7 ms·

Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula

163 points by samclemens 12y ago

Keyframe 12y ago
Form != Formula
- greenyoda 12y ago
  This usage of "formula" is entirely correct. Looking in the dictionary: formula: 2. any fixed or conventional method for doing something: "His mystery stories were written according to a popular formula." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formula http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formula
  - Keyframe 12y ago
    Both things stand. It's a formula for a form then. There are screenplay formulas though, which are more granular than form he presented in that text. Forms are useful in screenplays and, for the most part, expected because they work. Formulas are shunned.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    I think Keyframe is right here. There are many populr story shapes and even guides on how to shape your story using beats (eg if you're making a 90 minute feature film, the hero should run into a problem by page 5 and we should become aware of a villain by page 12 etc. etc.). Form lays out the temporal structure of the story and is useful in terms of adjusting pacing to fit the attention span and general expectations of the audience. The most popular story form in Hollywood is Hero's Journey, based on common elements in mythic archetypes drawing on the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. It's a very useful tool for making sure you have a good story arc, without being overly specific. Formula is more plot-oriented, involving stock characters, relationships and so on, eg part of the formula in every Terminator movie, supportive and antagonistic characters from the future (or with access to knowledge of the future) pursue the protagonist; the antagonistic robot finds the protagonist first and is about to kill her/him when suddenly the supportive character appears in a burst of significant firepower (to the surprise of everyone else in-world, but not to the audience) and tells the protagonist 'come with me if you want to live.' It seemed like a typical quotable one-liner in the first film, but it has endured because it encapsulates both the complexities of the basic time-travel story in the Terminator films and the more general dramatic need for the protagonist to make a risky investment of trust. The time-travel schtick is a narrative framework used to explore basic questions about the inherent anxiety of adult relationships.
azakai 12y ago
I don't think there's much substance here. Given the constraints of a typical sitcom - 22 minutes, comedy, resets each week (no new characters, no major changes to character's lives), the "formula" is basically the only option: You present a problem, you wrestle with the problem, and you resolve the problem (maybe with a subplot or two). What else can you do? You can avoid having a problem at all. But that loses all the usual dramatic structure and tension that we expect, not just from comedies but from tragedies all the way back to ancient greece. Or you can have multiple problems, each resolved in turn. This was done by the Simpsons in several seasons (but not in the earliest or latest). One problem would occur, quickly get out of hand, then either get resolved or morph into another problem. It made the Simpsons feel much more "chaotic" and "dense". Otherwise, the "formula" is basically the only way to do it. Maybe I missed something the article was saying?
- ourmandave 12y ago
  I remember hearing about the sitcom formula watching an interview with the Simpsons writers. They were kind of reluctant to talk about it the same way a magician wouldn't want to talk about how the tricks are done. The part that stood out was when they said they always reveal the main conflict just before the mid-episode commercial break so you'll stay tuned. From then on I can't help not see it every time I watch a half hour show.
  - mikemoka 12y ago
    there is no question a framework of reference might be used, it has been used for fairy tales as well actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp
    - cariaso 12y ago
      In the USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell is a later but more familiar example due to his work on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
- 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
derekp7 12y ago
I'd like to see a followup article on how the meat of different sitcoms is presented. For example, I remember figuring out the formula for Three's Company, where in almost every episode the "muddle" mostly involves a misunderstanding between characters, or where the audience has information that one or more of the characters doesn't have. Whereas other sitcoms have information that is kept from the audience until the end, which builds a different kind of suspense (in the first case, you are wondering when and how a character is going to "get it", and in the second case you are waiting for the characters to reveal final information to you).
