A requiem for the sitcom

I've written before about how sitcoms over the last, I don't know, 5 years or so, seem to have just fizzled out to a sad death. (When did "Malcolm in the Middle" end? It was the last one I could whole-hearted recommend.)

AA Gill in The Times is in despair of British sitcoms in particular; although I would say it has been moribund for perhaps 15 or 20 years. (OK, perhaps one small, short, silly exception: The IT Crowd.) What Gill says of British sitcoms applies to the US ones too, in my opinion:

I don’t believe in golden ages, on TV or anywhere else, and I am constantly telling people that if they’re not seeing the best television of their lives at the moment, it’s only because they’re not looking in the right places. I honestly believe every aspect of television is better than it’s ever been – except for the sitcom, which is far worse than it was 20 years ago, 10 years ago, last year and probably last Wednesday. It seems to be an artistic form, like weaving corn dollies and plate-spinning to music, that has reached a point where nobody can remember what its point is supposed to be. Sitcoms used to be about anger and hubris and the small man standing against the slings and arrows of life. The difference between British and American sitcoms was that ours were all about failure and theirs about success – they’d bake a cake, our lot would fall into a cake.

Now the situation has gone missing. It’s just about pushing comedians into rooms. The comedy lacks structure or tension or even interest. They’re not about life, they’re about the tired conventions of sitcom, so every scene, every exhausted setup and wan punch line, has been handed down until it’s ragged and sticky with overuse. The sitcom has become the Oxfam shop of telly.