When I first became aware of the the concept, I watched a few scenes of a program labelled as such. During a back-and-forth between two characters, their peripheral movements - hands and arms etc. - and the background goings on, were seamless between cuts. Seemed like an awful lot of work to get right, so initially I wasn’t sure I’d understood the idea correctly.
Actually, most of the outdoor scenes in Seinfeld were shot on an outdoor set. There’s a studio lot with a New York street set.
In the 1950s video recording had yet to be perfected, so shows were either broadcast live or were shot on film. Shows shot on film were then also edited on film, and broadcast on film via a telecinedevice. Shooting on film could be done ‘single-camera’ style like The Burns & Allen Show, Father Knows Best, Lassie, Leave it to Beaver etc. or ‘multi-camera’ style (multi inevitably meaning three) like I Love Lucy. In fact *Lucy *(or rather, Desi Arnez) is considered the inventor of the ‘multi-camera’ style. Filming multi-camera allowed for a studio audience with real laughter and a more ‘live’ presentation but without the complications and risks of actually broadcasting live. It was, however, more expensive.
The Honeymooners is an unusual example. The original, ‘classic 39’ two-season run of the series was both broadcast live and filmed. If you read the credits they mention the “Electronicam TV/Film System”. Although that picture of the set is too small to really see, those cameras were unique. The image went thru a beam splitter and was simultaneously broadcast via a video camera and recorded onto film stock via a ‘movie’ camera. The film was then edited together (duplicating how it was originally broadcast) for rebroadcasting (aka reruns). Jackie Gleason did this because he felt the show was his best work and had long rerun value. And at that time the only way to save and rerun live shows was to simply point a movie camera at a monitor and film the TV screen’s image (called a kinescope) which gave poor quality. This was even more expensive than above and only happened because Gleason was a huge TV star (I think he also owned the show and may have helped pay for the system himself).
That’s an interesting perspective, because I would have thought it was the opposite. I guess it’s a different kind of momentum. Single cam shows can quicken things by editing, so that there’s rapid fire jokes. Multi-cam shows often have to leave gaps for the studio audience laughter. There’s a video online where someone took a clip from The Big Bang Theory and edited out the studio audience laughter, and it made it unbearably awkward.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to both types of shows.
One of the big reasons single camera sitcoms and/or dramadies practically disappeared was because people no longer accepted the artificial laugh track, but at the same time refused to watch a show without one! (IOW it had to have a studio audience, which precluded doing it single-camera). All thru the late 70s and 80s artists on single-camera dramedy shows constantly fought to remove laugh tracks because they were crass and cheesy, but the networks stood by their research that showed that the vast majority of people would not watch a comedy without laughter, real or otherwise.
It’s only been in the last ten years or so that such ‘high-brow’ comedies (i.e. single-camera, no laughter) like The Office, Arrested Development, Malcolm in the Middle etc. have finally found some success.
Which is why Lucy & Desi agreed to lower salaries in exchange for the rights to film prints, which CBS assumed were worthless; then came things like the rerun and overseas syndication. 
I’m not entirely sure that this question has been answered directly. It matters because the feel and style of the show is very different based on whether it is a single-camera or multi-camera show.
A single-camera style has a more cinematic feel to it and a multi-camera style has a very studio-centered feel to it. There are people who say they don’t like multi-camera shows because they have a much more artificial feel to them, as if you are sitting in an audience and watching someone perform on a set.
Multi-camera is an extremely efficient way of shooting a series. You have a limited number of sets and you have a limited number of camera placements and you have a limited number of editing choices. They can be produced much faster and thus cost less to produce.
This has been addressed to some extent before, but it’s worth emphasizing. They are not performing a play as you would see it in an actual live theater setting. They shoot in bursts, they stop, they re-take scenes, they try different dialogue, they try different blocking, there are cameras and mike booms and other equipment blocking the audience’s view. If there are some scenes that are shot on location or on outdoor sets, the audience watches them on monitors.
And if they are being completely efficient with production costs, they do not necessarily shoot the scenes in the order of the story. They’ll shoot all scenes in a particular set together. They might shoot those out of order depending on the actors’ personal schedules, or other considerations like makeup and special effects.
If it’s a comedy, then while all these interruptions are going on, one or more warm up comedians might come out to keep the audience giddy and punchy.
It’s not at all like a play being performed from beginning to end as a single, uninterrupted artist presentation.
Well, what feels “artificial” can change depending on what the audience is used to and what sort of expectations they have. I suspect that the rise of reality shows has helped make single-camera sitcoms seem “realistic”, as there are now plenty of shows that go into real people’s homes and workplaces and don’t have to shoot through the “fourth wall”. So while I agree single-camera shows generally seem less artificial now, opinion on that could someday shift. It’s arguably less artificial to shoot a show before a live audience with fewer camera angles and less editing, even if this seems cheesy and dated to us now.
One fairly recent element of some comedies is the “mockumentary” feel. Modern Family, Parks & Rec and The Office all use mockumentary takes where a man character will talk directly to the camera. These are always part of a single camera show.
Back in 1970 (I think), The Odd Couple invited the home audience to “participate in a unique experiment” and vote on whether they preferred an episode (single-camera) without a laugh track. The response to that laughless episode must have been considerable, since they switched to a three-camera format with a live audience in their second season.
MASH*** started out with a pretty lively laugh track, but it gradually faded over the years. If it was used at all in the show’s final season, I honestly don’t remember it.
Yeah, I remember both shows. I started watching The Odd Couple in syndication and I remember the ‘laugh-trackless’ episode from the first season. It was the one where Oscar gets a job at the Playboy-like girlie magazine. As much as I can understand the hatred for laugh tracks, as a kid I found that episode painfully awkward to watch. Same goes for MASH. They did that faux-documentary B&W episode without a laugh track and I found it equally unfunny.
It was partly because it was just the norm I was used to, but also the style of comedy then. A single camera, laugh-trackless sitcom needs to have a very smart and dark or mean self-referencing meta-element to its humor (think *Arrested Development *or The Office). Although *MASH *and *The Odd Couple *were good shows they really needed the back & forth of joke/laugh (even fake ones) to work.