Last week’s finale of Will & Grace marked the end of the popular comedy famous for promoting the image of the smart, successful homosexual, but it may have also marked the near-end of sitcoms as we know them.
It’s the last of classic sitcoms, such as Seinfeld and Friends, on which our generation grew up. It’s the kind of show that featured the characteristic laugh track and hair-brained schemes, which ended with a good old-fashioned chuckle.
With Will & Grace’s exit, and reality television’s ongoing primetime triumph, maybe “You’re fired!” and “You’re still in the running to be America’s Next Top Model” will ring louder than laugh tracks.
Perhaps Friends star Jennifer Aniston said it best: “What happened to a great half-hour sitcom? It’s all Dancing with the Stars, Knitting with the Stars, Building a Home with the Stars, Living in the Homes of Stars!”
With Friends, Aniston was a part of NBC’s gimmicky Thursday-night lineup, dubbed Must-See TV, which was a staple of that sitcom era. Besides providing consistent entertainment, the show pulled stellar Nielsen ratings (coupled with Seinfeld).
Music junior Paul Wallgren, a dedicated Friends fan since it premiered in 1994, has noticed the absence of quality sitcoms – and the dominance of reality TV.
“Reality television is really sticking around,” he says. “People feel they can relate to reality TV stars, because they’re ‘real people.’ People like that reality shows aren’t scripted or planned.”
Wallgren says he remembers he and his friends piling into one dorm room to watch 2004’s Friends series finale.
“We said, ‘If anything happens to NUTV, we’re going to sue the school,'” he jokes.
Once Seinfeld and Friends bowed out, NBC banked on Will & Grace, one of their more successful post-Friends series, to maintain viewers.
Wallgren says he has sitcom-fan friends who now watch less television, except for reruns, because the “quality sitcoms” have ended. He also hasn’t found any worthy replacements.
“After Will & Grace, there’s nothing,” he says. “NBC has been trying forever, and it hasn’t really worked.”
Scrubs, though, might be one of the few exceptions. Not only has it kept a loyal audience, but with the help of talented writers – not to mention Zach Braff’s burgeoning fame after Garden State – it has attracted more viewers as well.
Still, Scrubs is different from the sitcoms we enjoyed in years past. Without a laugh track, it follows the reality or documentary-style format of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Arrested Development.
But even those comedies can’t maintain media buzz: Serial dramas and reality TV have grabbed hold of viewers and given them new obsessions. We don’t talk about Rachel and Ross anymore; we have “oh my God” conversations about Meredith’s choice between Dr. McDreamy and Finn on Grey’s Anatomy and heated debates about Chris Daughtry being voted off American Idol.
“With reality TV, you can start wherever, stop wherever, and it can be playing in the background,” says Weinberg senior Jeet Patel, who watches most reality shows, including Idol, The Simple Life and The Real World, but also watched sitcom classics. “I think society is too fast-paced for sitting down and watching a regular show. Who has the time? Not me.”
College life doesn’t make that investment much easier; students don’t have the endless hours of TV-watching they had in high school –
