Maybe in the end, I think Seinfeld just reminded people “you don’t have to do it that way”. It’s not so much it was copied as it gave a little more license to push some borders both in method and content. Not revolutionary, the beginnings of reform.
Wouldn’t Married With Children fit that? Maybe not quite.
The OP said that it was the most influential of all time which includes I Love Lucy. I pretty much don’t watch sitcoms these days so there is a ton that I have missed.
I am honestly not trying to be a dick, but I have carefully read the OP and I have yet to see where it references “sitcoms”:
I disagree with “most influential of all time” but some of these older shows, I don’t know. It’s easy to be “revolutionary” at the beginning. They’re “revolting” from radio and stage more than anything earlier on TV.
I can see that. I was thinking more that Sam is a lie-to-get-women-into-bed guy; and that Cliff, who has way too high an opinion of himself, is also casually dishonest, as are Norm and Frasier; and Carla’s honest in that, near as I can tell, sometimes she’s slinging genuinely mean-spirited insults. And so that leaves, what, some pranks and some pettiness and some conceited bragging and folks who sometimes get downright furious, plus maybe we wind up rooting for conman Harry The Hat?
You could squeeze that into an “Anglo-American cultural norms of “decency” which themselves were frozen in 1950s archetypes” take, but it’s an awkward fit.
You’re correct but my opinion, and I could certainly be wrong, is that the genres should match. That said, there hasn’t been a definitive list of dramas or made for tv movies that were heavily influenced by Seinfeld. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Seinfeld. Other than The Office, it was the last network sitcom that I regularly watched.
Most definitely, but I Love Lucy was the one that set the model for the modern tv sitcom. It changed tv. While Seinfeld was distinctly different than what came before, I don’t think that it had a huge effect on what followed.
Maybe there was no “redemption arc” much in Seinfeld but I don’t get this common perception that it was amoral selfishness that drove the show. Yes, they were selfish but not much more than most people. The show was more the conflict between selfishness and societal codes, and they more often than not followed social code. Remember Elaine wanted to break up with that old dude and Jerry deemed it to require face-to-face. If she was really selfish she would have blown it off but she didn’t. She accepted the ruling.
Agreed. As I said in an older thread:
The characters of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia come closer to being examples of pure immoral selfishness.
The 80s were full of Lesson of the Week sitcoms and dramadies. In addition to the already mentioned Cosby Show here are some of the more prominent. Family Ties, The Golden Girls, Growing Pains, ALF, Family Matters, and Saved By The Bell (the episode dealing with Jessie abusing caffeine pills is particularly memorable). After Seinfeld there were shows like The Big Bang Theory, Alway Sunny in Philadelphia, and How I Met Your Mother. These types of shows weren’t present in the 80s. I’m not saying they’re the same type of comedy as Seinfeld. What I would argue is that they were able to be made when the mindset was that all shows, even sitcoms, had to have a Lesson of the Week. Seinfeld is the show primarily responsible for getting rid of that mindset.
this reminds me of the debate one of the news shows had during its entertainment portions … sex and the city was having its finale and the female writers view was it was groundbreaking bringing modern sex to the public and the like and the males version was only thing groundbreaking about it was its crassness … change sex for comedy and you have the Seinfeld debate
I think it’s partly related. The question is whether or not Seinfeld was revolutionary, even if the revolution was about crassness. My earlier comparisons mentioned sitcoms from before and after Seinfeld’s time. Seinfeld’s contemporaries like Home Improvement, Fresh Prince, and Full House tended to be more in the 80s style of having very special episodes and lessons of the week. On the other hand Friends is more in the modern style, though not in the same way as Seinfeld. Overall, however IMHO the 90s sitcoms still tended more to the 80s style than the 2000s style.
I think this shift is less due to the impact of Seinfeld as it is due to changes in the viewing public’s taste, viewing habits, and the fact that there’s limited space on prime time network TV. First though, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between types of sitcoms, and IMHO you can’t really group all sitcoms together for this type of comparison. Most of the “pre-Seinfeld” sitcoms you list are family sitcoms, which are naturally going to revolve around family type “lesson of the week” issues. But Seinfeld is an adult sitcom and while the style was a bit different, it had plenty of adult sitcom contemporaries such as Cheers, Murphy Brown, Designing Women, Night Court, etc.
During Seinfeld’s heyday and then post-Seinfeld you see family sitcoms replaced by adult sitcoms and then a gradual decrease in all sitcoms as they are replaced by reality TV shows (including game shows) and medical/crime dramas. My guess is that during this same era most of the feel-good family sitcoms shifted to kid-friendly cable channels like Disney and Nickolodeon. I don’t think this was because Seinfeld was revolutionary. I think it’s more because cable gave families countless options for TV viewing so rather than settle in to watch a family sitcom together after dinner, the kids could watch Hannah Montana in the basement while the parents watch Two and a Half Men or CSI. Or if the family wants to watch something together they can watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire or American Idol.
Night Court and Designing Women were “adult comedies”? They are both in the same vein as what Flik is talking about. “Friends are the most important thing!” was basically the moral of every Designing Women. Night Court was moralistic as hell.
How many kids on the cast of Designing Women and Night Court? I’m not saying those shows were inappropriate for kids, just that the primary audience was intended to be adults. Unlike shows like Full House and Family Matters, the comedy and plot revolved around grown up business like work and relationships, rather than family issues and “lesson of the week” type stuff.
If Seinfeld was anything it was a comedy of manners. But unlike other comedies of manners (Fraiser for example), the protagonists don’t end up following their own moral code over the silly manners of society. In Seinfeld, the protagonists slavishly follow social manners in amoral ways - and demand that others follow those social manners as well. Morality never enters into the conversation at all - right and wrong are delineated by those social codes.
They were both rather moralizing shows and therefore not good examples of shows without “lessons of the week”.
Okay, here’s one definite effect the show had on TV.
It gave us the Dr. Pimple Popper reality show. It’s like it says on the tin.
(I’m dreading the day “He took … it … out.” becomes a series.)
Regarding the transition from “lesson of the week” style sitcoms to the post 90s style we have today:
One way to look at that is the viewers’ taste, but I have trouble completely buying that in a medium with such powerful gatekeepers. It doesn’t matter what the viewers actually want, it’s what the gatekeepers think the viewers want that counts to get a show on the air. A hit like Seinfeld would have opened lots of opportunities for shows that broke from the previously-successful moralizing style sitcoms. Could you imagine It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia getting green lit in 1985?
So it’s not necessary for Seinfeld to have invented its style to have had a huge influence on what came later. Merely being different from what came before and being hugely successful was enough to bring about a change in TV.
Was Roseanne a lesson of the week sitcom? I wouldn’t consider it so. It beat Seinfeld on the air and was pretty popular. The great sitcoms of the 70s weren’t lessons of the week. Simpsons wasn’t lesson of the week. Seinfeld really gets too much credit.
ETA: Married with Children was about shitty people and no lessons were learned.