It’s a good thing that I’ve talked mainly about sketches over the last few weeks. That’s because sketches share some things in common with the subject of this article, situation comedies (a.k.a sitcoms). Consequently you won’t be approaching the topic stone cold.

It’s valid to think of a sitcom episode as a series of sketches stitched together, meaning that you can reuse the rules of sketch comedy to some extent. But sitcoms bring some of their own rules too, plus there’s a certain knack to performing that stitching.

Situation

Brace yourself for a shock, but a situation comedy requires a situation. Once you’ve recovered from this startling news, you might recall that sketches also have a situation.

The situation in a sketch is relatively simple because it needs to sustain a story that only lasts between one and five minutes. As an exercise, think of some of your favourite sketches and describe their premises – you probably need just one sentence in each case, for example:

• Goodness Gracious Me, Going for an English: Flipping the cliche of drunken white people going to an Indian restaurant, a group of rowdy British-Indians go for an English meal and cause havoc.
• The Fast Show, Does My Bum Look Big in This: A woman is stopped for speeding but mistakenly thinks the policeman is concerned about her fashion choices.
• Cook & Moore, One Leg Too Few: A man auditions for the role of Tarzan, but has only one leg.

All good ideas for a few minutes of material, but they couldn’t be stretched much beyond that.

The premise of a sitcom however has to sustain multiple 30-minute episodes potentially over many series. That means the situation needs designing accordingly. It can still be summarised in just a couple of sentences, but it has to hint at well-drawn characters and a varied array of adventures for them to go on. Consider:

• Fawlty Towers: A snobbish, bad-tempered hotel owner, contemptuous of his usual guests, hatches schemes to attract a higher class of clientele against the wishes of his overbearing wife.
• Bewitched: A beautiful, affable witch marries a mortal and tries to lead an ordinary suburban life. However, her disapproving magical relatives frequently interfere in her life.
• Schitt’s Creek: A wealthy, materialistic family are rendered penniless and left with one asset: a small town that the parents once bought their children as a joke. Now they have to relocate there and fit in with the ordinary inhabitants.

It’s often remarked that in a sitcom, the situation comes from the characters being somehow trapped together. So let’s look further into characters.

Characters

When we say a sitcom character is trapped, it can mean many different things.

In the sitcom Porridge, our main protagonist Fletcher is serving a prison sentence, so he’s trapped in a very literal way. But a character can be trapped in a more figurative sense, as in Fawlty Towers. Basil Fawlty is trapped in a loveless marriage doing a job that slowly drives him berzerk on a weekly basis. Technically he could just walk out the door – or, knowing him, more likely off the roof – any time he wanted, but giving up on a marriage and a business are massive steps. Plus, it would mean Basil abandoning his ambition.

Ambition is an essential ingredient of a sitcom character. It’s their raison d’être, the thing that keeps them going from episode to episode, and the reason viewers keep watching. Basil wants to ascend to the upper classes and have a hotel that reflects that status. But sitcom is a cruel land, and its inhabits are never granted their ultimate wish, except – perhaps – in the finale.

SYBIL FAWLTY: I should never have let you write that advert, Basil. Fancy putting “no riff-raff.”

Already we see how sitcom characters have greater depth than sketch characters, because sketch characters don’t have ambitions. They may have a goal, but that’s different. A sitcom character has a goal too, but a story goal is a short-term thing that lasts as long as the episode. It’s a concrete step that the protagonist takes in the belief it will take them closer to their more abstract ambition.

However, their pursuit of that goal is undermined at some point during the course of an episode, occasionally by an antagonist but more often by the character themselves. That tendency to self-sabotage is the second essential ingredient of a sitcom protagonist. They have a comic flaw that prevents them from achieving their ambition. Put another way, the character is usually the architect of their own downfall. For example, when Basil Fawlty mistakes an insufferable guest for a hotel inspector, he swallows his considerable pride and folds to the guest’s ridiculous whims. When the truth comes out, Basil can’t help giving in to his petty nature and humiliating the guest – right in front of some actual hotel inspectors.

Episodic Nature

If a sitcom character keeps messing up, do they ever learn their lesson? Do they ever shed their comic flaw long enough to finally get what they want?

Of course not.

