Fading Laugh Tracks: Is the Traditional Broadcast Sitcom On Its Way Out?

If you look at a list of the most-watched television shows of the 1990s, you’ll find that seven of the top 10 were sitcoms.

As any fan who lived through it can tell you, the decade was a golden era for three-camera, live-studio-audience comedies.

Shows like Seinfeld, Friends, Home Improvement, Frasier, and Roseanne were averaging close to 30 million viewers per episode, a figure that would make any network exec do a little happy dance in 2024.

By 2000, hourlong dramas and reality shows had taken over the TV landscape, with only Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond landing spots among the year’s 10 most-watched shows.

Those viewing trends have remained in place ever since, but for a long time, the sitcom continued to show signs of life.

The Office and Modern Family switched up the formula, going with a cinema verite mockumentary style and ditching the laugh track.

And in doing so, they seemed to have breathed new life into the art form.

Then the 2010s saw the rise of a hip new brand of TV comedy.

Shows like Community, New Girl, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine kept the format fresh for a new generation of young adults.

But in the 2020s one of TV’s oldest genres has been showing signs of age.

The Big Four networks are still offering quality comedy, of course:

Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, and several other new sitcoms have found success with both critics and audiences.

Watch Abbott Elementary Online

And newcomers like St. Denis Medical and Happy’s Place are off to promising starts.

But the broadcast networks are offering far fewer sitcoms in 2024 than in years past.

And several of the current comedies are rebooted or spun-off from previously successful series, as is the case with Night Court and Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage, a trend that reflects a reluctance to take risks with what was once considered the most safely bankable genre.

There are many factors behind this trend:

Watch Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage Online

For one thing, cable and streaming outlets are not limited by FCC standards and practices guidelines, meaning that when it comes to comedy, HBO, Netflix, and their ilk can offer writers a lot more freedom.

Thus, in the world of edgy humor, the broadcast networks just can’t push the envelope as far.

And, of course, dramas have an easier time molding their storylines into the serialized, season-long plots that audiences seem to prefer nowadays.

Then there’s the rise of reality TV, which seems to have taken the place that lighthearted sitcoms used to occupy in millions of American households.

And then there’s the fact that Americans are currently so divided that we can’t even agree on what’s funny and what’s not.

When Seinfeld and Home Improvement ruled the roost, they routinely pulled in over 30 million viewers a week.

With audiences that size, there had to be some significant overlap.

But it’s tough to imagine millions of modern-day viewers would be equally amused by the plights of both Manhattan singles and a Midwestern family.

Both shows might find decent-sized niches nowadays, but the sort of broad cross-demographic appeal they enjoyed in the ’90s is almost certainly a thing of the past.

Yes, for numerous reasons, the sitcom is not as dominant as it used to be in today’s TV landscape.

Perhaps it will eventually make a comeback. But for now, dramas and reality TV are the dominant forces on broadcast.

And that’s a shame, as it seems that come the prime time hours, most of us have already experienced more than enough drama and reality.

What we could really use is to share a laugh with our neighbors. Or at least with a studio audience.