In retrospect, the 3-camera set-up that was developed due to limitations in early television production, and that makes sitcoms look like they are recorded stage plays, seems more like a blessing than a curse. On top of all this, they were funny.Īs television story-telling has become more sophisticated, we have lost the directness of older sitcom form. No matter what happened in an episode, life went on. They catalogued the world into twenty minute chunks. This was absolutely true in my case, as old sitcoms scratched an itch that cartoons, no matter how great, could not: they reflected the “real” world and presented everyday situations in understandable ways. What is it exactly about sitcoms that speaks to me so profoundly? Comedian Guy Branum (who I’ve been quoting a lot lately, huh?) has a theory that old sitcoms make perfect television for younger kids who want to understand the adult world, that the simulacrum of real-life they present is simple enough to be understood by anyone regardless of age, but complex enough to make a child feel sophisticated. Give me mistaken identities! Give me corny jokes! Give me pratfalls! I’ll take the clockwork farce of Frasier, the low-fi visual effects of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the heart-warming lessons of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air over the latest prestige t.v. Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, The Crown? All trash. Call me crazy, but I don’t really like being bored out of my mind for twelve episodes as boring characters deliver pseudo-intellectual dialogue only to be inevitably disappointed by a dum plot-twist in the finale. With very few exceptions, television’s recent attempts to become more cinematic have only made me less interested in it.

I love when they’re filmed “live in front of a studio audience,” and I especially love the unfairly maligned “laugh track.” To my mind, the sitcom should be regarded, right along side Jazz, as the great American art form. This is why the more I heard about WandaVision and what it was about – a superhero works through her trauma by reliving the sitcoms she used to watch as a child – the more it made me nostalgic, not for comic books and superheroes, but for my own sitcom journey. I find it both fun and comforting to hear Lou spin theories nerdy theories about Marvel superheroes – more fun, in fact, than watching the actual Marvel movies.

I didn’t watch WandaVision, but I experienced it second hand by listening to the recaps my friend Louis Gaudio put out as part of his podcast Robots vs. Trust me, this motherfuckers will put the cast of ‘Seinfeld’ to shame.

El chavo saw game