Things That Are Killing The American Sitcom Pt. 1

The American sitcom is a time honored tradition. And it is dying. I’ve found multiple reasons for this, and the next several posts will detail these reasons with thoughtful commentary and humorously captioned photos. Enjoy.

Everybody Loves Raymond

I used to watch Everybody Loves Raymond every week with my dad and younger brother. We’d get a Grande Combo from Taco Bell and watch the entire CBS primetime lineup from start to finish every Monday night, all centered around Raymond. And every Monday night, I would get terrible diarrhea. You might say this is because of the vast quantities of poor quality “Mexican” food, but I think Everybody Loves Raymond deserves at least part of the blame. There’s only so much bad comedy one can ingest before it has to find its way out, often in the form of rectal bleeding and anal fissures.

The leading cause of American dysentery since 1996.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that Raymond is a bad show, in some kind of Supreme Scale of Comedy™ sort of way. It’s just that it’s exactly what a sitcom was 10, 20, hell, as far back as 60 years ago. Not only does Everybody Loves Raymond exemplify the schlubby husband+hot wife+annoying in-laws formula that’s been around since The Honeymooners, but most of the jokes would work just as well on the radio, for God’s sake. And before you get confused, that’s not versatile writing, that’s writing that’s so lazy it’s the equivalent of a comedy time capsule.

“Dammit, you forgot our anniversary again, Ralph! I mean--err--Ray.”

These are all relatively minor crimes against the American sitcom, but what really hurts this show is its legacy. Unlike the many, many lazy iterations of the Honeymooners formula, Everybody Loves Raymond ran for 9 and a half years, is syndicated on TBS 3 times per day, was just acquired by TV Land, and is regularly run on local stations (here the show is almost certainly on somewhere, no matter what time it is, often on more than one channel). To make matters worse, Everybody Loves Raymond lead directly to The King of Queens, a show which also ran for 9 years and took all of the slob husband/sexy wife/mildly unpleasant in-laws jokes Raymond had driven into the ground and proceeded to dig them up and rape them in front of their own mothers.

Joke rapist.

The weird part about all of this is that Raymond could have been a really good show. By the end of the series it was pretty irrelevant what Ray’s job was, he was mostly there to justify the title and blink occasionally, but he was actually a sports writer. There’s a lot of un-mined comedy gold to be had from a profession like sports writing, but the show only ever used it as a set-up to the same traditional family squabbles seen on every other show ever. Equally unused was the basic set-up that Debra was from a polite, upper-class, gentrified family, and Ray’s family was crass, low-brow, and so ethnic the cast of Goodfellas would ask them to tone it down. But despite all the possibilities this presented, nothing was ever done with it. The two families never really had any more conflict with each other than they did amongst themselves, and Ray and Debra’s differences in upbringing were always turned into jokes about Ray being lazy or Debra being a bitch. Even Ray’s father, who was supposed to be the epitome of unpleasant paternity, never went any farther than the kind of PG-offensive that would make Norman Lear spin in his grave.

Norman Lear is dead, right?

Ultimately this, more than anything, is what Everybody Loves Raymond has done to kill the American sitcom. It has taught an entire industry that original characters, creative dynamics, and thoughtful interplay are all worthless, because you can have broad caricatures tell the same stale jokes for a decade and still be commercially successful. Which is actually kind of an American lesson, now that I think about it.

America. Sigh.

While researching this topic I came across a lot of Patricia Heaton pornography. A LOT. It’s gonna take me awhile to recover. But when I do I’ll be back to talk about the next thing killing the American sitcom: the goddamn British.