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  The muddle type is called a comedy of manners - where misunderstandings arise because the characters are too shy/ polite/ embarrassed/ intimidated to say what they really mean. There are many good books on this subject, but you could do worse than dig up Aristotle's Poetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 hasa helpful list of translations, including links to multiple public domain versions. Also, while it doesn't have breakdowns for individual shows, the TVTropes.com website is enormously useful for figiuring out story structures. The only downside is that like wikipedia every variation on something eventually gets its own entry and it can be hard to get a good view of the forest for the trees.
bob917 12y ago
Seinfeld's formula is to pick a mundane topic and whine like a Jew about it.
thret 12y ago
Virtually all movies of all genres follow a minute-by-minute plan also. It was popularised with the book 'Save the Cat'. http://www.savethecat.com/ http://www.savethecat.com/ It is hard to watch a movie without mentally ticking them off...
- eru 12y ago
  See http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw... for some background.
gweinberg 12y ago
Aristotle had more or less the same observation.
pervycreeper 12y ago
That was terribly verbose for how much information was provided.
nchelluri 12y ago
Gotta love the first sentence. Made me laugh. > As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television.
acqq 12y ago
I don't actually expect too much from the article which starts with: "As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television." More a "wat" then a joke. Happens to so many of us.
shalmanese 12y ago
I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them. There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned. The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes. Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting. If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution. Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Weren't multiple plots already common in soap operas before the 1980s? In fact, I believe Soap (the sitcom, from the late 70s) already had them, as well as long running storylines, much like the shows it was parodying.
brandonmenc 12y ago
Seinfeld was the first (only?) TV sitcom to weave multiple totally unrelated storylines together. Saying every show has "a beginning, middle, and end" isn't really much of an observation.
- cdcarter 12y ago
  Though it's not mentioned in the article, Seinfeld uses the weaving technique pretty straightly from "the Harold", a live performance form. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_%28improvisation%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_%28improvisation%29
- chrismealy 12y ago
  No, it started with The Phil Silvers show, in 1955.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Oh. I was going to say it started with The Love Boat. They always had three plots, driven by three regulars combined with new actors playing guests on the cruise ship. They (sometimes) tied them together in the end, loosely. In my family we call shows like that "Love Boat Plots"
jdietrich 12y ago
Virtually all American (and American-style) sitcoms follow the same simple formula. In the UK, the rules of sitcom are very different. The BBC commissions a large proportion of sitcoms, so the standard length is a full 30 minutes. Our series (seasons) are typically just six episodes long, and few programmes are commissioned for more than three series. As a result, huge committees of writers are unnecessary, and most programmes are written by just two people with help from a handful of editors and consultants. Scripts can reflect the idiosyncratic voice of the writers, rather than having to conform to an industrial process where writing can be delegated within a team. Characters and plots don't have to reset to zero by the end of an episode, because there is no expectation that a successful series will run indefinitely. An obvious comparison would be the British and American versions of The Office. The British version finished after just 12 episodes (plus two Christmas specials), following a clear dramatic arc; The American version ran to 201 episodes. The British version was written wholly by Gervais and Merchant, while the American version had over 40 credited writers. One is a work of art, the other is an industrial product. The medium is the message.
- orf 12y ago
  Not all BBC sitcoms are like that, look at Not Going Out (which I do love), Citizen Khan and Mrs Browns Boys. While not as sickeningly produced as American sitcoms they do follow a common pattern not dissimilar to the one in the article. I do agree with you though, I'm just playing devils advocate. The Office isn't a great one to choose because the American and English versions cannot really be compared as they are very different beasts, and while the American series shares inspiration it is trying to be something completely different while the English series is a one off stroke of genius (and not really a sitcom).
  - jdietrich 12y ago
