Three cameras and a studio audience
The sitcom, short for situation comedy, was shaped by a show from 1951. When I Love Lucy began, its stars, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, insisted on filming it in front of a live studio audience with three film cameras running at once, so the best shots of each moment could be cut together later. Filming instead of broadcasting live also meant episodes could be shown again, and the rerun was born. Most sitcoms since, from CHEERS and FRIENDS to The BIG BANG Theory, have followed the same pattern: a few sets, a group of characters stuck with each other, and a live audience laughing.
When there was no audience, or the laughs were not loud enough, many American shows added a laugh track. An engineer called Charley Douglass built a machine in the 1950s, nicknamed the laff box, stocked with recorded laughs he could play at just the right moment, and he guarded its workings closely for years.
Twelve episodes of chaos
British sitcoms tend to be much shorter than American ones. FAWLTY TOWERS, about a rude and panicky hotel owner in Torquay, ran for only twelve episodes, in 1975 and 1979, and it is still regularly voted one of the greatest British television programmes. John Cleese based the character on a real hotel owner he had stayed with, who threw a guest's briefcase out of the door, thinking it might contain a bomb. BLACKADDER followed one cowardly, scheming family through four periods of history, from the Middle Ages to the First World War trenches, with each series set in a new era. BLACK BOOKS was set in a small, grumpy London bookshop.
The biggest goodbyes
The final episode of a long-running sitcom can bring a whole country to a stop. When the American comedy M*A*S*H, set in an army hospital during the Korean War, ended in 1983 after eleven series, around 106 million Americans watched the last episode, a record for a scripted programme that stood for decades. In Britain, a Christmas episode of Only Fools and Horses in 1996 was watched by more than 24 million people, over two in every five people in the country.
A bar in Boston and a spin-off
The bar in CHEERS was based on a real Boston pub called the Bull and Finch, which renamed itself after the show and became a tourist attraction. When Cheers ended in 1993 after eleven series, one of its characters, a psychiatrist, got his own show, FRASIER, which also ran for eleven series, so the actor Kelsey Grammer played the same character for twenty years. Frasier won the Emmy for best comedy five years in a row.
Newer sitcoms often drop the studio audience altogether and are filmed like documentaries, with characters talking to the camera; our The Office page covers the show that made that style popular. MODERN FAMILY and PARKS AND REC followed it. BROOKLYN Nine-Nine was cancelled in 2018 and rescued by a different network within about a day, after a flood of complaints from fans. SEINFELD, SCRUBS, COMMUNITY, ROSEANNE, TAXI, the FRESH PRINCE, RAYMOND, MALCOLM, WILL AND GRACE, SPIN CITY and NEWSRADIO complete the grid. Our comedians page covers some of the performers behind them.