
Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula - samclemens
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/cracking-the-sitcom-code/384068/?single_page=true
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jdietrich
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.

~~~
jedberg
Whenever I watch a British show, I always feel like the writing is much better
than American sitmcoms. Don't get me wrong, I love American TV too, but
watching British TV doesn't feel like "TV". It usually feels like a series of
movies.

This completely backs up what you said, and makes a lot of sense in the
context that it's ok for characters to change and that most shows only get a
limited run.

~~~
stormbrew
The thing about perceptions like this is that you have to recognize that
there's a filter in place for you that isn't for the people consuming it at
the source. Bad British shows are pretty unlikely to make it across the ocean
because there's very limited shelf space for foreign media product in the
American market.

~~~
jedberg
This is an excellent point. I only see the best British shows because those
are the ones that Netflix picks up and/or that are recommended to me.

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azakai
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?

~~~
philwelch
The Simpsons also had a few episodes where the initial plot would kind of
fizzle out 1/3 of the way through and then suddenly they'd get to the real
plot.

~~~
jasonm23
In quite a few of those episodes, the fizzled opening plot would be
"surprisingly" resolved in the last act.

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shalmanese
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
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.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
I don't think there were such restrictions on soap operas because they weren't
heavily syndicated like sitcoms.

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mkhattab
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"

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thret
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
See
[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html)
for some background.

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evan_
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_...](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit)

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.

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JoeAltmaier
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.

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brandonmenc
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.

~~~
chrismealy
No, it started with The Phil Silvers show, in 1955.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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"

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derekp7
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
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.

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pervycreeper
That was terribly verbose for how much information was provided.

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lordnacho
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.

------
gweinberg
Aristotle had more or less the same observation.

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kirk21
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-...](https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-
pitches-85c0b1bf7612)

~~~
normloman
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.

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tptacek
This is true of most big movies, too:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.html)

The book itself is worth a read.

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narrator
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_Mo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Movie_Film_for_Theaters#Plot)

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nchelluri
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.

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Keyframe
Form != Formula

~~~
greenyoda
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)

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

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nkozyra
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.

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j45
This formula would make a really interesting mashup/visualization between
watching an episode and a text based timeline. Hmm.

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acqq
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.

