Suggested readings
Content Guide: Genres and Subgenres
Content Guide: The Office as an Example of Subgenre
Content Guide: How to Write A Proposal
MIttell Chapters 5-6
Bianculli Chapter 9
Content Guide: Genres and Subgenres
Conventions
TV programming is made up of genres and each has its own conventions. Each one of a large number of similar shows will vary in the details, but mostly comply with the conventions. One of the simplest to discuss is situation comedy. Situation comedies feature:
1. The same basic group of people who interact primarily with each other and various guest characters.
2. One main character and multiple supporting characters such as on The Mary Tyler Moore Show or The Bernie Mac Show, or two main characters (generally a romantic couple or two best friends) and other supporting characters such as The Jeffersons or Mad About You, or a more evenly balanced ensemble such as Friends or the 2017 revival of Will & Grace.
3. A “situation” which might be a home, an office or other workplace or place people traditionally “hang out” like a coffee shop or bar such as on Cheers. Some sitcoms, like the ones Bianculli calls “splitcoms” but others might call “hybrid” or something else might have two situations like the main character’s home and their workplace, in more or less equal measures, such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, or Black-ish.
4. “Wacky” adventures that put these characters into an uncomfortable position they have to get out of each week. There may be one storyline, or a more prominent “A” story, and a less important and often zanier “B” story, or there may be multiple storylines going on at once, sometimes with convergences of these as pioneered on Seinfeld and continued on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
5. Popular supporting characters or guest characters may be “spun off” into sitcoms of their own, for example Maude or Grown-Ish.
Variations
While older sitcoms tend to have their characters more or less reset to zero at the end of each episode, with only occasional changes throughout the run of series, these days most shows (with the exception of very long running animated shows such as The Simpsons) have more of a “story arc” that allows the characters to change over time and to remember and refer back to things that happened earlier in the season, or multiple seasons ago. This allows a family sitcom like Arrested Development to have much of its humor be reliant on such “call backs,” or a family sitcom like The Conners refer back to incidents that happened, or characters audiences first met on the 1990s sitcom Roseanne, on which it is based.
Whichever style the family sitcom takes, it features a family. This may involve a married couple, a married couple and their children, a blended family that includes children with various parents or with additional relatives like aunts/uncles, grandparents, or close family friends that serve as surrogate parents, or something like adult siblings. In general, the family unit is what is most important on those shows, with stories about work, friendships, politics and world issues taking a backseat to stories about the family itself.
Families may, and in fact do, fight on these shows, but without the family unit there would be no story, so keeping the family together is the most important thing for these shows. That’s why adults who in real life would have their own homes, possibly hundreds or thousands of miles away often make choices that leave them not only in the town the rest of the family lives in, but often in the home. You may notice that even brainy teens on sitcoms who we learn early on are excellent students who want to go to Harvard end up attending colleges close to home or not at all (unless they are getting their own spinoffs), and that random siblings or cousins no one has previously mentioned sometimes just show up out of nowhere to move in and help keep the family home a bustling place with lots of story possibilities. Can you think of any stories like that?
Workplace Sitcoms
On workplace sitcoms, by the same token, keeping the gang working together is the most important thing, so even if characters seem to dislike each other or do things that would get most of us fired, they generally end up staying at the job (unless the actor needs to get out of his or her contract), or talented workers who have opportunities to go elsewhere, often for a hefty raise or significant promotion, usually decide to stay at the workplace because they “love the people,” or leave and are never heard from or about again, even though in real life people change jobs, but might keep in touch with their friends.
Some conventions of workplace sitcoms include:
1. An office or other work setting. If it’s an office, there are probably chairs, desks, typewriters, desktop computers, laptops, or tablets depending on when the shows was shot (or is set). Or if the show is set at a bar, there’s a main barroom, liquor bottles, beer taps, stools, tables and chairs, and probably a private office or storage room, and perhaps a pool table or dartboard.
2. Probably a boss we see in most episodes, but there may also be bigger bosses so there can be directives from a corporate office, or a community board as in Parks and Recreation.