    There are plenty of lazy and derivative British sitcoms, but I wouldn't call The Office a one-off stroke of genius. A great many British sitcoms have similar depth and substance - Gavin and Stacey or The Inbetweeners would be good contemporary examples. Going back further, you have programmes like I'm Alan Partridge, Blackadder, Porridge, The Likely Lads and so on. None of those sitcoms could plausibly have been produced in the US, they're just not sufficiently marketable. British TV commissioning isn't perfect, but it affords a level of creative freedom that is largely absent in the US, and that is necessary for programmes like The Office to come into being. British commissioners really do think in terms of artistic merit rather than purely commercial value. American networks are excellent at producing huge international hits, but there's no room in the system for smaller, quirkier productions. The BBC and Channel 4 tend to take a lot of small risks on cheaper productions rather than always swinging for the fences. Success and failure is far less binary when there isn't the pressure to recoup a huge budget. Some of those cheap experiments will be total flops, some will survive as lowbrow primetime filler, some will find a small but loyal audience, a rare few will be huge hits. None of those outcomes are career-ending catastrophes, they're just part of the process. Commissioners expect and allow that level of variance.
narrator 12y ago
Then there's Aqua Teen Hungerforce. The plots are mostly random and nothing ever gets resolved at the end. The movie was full on surrealism[1]. It's almost hard to remember what the plot of any episode was because they seem to take completely random directions. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Movie_Film_for_Theaters#Plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Mo...
nkozyra 12y ago
This is basically a way of rewording a compressed three-act narrative structure, not exactly a Eureka! moment. You can lump a very large segment of historical and contemporary fiction into a similar dissection.
tptacek 12y ago
This is true of most big movies, too: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw... The book itself is worth a read.
j45 12y ago
This formula would make a really interesting mashup/visualization between watching an episode and a text based timeline. Hmm.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
No surprise - lots of works of art have constraints that make them formulaic. Haiku. Greek tragedies. Sculpture. Oil painting. TV commercials. Its helpful to study the formula e.g. for teaching others how to succeed. No need to denigrate it.
evan_ 12y ago
Dan Harmon, creator of Community and some other great stuff, refers to this as a "Story Circle": http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_... He's become somewhat famous for this, having produced several "how-to" videos of varying levels of seriousness about sitcom writing. His writers on Community have even slipped references to this into the background of episodes, where set decorations (e.g., drawings on the study room whiteboard) sometimes subtly acknowledge which part of a character's story circle a scene depicts.
lordnacho 12y ago
A friend of mine spent some time reading movie scripts for a major film company. He told me the business was so standardized (5 act play) that people would go straight into asking "so what the big change that happens to the character" and such. It's not surprising given that it's such a big industry. If your wares don't fit, it just gets hard to get in the door. And on the producer side, there's a machine built over the years to create a specific kind of product.
mkhattab 12y ago
I'm reminded of a scene in Louie where Louis CK is approached by a Hollywood producer to discuss movie ideas[0]. The producer asks him for his best idea for a movie. Yeah? All right, well well, you know how movies, there's always a guy and his life is, you know, okay? And then something happens, like a conflict and he has to resolve it, and then his life gets better? Well, I always wanted to make a movie where a guy's life is really bad and then something happens and it makes it worse but instead of resolving it, he just makes bad choices and then it goes from worse to really bad, and-- and things just keep happening to him and he keeps doing dumb things, so his life just gets worse and worse and, like, darker and-- Like-- like he has-- lives in a little one-room apartment, he's not a very good-looking guy, he has no friends and he lives-- he works in, like, a factory, where they-- like a sewage-disposal plant, and then he gets fired, so now he doesn't even have his job at the shit factory anymore and he's-- and he's going broke and he takes, like, a trip and it rains, like, just stuff, just shit keeps-- horrible. But then he meets a girl and she's beautiful and he falls in love, so you think that's gonna be the thing, the happy thing, but then she turns out to be a crook and she robs him, she takes his wallet, and now he's, like, stuck in the middle of nowhere and he's got no wallet and no credit cards. --- [0]: Louie S2E10 "Halloween/Ellie"
kirk21 12y ago
Metanarratives. Life might be one big metanarrative (ie people think their life is unique but we repeat a lot of stuff other people do). Applied to startup pitches: https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-pitches-85c0b1bf7612 https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-...
- normloman 12y ago
  You can take everything in that article and replace it with just one metanarrative: Transition from problem to solution. The similarity of start up pitches, or any sales pitch for that matter, is explained by the function of a pitch: to demonstrate the benefit of a product. I think the article you linked to needlessly complicates the matter. If you're writing a pitch, just tell them how your product improves someone's life.