Classically a sitcom is episodic. Each instalment may feature the same set of characters but it’s a self-contained story. At the beginning of an episode, the protagonist encounters a new obstacle and it becomes their goal to overcome it by the end of the thirty minutes. They may or may not achieve that goal, but one thing is certain: the character doesn’t change in any significant way. Their experiences teach them no fundamental lessons and bring them no closer to their ultimate ambition. Certainly their comic flaw remains fully intact when the credits roll. In the following episode, everything resets and the process repeats.

Of course, change isn’t absolutely outlawed over a sitcom’s life, it’s just that change is risky. Porridge attempted significant reinvention after several highly successful series by depicting a Fletcher who’d achieved his ambition and been released from prison. Renamed Going Straight, audiences didn’t respond warmly and it lasted only one series. But sitcoms can get away with a little alteration here and there. A fundamental part of the character Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses was his fondness for pursuing the ladies. For years he tried – and mostly failed – to charm the opposite sex, until the show’s writer (John Sullivan) acknowledged the character’s advancing age and gave him a spouse. This change worked because, while one part of Del’s character altered, we was mostly unchanged and his ambition of becoming a yuppie millionaire remained.

(I should point out that the waters have become a little muddied in recent years. Streaming in particular has rendered it trivial to watch a show at your leisure and ensure you never miss an episode. This makes it tempting for writers to break out of the sitcom structure and encourage binge viewing by stretching story arcs over multiple episodes and developing characters in more fundamental ways. As a result, things have developed and diversified, bringing to prominence new categories. For example, are shows like Fleabag and BoJack Horseman sitcoms, or do they deserve their own category, like dramedy? For today, I want to remain focused on the pure and simple idea of sitcom, but in future articles I’ll address these complexities.)

Structure

If a sitcom is divided up into self-contained episodes, what general structure does an episode follow?

We saw in previous articles how a sketch is a short three-act story having a beginning, middle and end. Characters begin the sketch wanting something, they spend the most of the sketch trying to get it (hopefully making us laugh in the process), until finally a punchline rounds things off. In an episode of a sitcom, the characters basically repeat this process several times. The key difference is that each ‘sketch’ in the episode operates in the wider context of a thirty minute plot and advances that plot in some way.

The result is a longer three-act story made up of several shorter three-act stories. Here’s the general order of things:

Act 1

• Lasts about 3 mins max. Introduces the main characters, establishes the show’s tone and lays out this episode’s story goal.

Act 2

• Part 1 – obstacle: (3 – 5 mins) Reveals the obstacle to the story goal and shows the protagonist forming a plan.
• Part 2 – escalation: (3 – 5 mins) The protagonist puts the plan into action but fails, possibly several times.
• Part 3 – showdown: (3 -5 mins) Everything comes to a head. There’s one more attempt to overcome the obstacle. The protagonist may or may not win but there must should be a surprise twist and a resolution.

Act 3

• A last 3 minute bit that concludes the plot and shows the consequences of what’s happened.

If that all seems a bit abstract, don’t worry, I’ll illustrate it with examples in a later article.

The timing of these chunks adds up to about 21 minutes, which might seem too low – after all, a sitcom is traditionally a half hour – but there are a couple of things to consider. One is all the additional stuff that intrudes into those 30 minutes, namely the opening and closing credits, and the advertisements.

The second thing to consider is…

Subplots

To keep that structure above simple, I described it covering a single plot featuring a single protagonist. However, a sitcom features a main cast of several characters and, unlike a sketch, a sitcom has room to explore more than one plot line. It can’t devote as much time to an additional plot, but that subplot should still have a beginning-middle-end structure and – for maximum satisfaction – it should support and intersect with the main plot, for example by thwarting the main protagonist’s goal in the surprise twist.

In the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Wedding Party’, Basil spends a lot of time openly disapproving of the unmarried couple sharing a hotel room. At the same time, Manuel has a subplot where he’s celebrating his birthday, which we see bits of as the episode progresses. After a heavy night out, he spends the second half of the episode suffering and continually frustrating Basil. The two plots finally converge fully at the end when a half-naked Basil mistakes the still hungover Manuel for a burglar and knocks him unconscious. Realising his mistake, Basil sits astride him trying to resuscitate him just as the unmarried couple walk in to find the holier-than-thou Basil in a compromising situation with his waiter.

And… Scene

That was the whistle-stop tour of sitcom. Believe me, there’s lot more to talk about and I only went skin deep here, but it’s enough to keep us going for the next few articles as I tell a few stories. In time, I’ll revisit the topic of sitcom and delve a little deeper.