3. A variety of work roles—for example on a sitcom about making a TV or radio show there might be on air personalities, producers, writers, camera people or engineers and perhaps secretaries or assistants. So, on Newsradio, a sitcom about an all-news radio station, there is the owner, Jimmy James, the program director, Dave, senior reporter Lisa and junior reporter Matthew, on air personalities Catherine, and at first Bill and in later seasons Max as well as engineer Joe and secretary Beth. Appropriate guest characters included people being interviewed on the radio show, an efficiency expert, a potential new owner of the station, temps, and an intern.
4. Typical plotlines might revolve around romantic relationships among the characters, potential promotions or raises, directives from the boss or some other entity that change the way the workplace typically works (for example a requirement for uniforms when there were none or a sale on a product), complaints from the community or anything else that will cause the characters to band together to try to solve a problem, cause an argument among them, or otherwise cause some sort of comedic situation.
Hangout Sitcoms
Although sitcom characters on family or workplace sitcoms sometimes have outside friends in addition to their families or workmates, hangout sitcoms about friends who spend time together without a “situation” of a family or workplace are somewhat newer, starting essentially with Seinfeld in 1989, and including such shows as Living Single in 1993, Friends in 1994, Girlfriends in 2000, and How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014). What are some of the common features of shows like this?
Other considerations
Some sitcoms add a note of wackiness or a “high concept”—it’s a family, but one or more of the members are aliens, witches or from another time period. Instead of an office or a TV station, it’s a space station, or things like that.
While some 1950s situation comedies were filmed with no audiences, most situation comedies from the time of I Love Lucy until the late 1990s relied heavily on “kickers” or laugh lines, followed immediately by the laughter of either a live audience, who watched the actors directly, an audience that watched the show “on tape” and laughed or gasped accordingly, or a laugh track, used to enhance audience laughter that wasn’t quite boisterous enough, or to substitute entirely for it. They were generally shot on a stage with 3 or 4 cameras, and therefore are known as “multicam” sitcoms.
While there are still sitcoms shot that way, most are what are called “single camera” shows that are shot on a location or a soundstage without an audience, multiple times from multiple angles and are edited more like a movie or a TV drama. There is generally no laugh track in these shows, in part because since the camera moves around, there is no obvious place for an audience, even an imaginary one, to be.
A nostalgia craze of brought us a number of revivals, remakes, and revisionings of older shows in general, many of which are sitcoms. For example, many shows from the 1990s were revived in the late 2010s, including Mad About You, Murphy Brown, Will & Grace and Roseanne (which became The Conners after its first revival season).
There was also a new framing for the show One Day at a Time (1975-1984). The original series was about a divorced [white] woman and her two teenage daughters and started airing when it was unusual to see divorced characters as protagonists on TV. The new One Day at a Time (2017-2020) starred a Latinx family and dealt with a lot of up-to-date issues—a divorced nurse who got her training in the military, brought up a gay teenage daughter and a younger son and spent several episodes on issues of immigration and assimilation, while The Wonder Years, (1988–1993) about a young boy growing up in the Vietnam era had a revival in 2021, but it centered on an African American family and its experiences.
Other genres:
You can do the same kind of analysis with “procedural” dramas or family dramas. Dramas about doctors, lawyers, cops, spies, or politicians have their own trappings, for instance medical shows will have doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, patients, and caretakers of parents such as parents, spouses or teachers. Shows will probably take place primarily in some combination of exam rooms, operating rooms, or emergency rooms, doctors' offices, waiting rooms, and near patient beds, whether in a ward or a private room. Props include stethoscopes, surgical masks, blood pressure cuffs, IVs and so forth. Stories revolve around matters of life, death, sometimes birth or illness, but also probably includes relationships ,including romantic ones, friendships and rivalries among the staff. What can you think of for cop or lawyer shows?
Soap operas, which used to populate much of network TV on weekday afternoons, but have dwindled down to a few shows have their own conventions. While some shows may be classified “nighttime soap operas” about often wealthy families and rivalries among the members, other shows are harder to classify. Shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or Succession are considered “Quality Dramas” that may not have as many genre conventions in common with each other, but are more about interesting but flawed characters than plots and genre conventions.
Still others, particularly shows from the early 1990s on, blend multiple genres in one show. So, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a high school show with the conventions of those type of shows (lockers, teachers, librarians and principals, popular kids vs. nerds, first love and sex, exams and papers, activities like school talent shows), It’s also about a girl who kills vampires and uses the conventions of the supernatural (magic, blood, pointy stakes, suspenseful music).