163 points by samclemens 12y ago

Keyframe 12y ago

Form != Formula

greenyoda 12y ago
This usage of "formula" is entirely correct. Looking in the dictionary: formula: 2. any fixed or conventional method for doing something: "His mystery stories were written according to a popular formula." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formula http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formula
- Keyframe 12y ago
  Both things stand. It's a formula for a form then. There are screenplay formulas though, which are more granular than form he presented in that text. Forms are useful in screenplays and, for the most part, expected because they work. Formulas are shunned.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  I think Keyframe is right here. There are many populr story shapes and even guides on how to shape your story using beats (eg if you're making a 90 minute feature film, the hero should run into a problem by page 5 and we should become aware of a villain by page 12 etc. etc.). Form lays out the temporal structure of the story and is useful in terms of adjusting pacing to fit the attention span and general expectations of the audience. The most popular story form in Hollywood is Hero's Journey, based on common elements in mythic archetypes drawing on the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. It's a very useful tool for making sure you have a good story arc, without being overly specific. Formula is more plot-oriented, involving stock characters, relationships and so on, eg part of the formula in every Terminator movie, supportive and antagonistic characters from the future (or with access to knowledge of the future) pursue the protagonist; the antagonistic robot finds the protagonist first and is about to kill her/him when suddenly the supportive character appears in a burst of significant firepower (to the surprise of everyone else in-world, but not to the audience) and tells the protagonist 'come with me if you want to live.' It seemed like a typical quotable one-liner in the first film, but it has endured because it encapsulates both the complexities of the basic time-travel story in the Terminator films and the more general dramatic need for the protagonist to make a risky investment of trust. The time-travel schtick is a narrative framework used to explore basic questions about the inherent anxiety of adult relationships.

azakai 12y ago

I don't think there's much substance here. Given the constraints of a typical sitcom - 22 minutes, comedy, resets each week (no new characters, no major changes to character's lives), the "formula" is basically the only option: You present a problem, you wrestle with the problem, and you resolve the problem (maybe with a subplot or two). What else can you do? You can avoid having a problem at all. But that loses all the usual dramatic structure and tension that we expect, not just from comedies but from tragedies all the way back to ancient greece. Or you can have multiple problems, each resolved in turn. This was done by the Simpsons in several seasons (but not in the earliest or latest). One problem would occur, quickly get out of hand, then either get resolved or morph into another problem. It made the Simpsons feel much more "chaotic" and "dense". Otherwise, the "formula" is basically the only way to do it. Maybe I missed something the article was saying?

ourmandave 12y ago
I remember hearing about the sitcom formula watching an interview with the Simpsons writers. They were kind of reluctant to talk about it the same way a magician wouldn't want to talk about how the tricks are done. The part that stood out was when they said they always reveal the main conflict just before the mid-episode commercial break so you'll stay tuned. From then on I can't help not see it every time I watch a half hour show.
- mikemoka 12y ago
  there is no question a framework of reference might be used, it has been used for fairy tales as well actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp
  - cariaso 12y ago
    In the USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell is a later but more familiar example due to his work on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

derekp7 12y ago

I'd like to see a followup article on how the meat of different sitcoms is presented. For example, I remember figuring out the formula for Three's Company, where in almost every episode the "muddle" mostly involves a misunderstanding between characters, or where the audience has information that one or more of the characters doesn't have. Whereas other sitcoms have information that is kept from the audience until the end, which builds a different kind of suspense (in the first case, you are wondering when and how a character is going to "get it", and in the second case you are waiting for the characters to reveal final information to you).

anigbrowl 12y ago
The muddle type is called a comedy of manners - where misunderstandings arise because the characters are too shy/ polite/ embarrassed/ intimidated to say what they really mean. There are many good books on this subject, but you could do worse than dig up Aristotle's Poetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 hasa helpful list of translations, including links to multiple public domain versions. Also, while it doesn't have breakdowns for individual shows, the TVTropes.com website is enormously useful for figiuring out story structures. The only downside is that like wikipedia every variation on something eventually gets its own entry and it can be hard to get a good view of the forest for the trees.

