Life As A Sitcom

As we contemplate the days ahead, L’officiel wonders what the once glorified genre can teach us about life versus fiction, and how it might be best to embrace both

- Donatien Grau

Definition is the first problem when one is to comment on sitcoms. What is a sitcom? Where do the boundaries lie? If we are to say that Friends is the absolute sitcom, one is left to wonder whether it constitutes a genre of its own.

The etymology of the word may explain its meaning. Sitcom is short for “situation comedy.” Therefore, a comic system related to a situation. The word “situation” is a difficult one to explain: it may be described as a display of things and people within a location. As such, the sitcom would be the comic display of things and people within a specific location. The term “location” also offers its challenges: is the location a specific set, one that never changes — as was the case in the early, original situation comedies of the 1950s and ’60s? Or is the location a city, for example, as in the more modern, genre-bending Beverly Hills 90210? What happens if the location is central, but the action of the program happens in many other places — as occurs on the recent hit French Netflix show Call my Agent!