As you watch shows for this course, consider the genre conventions the shows you are watching, and the ones it is choosing not to use or others it is choosing to blend in.
Reading:
Poniewozik, J. (2021, June 16). The New York Times.
Content Guide: The Office as an Example of Subgenre
If you can find it, please watch the episode of The Office called “Diversity Day”, Season 1 Episode 5, Mar 29, 2005. If you can't watch it, find a description. Note that this is from the American remake of The Office, not the original British show.
Our first question would be, “What genre is The Office?” How does it resemble other shows in that genre?”—in other words, what are the conventions of that genre and subgenre? How does it differ from shows in the same subgenre before it? In other words, what are the inventions of the genre and subgenre? What were the politics like when the show started?
NOTE: Please make sure to consider the subgenre of the shows you are looking at. When you are working on assignments, you will have a much easier time comparing workplace sitcoms with each other than you will with family or hangout comedies or with other comedy type shows like variety shows or “fake news.” It is not useful to write a “history of comedy” in general.
You can probably tell from the title that The Office is a show about the workplace. How did The Office resemble other workplace situation comedies from the past? How did it differ from them? In what ways does it make allusions to any earlier or contemporary shows? The way to know this would be to watch older workplace sitcoms. Some popular examples include The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (both of these are more of a hybrid or “splitcom” so make sure you choose episodes that happen primarily in the workplace), WKRP in Cincinnati, Newsradio, Cheers, Just Shoot Me, Spin City. Newer shows include 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Silicon Valley.
There is also the question of ideology and message:
For example, if you watch The Office you will see issues of diversity, equity and inclusion such as racism are featured. Michael Scott makes fun of people for their accents, and how they look, and how they are perceived to drive. In another similar episode, he makes fun of a disabled employee. He clearly believes the most broad, old fashioned stereotypes about people, even as he works with people from multiple races and ethnicities who clearly are not stereotypical.
Earlier workplace situation comedies often shied away from this type of humor by having entirely or mostly white characters, or having one or two serve as the “token” employee of color, who often had less to do than many of the other characters or simply primarily ignored questions of race.
The Office, although the lead characters are white, does include several characters of color in smaller roles. In later seasons, some of these roles get bigger and we get to know Kelly and Oscar, in particular, much better.
The Office is not like a lot of earlier sitcoms though, where the prejudiced boss would “learn a lesson” and everyone would hug. instead it's what some would call a “cringe comedy” designed to make you feel uncomfortable and be unsure who, if anyone, to like. Yet, it's clear that the writers believe that racism is wrong, and that they are confident the viewer is in on the joke, although there could indeed be viewers who think that Asian people being bad at driving or other ridiculous stereotypes are true.
Content Guide: How to Write a Proposal for detailed instructions on this assignment.
For the proposal, you are not expected to have watched all the episodes yet, but you should be familiar with the shows you chose, so you may want to watch at least one episode of each.
Please read carefully before writing and submitting:
Choose a subgenre:
1. Family situation comedies
2. Workplace situation comedies
3. Variety shows
4. Cop or detective dramas
5. Medical dramas
6. Talk shows
7. Animated shows
8. News programs
Choose one issue
1. Gender or Sexuality
2. Race or Ethnicity
3. Social class
4. Disability
5. Age
Choose your episodes (ideally your grouping will include the first episode and, for older shows, the final episode, but any three episodes will do):
· Watch at least 3 episodes of a single TV show in your subgenre from before 1970
· Watch at least 3 episodes of a single TV show in your subgenre from 1971-1985
· Watch at least 3 episodes of a single TV show in your subgenre from 1985-2015
· Watch at least 3 episodes of a single TV show in your subgenre that is still on the air
Develop a thesis statement that argues something about how your genre has changed in terms of your issue over time.
Plan to discuss your shows in chronological order, or you may express a good reason for another organizational system and then use that system.
For each show, include
· What time and day of the week was this show offered?
· What network or service was this show on?
· How many episodes of this show were there, over what period of time?