bob917 12y ago

Seinfeld's formula is to pick a mundane topic and whine like a Jew about it.

thret 12y ago

Virtually all movies of all genres follow a minute-by-minute plan also. It was popularised with the book 'Save the Cat'. http://www.savethecat.com/ http://www.savethecat.com/ It is hard to watch a movie without mentally ticking them off...

eru 12y ago
See http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw... for some background.

gweinberg 12y ago

Aristotle had more or less the same observation.

pervycreeper 12y ago

That was terribly verbose for how much information was provided.

nchelluri 12y ago

Gotta love the first sentence. Made me laugh. > As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television.

acqq 12y ago

I don't actually expect too much from the article which starts with: "As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television." More a "wat" then a joke. Happens to so many of us.

shalmanese 12y ago

I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them. There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned. The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes. Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting. If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution. Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.

icebraining 12y ago
Weren't multiple plots already common in soap operas before the 1980s? In fact, I believe Soap (the sitcom, from the late 70s) already had them, as well as long running storylines, much like the shows it was parodying.

brandonmenc 12y ago

Seinfeld was the first (only?) TV sitcom to weave multiple totally unrelated storylines together. Saying every show has "a beginning, middle, and end" isn't really much of an observation.

cdcarter 12y ago
Though it's not mentioned in the article, Seinfeld uses the weaving technique pretty straightly from "the Harold", a live performance form. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_%28improvisation%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_%28improvisation%29
chrismealy 12y ago
No, it started with The Phil Silvers show, in 1955.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Oh. I was going to say it started with The Love Boat. They always had three plots, driven by three regulars combined with new actors playing guests on the cruise ship. They (sometimes) tied them together in the end, loosely. In my family we call shows like that "Love Boat Plots"

jdietrich 12y ago

Virtually all American (and American-style) sitcoms follow the same simple formula. In the UK, the rules of sitcom are very different. The BBC commissions a large proportion of sitcoms, so the standard length is a full 30 minutes. Our series (seasons) are typically just six episodes long, and few programmes are commissioned for more than three series. As a result, huge committees of writers are unnecessary, and most programmes are written by just two people with help from a handful of editors and consultants. Scripts can reflect the idiosyncratic voice of the writers, rather than having to conform to an industrial process where writing can be delegated within a team. Characters and plots don't have to reset to zero by the end of an episode, because there is no expectation that a successful series will run indefinitely. An obvious comparison would be the British and American versions of The Office. The British version finished after just 12 episodes (plus two Christmas specials), following a clear dramatic arc; The American version ran to 201 episodes. The British version was written wholly by Gervais and Merchant, while the American version had over 40 credited writers. One is a work of art, the other is an industrial product. The medium is the message.

orf 12y ago
Not all BBC sitcoms are like that, look at Not Going Out (which I do love), Citizen Khan and Mrs Browns Boys. While not as sickeningly produced as American sitcoms they do follow a common pattern not dissimilar to the one in the article. I do agree with you though, I'm just playing devils advocate. The Office isn't a great one to choose because the American and English versions cannot really be compared as they are very different beasts, and while the American series shares inspiration it is trying to be something completely different while the English series is a one off stroke of genius (and not really a sitcom).
- jdietrich 12y ago
  There are plenty of lazy and derivative British sitcoms, but I wouldn't call The Office a one-off stroke of genius. A great many British sitcoms have similar depth and substance - Gavin and Stacey or The Inbetweeners would be good contemporary examples. Going back further, you have programmes like I'm Alan Partridge, Blackadder, Porridge, The Likely Lads and so on. None of those sitcoms could plausibly have been produced in the US, they're just not sufficiently marketable. British TV commissioning isn't perfect, but it affords a level of creative freedom that is largely absent in the US, and that is necessary for programmes like The Office to come into being. British commissioners really do think in terms of artistic merit rather than purely commercial value. American networks are excellent at producing huge international hits, but there's no room in the system for smaller, quirkier productions. The BBC and Channel 4 tend to take a lot of small risks on cheaper productions rather than always swinging for the fences. Success and failure is far less binary when there isn't the pressure to recoup a huge budget. Some of those cheap experiments will be total flops, some will survive as lowbrow primetime filler, some will find a small but loyal audience, a rare few will be huge hits. None of those outcomes are career-ending catastrophes, they're just part of the process. Commissioners expect and allow that level of variance.

