We don't have a laugh track, which helped Seinfeld a lot, and did kind of tell people when to laugh. It just made it a lot easier. Our show doesn't have that, so it's hard for Middle America to catch on.
I like the sitcom, as a structure.
The family sitcom has been around forever, since the advent of television. I don't need to reinvent it. But if you take something and you do it in a way that you haven't necessarily seen before, that's right where I live.
We've talked about a sitcom and a comedy drama. It's getting the right project and working with the right people.
There are quite detailed rules with sitcom. When people can leave scenes, act structure, joke rhythm. You can't not have a straight man.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
I think the sitcom is the format for television. It's the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.
What's so amazing about 'All in the Family' is sometimes an entire act was one camera shot. It was all about characters.
Everyone told me that British sitcom was dead. Then I looked at 'Seinfeld' and 'Frasier' and thought, 'No it's not, it just needs more gags.'
When 'Family Guy' started, we wanted to make it more like a sitcom. And there was very little music.
I was kind of lucky that I had done so much theater over the years, because basically a sitcom is kind of like a hybrid between a film and a play.
A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.
If you ask me, you see, I prefer doing film. The reason I'm doing a sitcom is because it's much more approachable.
It's just hard for a multi-camera show: Either they hit big, or they don't.
I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format.
I don't think there's a ton of new new stuff about doing a sitcom or doing a multi-camera show, but they work. They're fun, and they're energetic, and they're short. And when you fall in love with one - like, I will watch Seinfeld, I'll watch Will & Grace, all those reruns. I just can never get enough. I watch the same ones over and over and over. I watch the same movies that make me laugh over and over and over. I was hoping to be part of something like that.
It was Christopher's brilliant concept that he did not want this to become like every other sitcom where you do one take, and the audience gets bored with seeing it ten times, you know, over and over again.
Well, usually, when you're doing a sitcom, you get a script and every word or for the most part, is written. So, you know, if it's a 30-minute sitcom, then it's a 35-page script or something like that.
When you're doing a single-camera show, it's more buying into a level of reality. I think a sitcom, a four-camera show, doesn't require that so much. I think with a film show, you just need the characters to grow.
I have tried many times to write a TV sitcom - with little success.
I'm very lucky to be on 'Melissa and Joey' because it's a multi-cam sitcom, and it was a nice transition from theatre because it's taped in front of a live audience.
In British sitcoms, you can get five minutes of nothing before the story starts.
After the play of 'Fleabag,' we had conversations with different channels and with film companies about whether 'Fleabag' should be a half-hour sitcom, an hourlong, serialized drama, or a film. And I knew that it couldn't be a drama because I wanted to hide the drama - that had to be the surprise. I knew it had to be comedy.
The reason I'm doing a sitcom is because it's much more approachable.
I couldn't see myself doing a traditional sitcom.
