If it were the mid-1990s, Steve Levitan and Christopher Lloyd would be a couple of months away from launching the closest thing to a sure hit on television.
As if their award-winning comic chops, developed on a string of previous hits such as “Wings,” “Just Shoot Me” and “Frasier,” weren’t enough, their new show on Fox, “Back to You,” also marks the highly anticipated return of two certified TV stars – Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer.
But a lot has changed on the small screen in the past decade.
Sitcoms are no longer the lingua franca of primetime television. New comedies are becoming scarcer thanks in no small part to the proliferation of reality programming. TV audiences too are shrinking overall, and the networks, like many traditional media outlets, seem bewildered by the tectonic shifts beneath them.
“We really do feel like underdogs,” said Levitan over lunch with his partner on the Fox lot. “I know that sounds crazy because we both have some successes under our belts, but the world is very different now.”
How this different audience-fragmented world receives “Back to You” when it premieres in mid-September could influence comedy development for the next season, perhaps even longer.
If the show doesn’t garner sizable ratings, the future of television comedy might be grimmer than even pessimists believe and the traditional multicamera manner in which the show is shot could drop in demand to the level of a cord phone. And with the demise of the multicam, popular culture would lose a form that carried some of the most beloved comedies – ranging from “I Love Lucy” to “All in the Family” to “Seinfeld.”
“There are going to be a lot of eyes on this show, particularly with its two big comedy stars,” said Steve Sternberg, executive vice president of audience analysis for Magna Global, a New York-based media-buying company. “If it doesn’t work, it’s going to be a lot harder to get a multicamera show on the air any time soon.”
Comedies were a staple
For decades, multicam comedies have been a primetime staple as much for their hit-making potential as for the relatively inexpensive production costs, but the shows, filmed before live studio audiences, have fallen out of fashion. Rising to take the few remaining network comedy spots has been the single-camera style, whose movie-like freedom and ease can be seen in such critically acclaimed programs as “30 Rock,” “The Office” and “Arrested Development.” Single-camera exudes a sophisticated cool that executives believe appeals to the prized and more tech-savvy 18- to 49-year-old demographic.
Actually, few young viewers today probably realize that single-camera comedies are older than they are. The form used in such shows as “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” in the mid-1960s was once the prevailing force of prime-time comedies. While not near those heights today, single-camera again is gaining ground. Of the eight new half-hour comedies greenlighted for this fall, five are single-camera – the first time in decades singles have outnumbered the multicams.
Multicam sitcoms got stale
“The problem with multicamera shows is that over the years there has been a glut of them, and there have been so many bad ones with the same rhythm that the form itself got stale,” said Ken Levine, a veteran comedy writer for shows including “M*A*S*H,” “Cheers” and “Frasier,” who blogs about pop culture.
Even in Hollywood, where blame gets passed around like a viral video, there’s little disagreement about the generally punchless condition of most primetime sitcoms over the last decade.
“Most of them haven’t been funny,” said Grammer, who plays an egocentric news anchor on his way down the ladder of success. “It’s just that simple.”
This isn’t the first era in which the media have been churning out stories about the alleged death of television comedy, multicam or otherwise. In 1983, when just one of Nielsen’s top 10 shows was a comedy, the media were filled with stories about its demise at the hands of prime-time soaps. The following year, however, NBC launched “The Cosby Show” – a multicamera sitcom that single-handedly rejuvenated the genre and transformed the then-ailing network into a ratings giant.
