers and
The Cosby Show revitalised the format. After both
The Cosby Show and
Cheers left the air, many thought the sitcom would go the way of the dinosaur. It was then that
Friends and
Frasier debuted, while
Seinfeld finally got the recognition it deserved. Even if there are no breakout hits this season, I suspect there will be next season or the season after that. The sitcom format has been around for a combined total of 75 years on both radio and television. At no point in that 75 years have there been no sitcoms on the air. For better or worse, the sitcom will survive.