· Who were the stars? What other influence did they have on the media landscape (other TV, movies, magazines, etc.)
· Who might have watched this show? Who might they have watched with?
· Through what mechanism might they have watched this show?
· Were there other ways to watch this show than on TV at a specific time?
· How were people likely to get or share information about this show?
· What did the networks or show producers get from viewers of the show? How did they take their feelings into account?
· What can you say (at this early stage) about your chosen issue of gender or sexuality, race and ethnicity, social class. sexuality, disability, or age and this show?
Incorporate at least two articles from scholarly research. You may additionally use and cite articles from popular magazines, newspapers, or entertainment focused-sites. Quote and cite them correctly.
Writing tips for students not familiar with proposals or scholarly writing:
The Thesis Statement and Arguments
· Write a thesis statement. This should argue something, never just describe something. Students often want to talk about race on television or working women on television, or, even, if they're following directions, working women on family sitcoms, but then, even after they've narrowed down their ideas (since any of these is too much for a dissertation) they just start describing. Describing is not what writing a college paper is about–you need to argue something.
· You can't just argue something that no one could really argue with you about. So, the fact that things have changed for women on TV or African Americans on TV is not arguable. They have. But how have they changed? Is this good or bad? Can you pinpoint a time when things changed, and how?
· A good way to write a thesis is in the form, “although . . . actually”. So a good thesis could be “Although it seems as if women have been portrayed in a progressively better light in workplace situation comedies over the television era, actually there has been more pressure on them to choose motherhood in recent years.” Then you will make sure to give some examples of both how it seems as if things are getting better, and examples of how it is actually getting worse.
· Be sure you are proposing something you will later fill in, not just writing what you think is the first page or two of your paper.
· A proposal in this class would include the thesis statement, and the specific examples you would like to use. So it would include that fact that for a paper with the thesis “Although it seems as if there has been progress for women without children on TV sitcoms, actually there is pressure on women in workplace sitcoms to have children”, that you will discuss Our Miss Brooks (1952-1956), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Newsradio (1995-1999), and a current show including at least one prominent working woman. These are good choices because they are more or less equally spread apart in time and similarly show at least one important woman in the workplace.
Outline, Skeleton or Plan
· Then you may or may not want to outline but try to come up with a skeleton for your ideas.
· The most likely order is chronological, so plan to write about the earliest shows first. If you have other methods to determine order make sure you make it clear what these methods are and why you chose that order.
· Come up with some other sorts of questions you may want to answer or issues you find important to discuss. You can just mention them at this point—you can put them into context later.
· Stay focused. Although as an undergraduate student, this may seem like a long paper to you, as part of the scholarly conversation you are entering into, it's pretty short, and you can really only deal with one or two ideas.
Using, Quoting, and Citing Scholarly Research and Styles for TV Titles
· Support the major statements you have made in your proposal with quotes from the scholarly and other research. You don't have to support every sentence, but should demonstrate that you know how to incorporate scholarly and other types of research.
· Quotes should be part of a complete sentence and all quotes must be introduced, so for example, you could say, Dr. Eric Smith, a professor of media studies from, Harvard University states that “quote” (source). Then explain how the quote supports what you are arguing.
· Also make sure that you italicize titles of TV shows, movies, books, journals, newspapers, and magazines. Episode titles and article titles use quotation marks.
The Works Consulted Page and Citations
· You may use MLA, Chicago/Turabian, or APA style, but be consistent.
· There are many pages all over the Internet that will refresh your memory on how to do this.
· Make sure your citation includes all the required information: who wrote it, what the title of the article is, what the journal, magazine, or newspaper it is from, the date it was published, and the date you found it. If it's a book include the title and the publisher. If it is an article that you found online, include the link, whether your style requires this or not. If it's an article you found in a library database, look for something that says “permanent link.” Make sure the link works.
· The point is that your reader, whether the instructor or anyone else, should be able to read the article too, and determine if it's an appropriate article, and possibly read it to know more about the subject.
· You may use a citation manager like or Zotero or Menderley (look at the library website for help), or a tool like the OWL, but check the citation it gives you as they are often incorrect and may leave out information.
· Is the capitalization appropriate for your style? Is all the information there and spelled correctly? Are your Works Consulted in alphabetical order?