narrator 12y ago

Then there's Aqua Teen Hungerforce. The plots are mostly random and nothing ever gets resolved at the end. The movie was full on surrealism[1]. It's almost hard to remember what the plot of any episode was because they seem to take completely random directions. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Movie_Film_for_Theaters#Plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Mo...

nkozyra 12y ago

This is basically a way of rewording a compressed three-act narrative structure, not exactly a Eureka! moment. You can lump a very large segment of historical and contemporary fiction into a similar dissection.

tptacek 12y ago

This is true of most big movies, too: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw... The book itself is worth a read.

j45 12y ago

This formula would make a really interesting mashup/visualization between watching an episode and a text based timeline. Hmm.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

No surprise - lots of works of art have constraints that make them formulaic. Haiku. Greek tragedies. Sculpture. Oil painting. TV commercials. Its helpful to study the formula e.g. for teaching others how to succeed. No need to denigrate it.

evan_ 12y ago

Dan Harmon, creator of Community and some other great stuff, refers to this as a "Story Circle": http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_... He's become somewhat famous for this, having produced several "how-to" videos of varying levels of seriousness about sitcom writing. His writers on Community have even slipped references to this into the background of episodes, where set decorations (e.g., drawings on the study room whiteboard) sometimes subtly acknowledge which part of a character's story circle a scene depicts.

lordnacho 12y ago

A friend of mine spent some time reading movie scripts for a major film company. He told me the business was so standardized (5 act play) that people would go straight into asking "so what the big change that happens to the character" and such. It's not surprising given that it's such a big industry. If your wares don't fit, it just gets hard to get in the door. And on the producer side, there's a machine built over the years to create a specific kind of product.

mkhattab 12y ago

I'm reminded of a scene in Louie where Louis CK is approached by a Hollywood producer to discuss movie ideas[0]. The producer asks him for his best idea for a movie. Yeah? All right, well well, you know how movies, there's always a guy and his life is, you know, okay? And then something happens, like a conflict and he has to resolve it, and then his life gets better? Well, I always wanted to make a movie where a guy's life is really bad and then something happens and it makes it worse but instead of resolving it, he just makes bad choices and then it goes from worse to really bad, and-- and things just keep happening to him and he keeps doing dumb things, so his life just gets worse and worse and, like, darker and-- Like-- like he has-- lives in a little one-room apartment, he's not a very good-looking guy, he has no friends and he lives-- he works in, like, a factory, where they-- like a sewage-disposal plant, and then he gets fired, so now he doesn't even have his job at the shit factory anymore and he's-- and he's going broke and he takes, like, a trip and it rains, like, just stuff, just shit keeps-- horrible. But then he meets a girl and she's beautiful and he falls in love, so you think that's gonna be the thing, the happy thing, but then she turns out to be a crook and she robs him, she takes his wallet, and now he's, like, stuck in the middle of nowhere and he's got no wallet and no credit cards. --- [0]: Louie S2E10 "Halloween/Ellie"

kirk21 12y ago

Metanarratives. Life might be one big metanarrative (ie people think their life is unique but we repeat a lot of stuff other people do). Applied to startup pitches: https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-pitches-85c0b1bf7612 https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-...

normloman 12y ago
You can take everything in that article and replace it with just one metanarrative: Transition from problem to solution. The similarity of start up pitches, or any sales pitch for that matter, is explained by the function of a pitch: to demonstrate the benefit of a product. I think the article you linked to needlessly complicates the matter. If you're writing a pitch, just tell them how your product improves someone's life.