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I tried to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory once 🤢
—sees a woman in a game store—
"Ummmm is she lost?" —scoff—
—laugh track plays—
Unironically actually in the show.
The laugh track.
It ruins so. Many. Shows.
I mean .. maybe I'm wrong here. But if you wrote actual funny things, I'd laugh. Idk. I'm probably wrong.
Without it most of them are just condescending and misogynist. It's always sunny in Philadelphia has no laugh track and is just great.
Oddly, though, you can't just cut it out from shows that have it, especially if they actually film in front of a live audience, though even those with canned laughter are playing in the same sandbox. The pacing and the vibe gets completely thrown off because the writers and actors have to account for the laughs, and it becomes eerie without them. It's a different style of making TV that's seeking a different type of reaction from the TV audience, and has different limitations. Understanding that can let you enjoy the best examples of the form (admittedly almost all 20 years old or more). Stock characters slinging zingers and potentially doing pratfalls can be amusing (though the form has a direct lineage to radio shows so it tends to be light but verbal -- the physicality is a huge part of what made I Love Lucy groundbreaking), but it doesn't shine when trying to do cringe, nuance, dramedy, or densely packed humor.
This is not to say that you should watch The Big Bang Theory. You should not. It's awful. The easy tropes and low cost of production (other than stars' salaries if a show takes off) means that so much garbage has been done in this format, I daresay higher than single-camera "movie style" shows. It's just that it's not quite so simple as "write more funnier."
IMO, it's almost like telling a musical theater writing team that their play would be better if the characters weren't constantly breaking into song. For the record, my instincts and tastes leave me sympathetic to that last point, so I just don't watch many musicals, live or recorded. It's not that they're bad; the appeal is just lost on me. Same with multi-cam sitcoms with laugh-tracks.
MASH is one of the best TV shows ever made and that has a laugh track through most of it, although I've heard it aired in Europe without it and was mostly better for it, but that is the show that first started challenging the need for a laugh track in the first place and successfully ditched it when they went harder into dramedy.
My father got big into that show. Destroyed his ability to hold a conversation, because Every. Single. Fucking. Thing. You. Say. To. Him. "Reminds me of this thing that happened on Big Bang Theory where Sheldon...
He's got a litany of shitty sitcoms he can't just fucking stop with. "Character says something." laugh track "Well other character says sumn else!" laugh track. "Maternal and/or love interest character walks across room, touches character's arm, says something about feelings." canned manufactured pindrop silence "Character says sumn else!" laugh track
Fuck your ventricles.
I stopped watching TV when my favourite channel lost access to several shows and turned into a TBBT re-run channel. Four. Fucking. Episodes. Every day. The series looped about once every two months.
I gave up on television sometime around the end of Stargate SG-1, somewhere in the middle of Eureka!.
It was right around then that only the 24 hour news networks were what they said they were; there was no Sci-Fi on SyFy, no history on History, no music on MTV, no discovery on Discovery...adult prime time television was going to the humorless "gritty realism" phase, and the only topic anyone would smalltalk about was Game of Thrones.
To this day I watch basically nothing but Youtube.
It's been so many years for me too. Can't even remember when I actively watched TV. If I try to watch some today, I'm immediately put off by the amount of ads and all that reality garbage, that has surprisingly little to do with actual reality. Can't we just call that low production value trash instead?
I even tried some of the official apps these channels have, and they were about as awful. The good thing is, you can DNS filter the ads on your tablet, so at least you can watch without being constantly interrupted. Sadly, that still didn't address the underlying issue of finding worth watching. Some documentaries and movies were ok though.