I can’t find a suitable TVTropes category for this (aside from Arc Fatigue, which really applies to shows with narrative arcs that play out before the production is complete) but I would term is “Exhausted Premise” where all of the conflict and uncertainty is eventually eliminated through the characters getting everything they want (e.g. love, marriage, children, et cetera), leaving nothing more to mine for story impetus without some kind of radical dramatic change (divorce, death, children leaving home, et cetera) most of which is unpalatable to the standard sitcom format where things don’t materially change. The way shows deal with this is what usually leads to the shark-jumping moment, or puerile “Cousin Oliver” additions, or other changes that disrupt the continuity of the show without materially adding new conflict from which to extract novel stories.
One of my favorite webcomics, Questionable Content, is starting to reach this point. Everyone has a boyfriend or girlfriend, now. (Except Hannelore, who would freak at the idea.) Dora and Tai are about to get married. There hasn’t been a lot of conflict ever since Elliot and Clinton got together.
When a show reaches a point that the majority of the “jokes” are predicated almost entirely on the audience “knowing” the characters. All sitcoms reach this point sooner or later. The Simpsons has been operating almost solely on this principle for at least 20 years now. Most shows tend not to last nearly as long after crossing that milestone.
An oral history, The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series, was released recently. Of course, the inside story is that everyone was wonderful: the cast, the writers, the crew, the guests, the parents, the third-grade teachers. Every episode was brilliant, from the creepy beginning to the wish-fulfillment end. It’s a 500-page book and if you take out all the wonderfuls you have a 250-page book.
But in those 250 pages, you do get some insight of the battles the writers had in trying to keep the show from sinking from the lack of new plotlines. They recognized that new regulars would change the dynamics, that marriage would lessen the rampant sexism, that pairing the characters in different ways would bring out fresh aspects. The series had four showrunners over the 12 years and Chuck Lorre now admits that the show would have gotten stale and fixed much earlier if they hadn’t brought in someone new.
None of it worked in the end, since the last few years still went downhill. The writers very cautiously say how much they were constrained by the expectations of the core, fan audience that their favorites never change. Every kind of series, not just television but also books and movies, falls into the trap that the audience wants more of exactly the same only different. We’ve had discussions of whether there’s ever been a big popular long-lasting series that stayed at a high point to the end. I don’t remember any plausible examples. I’ve never encountered one.
If I understand correctly, Barney Miller was originally intended to focus much more on Barney’s home life and relationship with his wife than the way the show turned out. Maybe that makes it the opposite of what this thread’s title mentions.
I’ve often said that character development ruins sitcoms. If the show is good the characters are good as they are. We don’t need them to grow up, learn things, or improve themselves. We need them to stay funny they way they were when we started watching the show.
Well, yes, part of the thing is that some genres lend themselves to a “set piece” approach. If it’s a sitcom, you take the established characters with their estabished quirks and point them at something in the world to make fun of it (or to make fun of them for how they deal with it). If it’s police procedural, you take whatever crimes made headlines in the past year and rewrite them to how you would have wanted it to go down in your universe.
There is also the matter of two components in how American TV execs approached their own medium for the longest time: On the one hand, the notion that this was ephemeral: that the vast majority of introduced shows don’t make it so no need to plan for the long run; on the other hand, the opposite notion that once you have a major hit you want it to go on forever and milk it for every cent. Both of these conspire against proper begining-middle-end development because in the first case it gets canceled before any loose ends get tied up and in the second case then you have to keep adding filler and figuring out how to further extend interest.
I think that things changing (anything, but relationship status is a big one) is the doom of any pure sitcom show, but I’m not so sure that the boundaries between genres are so hard and fast. I think that you can make a better show if it has elements of both comedy and drama than if it’s purely one or the other. And so elements like character and relationship development can be good, if the show plans for it.