Something Funny is Going on: The State of Prime-Time Comedy May Seem Like a Joke, but the Punch Line is That Viewers Are Flocking to Reruns and Original Cable Sitcoms

By Diane Werts, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Apr. 8–A little true-or-false game about TV comedy:

Sitcom viewership has been trending downward for years.

Networks are turning to movie-like comedies with young-adult attitude because that’s what now attracts viewers.

Kids, teens and parents rarely watch the same shows or even the same TV set anymore.

Cool-looking casts and trendier concepts appeal most to the ad-valued younger demographics.

All are commonly accepted truisms of the current state of sitcomedy — but critics like me might argue that network comedy feels less popular mostly because its quality and relevancy have gone into the toilet. If the modern equivalent of an “I Love Lucy” or “All in the Family” debuted today, with sharp writing and relatable performances, broad-based audiences would howl despite the characters’ ages, attitudes or less-than-glam faces. People said sitcomedy was dead in the 1980s, too — especially family comedy — when a washed-up comic’s fresh take called “The Cosby Show” exploded to Nielsen’s No. 1 spot, spurring the resurrection of both the genre and Bill Cosby’s career.

Funny is funny. So none of the bulleted statements above really matters.

And according to a new research report on TV comedy, none of them is true, anyway.

“People are actually spending more time watching comedies on television today” than in previous years, says Steve Sternberg of the media services firm Magna Global, which analyzes the TV business and negotiates advertiser spending.

Sternberg just authored a research report on “Comedies on Television,” noting that, even among that cool-defining 18-to-34 age demographic, comedy viewing on networks, syndication and cable combined hit a record average last season of 2.85 hours per person weekly. Household totals reached 5.26 hours a week, up from around 4 hours in the mid- and late-’90s.

It’s just that today, most of that comedy viewing no longer goes to network prime time but instead to syndication and cable. The networks scheduled 24 comedy series last fall, Sternberg says, down from 2003′s record of 50. Syndication is playing 22 comedies, often daily, up from just eight recent shows in 1993.

Of the top 10 comedies in viewership, only CBS’ “The King of Queens” is still running new episodes along with repeats. (The sitcom starring Mineola-born Kevin James, who was raised in Stony Brook, returns Monday night at 9:30, with its 200th episode, for the concluding weeks of its nine-year network run.)

The other high-ranked shows Sternberg cites are weekday cable and local station reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond,”"Seinfeld,”"Friends,”"That ’70s Show,”"Fresh Prince,”"Full House,”"Roseanne,”"M*A*S*H” and “Home Improvement.”

“Viewers are spending more time watching [these repeats] today than when they were at the height of their first-run popularity on network television,” Sternberg says. “It makes putting something on broadcast to draw those viewers all the more difficult, because they’re still being compared to these comedy classics.”

More evidence that the sitcom format itself isn’t the problem comes when you look at what schoolkids — soon to be advertisers’ most prized demographic — choose to watch. With such kid-centric formats as animation bombarding them from Cartoon Network and other cable options, where are those young eyeballs turning? To original sitcoms about families, according to recent Nielsen ratings. Seven of the 10 highest-ranked nighttime shows this year among ages 6-11 are kid-star familycoms — Disney Channel’s “Cory in the House,”"Hannah Montana” and “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody,” along with Nick’s “Zoey 101,”"Ned’s Declassified,”"Drake & Josh” and “The Naked Brothers Band.” Rankings are similar for ages 9-14.

And the other top shows for those age groups? They’re network shows the entire family can watch comfortably and enjoy equally — Fox’s two weekly airings of “American Idol” and its new quiz-mate “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

Family hours persist

Turns out families do still watch TV together. Despite the multiple sets in most households and other competing video options, Sternberg says, “Roughly 80 percent of homes during prime time only have one television set turned on.” Historically and today, “the most popular comedies on broadcast, syndication and even cable have been almost exclusively comedies that not only focus on families but also that most family members can watch together.”

OK, so that doesn’t account for “Seinfeld.” But there’s always an exception. Just don’t take the exception as the rule, warns Phil Rosenthal, the creator of network TV’s most recent traditional sitcom blockbuster, “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

“It’s so obvious what endures, and what we regard as classics,” the Hofstra grad said in our recent chat about the state of his art as it flounders in disarray on the networks today. Recent attempts to reinvent the form or find The Next Big Thing have often sought to lure younger demographics with casts of youthful hotties. But Rosenthal insists that when it comes to comedy perennials, “They all have people that look like us, look like our neighbors, they’re not the young and the beautiful. think ‘Friends’ was the norm. And ‘Friends’ was the exception.”

A sitcom parable

Rosenthal, a former stand-up comic, offers a colorfully specific example of wrongheaded sitcom theory. ‘There’s a beautiful actress, stunning, and there’s a billboard of her, saying she’s coming to TV in a sitcom. Now as you drive past and you see this billboard, you look at this beautiful girl. ‘Ooh, what’s she in?’ And then you see. ‘A sitcom? My guess is, she won’t be naked in that. Therefore, I don’t need to watch. Because I don’t go to her for my sitcom needs,’” he says. “And what bears me out is the fact that nobody watched this particular show once. And it was advertised up the wazoo.”

He refuses to name names — but last year’s fast flop “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” designed by ABC around blond babe Heather Graham, fits Rosenthal’s description perfectly. All its pretty trendiness in form and content didn’t give viewers enough to connect to.

Even the self-involved “Seinfeld” characters had fleshed-out personalities. And how many were pretty? Or trendy? The show itself was a conventionally structured live-audience sitcom. Researcher Sternberg says how comedies are filmed “is largely irrelevant,” but the shows do need “an ensemble of characters that people want to see week after week.”

And not a narrow slice of the audience, either, Rosenthal argues. “I remember being 11 years old and watching ‘All in the Family’ with my parents. See, that’s what we need. We need that show.”

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Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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