Fri, April 14, 2006

As onebee's Wayback Machine recently reminded us, it was just over a year ago that NBC first broadcast its version of The Office, based on the unapproachably brilliant BBC sitcom of the same name. The Wayback Machine also reminds us – as its unblinking honesty so often does – how much things have changed. Back then, I was lukewarm on the Americanized version. And, after three episodes, I quit watching it entirely.

What a difference a year makes.

To begin with, The Office has improved in virtually every way in which it was lacking. The characters are more nuanced, the performances are more subtle, and the actors play to the camera more convincingly. Particularly in Carell's case, the performance is vastly improved. Gone are the hair plugs and wacky mugging; taking their place is a more richly layered character, whose pitiful attempts at humor stem not from ignorance but from a loneliness even more profound than that of Ricky Gervais's original Office character, David Brent.

It makes sense, really. For NBC, The Office was a pretty big gamble. Their track record at adapting BBC sitcoms was dismal; the show's style is entirely unlike the typical TV comedy; there's no laugh track (laugh tracks seem to be a sort of insurance policy for programming executives, even while they're bugging the hell out of the rest of us). So, they had to hedge their bets a little and smooth its rough edges. But then the show found an audience, and Carell became a comedy superstar during the off-season, with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And the rest of NBC's comedy lineup fell flat (with the exception of Scrubs, which has continually performed fairly well but oddly fails to bolster NBC's confidence in offbeat, single-camera comedies whatsoever). Suddenly, NBC was brimming with confidence for The Office. They let the show's producers make it good, and the show's producers made it fucking awesome. Now it can get ratings all on its own, it dominates the video downloads on iTunes, and it's paired up with My Name Is Earl – another offbeat, single-camera comedy in an entirely different style. And it's working.

Which is fantastic, not only because it's blissfully enjoyable to watch. (I want to have Jenna Fischer's baby!) It's great because, with its unique construction and its popular appeal, The Office may just be the final drop it takes to break the levee of network indecision and flood the airwaves with the next generation of sitcoms.

See, I believe we're in the midst of an evolutionary step in television. Particularly in comedy – because in drama shows, these differences manifest themselves less conspicuously. It's not just the shift from four cameras to one, although that's certainly part of it. It has to do with the "smartening" of television. Just as we're willing to follow multiple concurrent, complex story lines on shows like The Sopranos and 24, we're willing to laugh without the prompting of a live studio audience, and we're willing to interpret a depth of character that allows subtle humor like Jim's knowing glance into the camera on The Office where previously we'd be subjected to Ed Bundy's pratfalls on Married: with Children. And part of that new intelligence is also a comprehension of satire, which is typically a little more challenging to parse than, say, fart jokes.

Sure, you can make the argument that satire has been around in sitcoms from the very start, with shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show. But that's not the era we're evolving from now. We're evolving from the Yes, Dear era. The Caroline in the City era. Each era is going to have its standouts: the shows that were brilliant and funny and innovative. Dick Van Dyke, MAS*H, Cheers, Friends. But you can't define a period by its very best shows – you've got to look at the average, mainstream shows. And I contend that, for a period of fifteen years or so, we've been stuck in an era of entirely formulaic sitcoms. The networks unpacked their Sitcom Kits, set up the same framework for every show, and then filled in slightly different details. But most of the jokes were interchangeable, and most of the laughs were hollow, and most of the characters were flat and static. And the results were, with few exceptions, terrible.

And then came The Simpsons, which appeared to be a cute, animated sitcom for the whole family, with funny physical gags and a typical dumb and lovable sitcom dad. But it was really an incisive social satire underneath; it worked for audiences who appreciated either, but its brilliance and lasting power came from delivering both.

For a while, nobody else attempted another maneuver quite as bold. NewsRadio was a brilliant satire of workplace sitcoms, but nobody was ready for anything that self-aware. (NBC wanted something more like Working: nice and digestible and comforting.) It took until Entourage for a broad audience to really warm up to anything so "meta."

But now I think the evolution has gathered enough momentum. Malcolm in the Middle has been delivering single-camera laughs for years. Scrubs is a consistent performer. Film-style visual gags and on-location bits are becoming part of the sitcom's toolbox. Audiences are embracing characters more complex than "the mean boss" or "the slutty neighbor" – except on shows like Joey, where no such characters exist. But it took the work of a number of shows over the years to get us to this point. Working within the standard four-camera framework, Everybody Loves Raymond brought character depth to the traditional sitcom. Shows like Seinfeld broke out of the typical sitcom narrative. (It was never truly a show about "nothing," but it was a lot less about something than most of its forebears.) More recently, shows like Arrested Development broke all the rules. And – to follow the evolution metaphor – its mutations were too severe to sustain it in the current ecosystem. (And it's just a metaphor, of course. The jury still being out on science.) But, progress has been made, a path forged, and now there's room for TV comedies that don't necessarily look like "sitcoms" at all.

So you've got shows like The Office and Earl operating at the vanguard, while the change-averse networks continue filling out the schedule with flops like Teachers and The New Adventures of Old Christine*. (Sarah Shahi is enough of a reason to watch anything – including "NutsSaw!" – but Teachers is abysmal and its protagonist "funny guy" delivers every line as though he's auditioning for a sitcom.)

Don't get me wrong, it's not that the four-camera sitcom is dead. I'm optimistic that Raymond was not the last studio-audience show that will ever be inventive. But, right now, the shows that are innovating are also shooting without audiences. It allows a great deal of narrative freedom, and it allows them to employ a more natural comic rhythm in performance and editing, because they're not putting on a live production. What needs to happen, as progress continues, is that all shows learn how to be as entertaining and fresh as shows like Earl, The Office, and Scrubs are today. There's no reason the innovation should have to come exclusively from editing and camerawork. I'd like to see more shows mix other genres into comedy, the way Futurama did with sci-fi and Ed did with romance.

Sure, there will be some misfires. Sons & Daughters is just unwatchable. Fox's The Loop tries to fit a bunch of the new tricks into a young comedy show, and fails pretty miserably. Philip Baker Hall is a riot as the cantankerous airline executive, but that's about it. (Just like on How I Met Your Mother, the show relies on a guy with three names to elevate its worst written character to its funniest performance.) But it's better to see a dozen new and original comedies premiere each fall and half of them fail than to see a bunch of derivative duds like Four Kings (which also fail). And I have hope that we'll see more innovation, since one of the most innovative shows has finally found an audience, and proved to a network that it deserves to exist.

* Seriously, I think it's time to be finished with cutesy, absurdly long sitcom titles that no one ever pronounces. And the networks know it! The CBS announcer will say, "Tonight on an all new Christine...", just like ABC's announcer refers to "Eight Simple Rules." Unwieldy, "clever" titles like The New Adventures of Old Christine just make it clear that networks are patching these shows together with twine and duct tape for the upfronts, with no plan or expectation for them to make it to a second season. You're so proud of your cute little idea that her ex-husband is dating another woman named Christine and so they're "New Christine" and "Old Christine?" Great. So call the show Old Christine and be done with it.

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