3 ms·
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, whe
by 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 agoThe 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.