Sitcoms and Gender

Sitcoms and Gender 1

Sitcom Definition

A setting and a group of characters providing
the opportunity for a comic narrative, usually
resolved in 25-30 minutes (although the
‘situation’ remains open to future disruption),
and broadcast in a series of five or more
episodes.

Production and distribution
• tv sitcom is essentially a ‘writer’s medium’;
• although ‘stars’ are important, the char ac ters
they play are often more so;
• in the US teams of writers v. in the UK, single or
paired writers;
• once successful, very long runs in the US v.
much shorter seasons in the UK;
• sitcom ideas have moved both ways across
the Atlantic, but often it is easier for UK
commentators to recognise those that go from
the UK to the US (usually having to be changed
to suit American tastes). Recently they have
failed to make much impact (e.g. Men Behaving
Badly, Coupling);
• ‘live action’ shows have been used as the basis
for animation (Bilko became Top Cat/Boss
Cat, The Flintsones was based on a US family
sitcom). The Simpsons has been by far the most
successful ‘original’ animation series.
• US shows are ‘syndicated’ across many channels
and exported worldwide;
• UK production contexts changed with the
advent of Channel 4 and the rise of the
‘independent producer’ (sitcoms were the basis
for the rise of new companies such as Hat Trick,
Celador etc.).
• US sitcoms helped make big stars and also
worked to ‘spin-off’ new series. The Mary
Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s produced both
Rhoda (sitcom) and Lou Grant (drama). The
Cosby Show made Bill Cosby the biggest star
on US TV and created A Different World. Matt
LeBlanc is being ‘spun-off’ into Joey in 2004.
• ‘Guest stars’ have always been an im por tant
attraction in long-running US shows. Less
common in the more insular UK shows.
• Sitcoms have been developed into feature
fi lms, especially in the UK in the 1950s, 60s
and 70s. (Kevin and Perry Go Large is a recent
example of tv sitcom-type characters in a
fi lm.) Hollywood in the 1990s revived sitcom
characters from the 1960s and earlier in big
budget features (e.g. Sgt. Bilko (US 1996)
• Feature fi lms have also become sitcoms
(M*A*S*H was a feature fi lm before becoming
a very long-running series)
• Early US shows (I Love Lucy, Bilko) were shot on
fi lm, allowing export across the world and easy
archiving on high quality stock.
• Most early UK material was not recorded/
archived.
• Most sitcoms are studio productions with a few
simple sets and occasional fi lmed inserts.
• A ‘laughter track’ from a studio audience or
‘canned’ material is often added.
• Dinnerladies, with usually just the one large set
is an extreme example of the studio production.
• Last of the Summer Wine was unusual in
shooting so much on location.
• The critically-acclaimed series (The Offi ce,
The Royle Family, The Book Group) are often
distinguished by camera style, fi lm shooting, no
laughter track.

Narrative structure
Episodes are usually presented in ‘seasons’ in the
US (13 or more) and much shorter series in the UK
(approx 5-7)

Most sitcoms offer single episodes that are
‘self-contained’, but recently there have been more
quasi ‘serial’ narratives in which a single storyline
underpins the season or series. In the self-contained
episode, the disruption to normality will normally
be resolved by the end of the show.

The most successful series are likely to be
awarded a ‘special’ programme (60 mins plus). In
the UK this is most likely to be a Christmas Show.
Other occasional ‘special shows’ might be ‘twoparters’,
holidays on location etc.

The line between ‘sitcom’, drama and other TV
forms is increasingly being blurred.

• The Royle Family blends sitcom and soap opera,
The Offi ce is a mockumentary/spoof reality tv
doc;
• Alan Partridge was a character in a satire/spoof
news show spun off into his own sitcom.
Sometimes writers may devote an episode to a
parody or a spoof of literature, fi lms etc. US series,
such as Roseanne in the 1980s, have given episodes
titles evoking a specifi c fi lm, song etc.

TV Sitcoms and Gender

Narrative conventions have been borrowed from
theatre (farce, comedy of manners etc.) and fi lm.
The narrative may be disrupted by contrived scenes
of slapstick etc. (Noticeably in the series celebrating
the antics of older characters in Dad’s Army and
Last of the Summer Wine.) Catchphrases have been
important and have enabled characters to enter
public discourse through mimicry.

Setting and characters

Possible narratives and characterisations are
constrained by:
• short running time (25-30 mins)
• limited sets/locations
• limited number of characters
‘Situation’
The single most important consideration is that the
setting and the potential group of characters must
offer a range of possible narrative confl icts.
This is likely to mean:
• characters of different ages/social background/
cultural values/personal traits;
• it could, but doesn’t have to mean gender,
national, regional or ethnic differences.
The most common narrative situations:
• ‘family’ (in the loosest sense of people living
together)
• workplace (offi ce/factory)
• ‘social institution’ – hospital, education, armed
forces, prison etc.
• leisure facility – pub, club, bar, coffee shop etc.
Some of the most successful sitcoms range across
both family/home and work/institution and the
confl icts that arise between the two. (e.g. in
Yes, Minister, the politician’s decisions are often
undermined or mocked by his wife and daughter).
Fawlty Towers covers both ‘home’ and ‘work’ in the
same setting. Usually, however, either ‘home’ or
‘work’ are occasional settings when the other is the
main focus.

Conservative/Radical

The sitcom is an innately conservative form
(because the situation never changes and any
confl ict must be resolved in such a way to
reproduce the potential for further confl ict). Partly
this is a function of scheduling in primetime for
a family audience. Most sitcoms are fairly safe,
but the successful ones have been seen to ‘push’
the limits. At various times One Foot in the Grave,
Father Ted etc. have been seen to ‘shock’ some
audiences. Sitcoms on C4 or BBC2 are more able
to address taboos. Death is one of the last taboos
– broken recently in C4’s The Book Group, in which
a character dies from a drug overdose.
Realism/fantasy

Most sitcoms (The Royle Family being a major
exception) offer at least a slightly exaggerated
representation of everyday events – as in soap
opera, most events are possible in ‘real life’ but
not with such intensity or frequency. Some push
much further into surrealism, based either on the
setting (e.g. wartime, national security etc.) or an
eccentric/unusual character. This doesn’t always
match with the aesthetic – Last of the Summer
Wine married eccentric behaviour with naturalistic
location shooting. The Royle Family is distinguished
by a single studio set, but also the use of unusual
framings and compositions, perhaps associated
with documentary.

Character ‘differences’
Gender is the crucial factor in characterisation in
the majority of sitcoms. Up until the impact of
feminism in the 1970s, in the UK at least, it is clear
that most of the successful sitcoms featured leading
male characters (Hancock, Steptoe, Dad’s Army, Till
Death Do Us Part, Porridge etc.). Women were more
likely to feature in ‘ensemble casts’ – The Rag Trade,
Are You Being Served? This was also a function of
the employment opportunities for women. Since
the 1970s, women in leading roles have been
more common (but the most successful comedies
comedies have tended to be based on couples
rather than single women). Women have become
increasingly successful as writers, but Dinnerladies
is rare in maintaining a large female ensemble cast.
‘Dysfunctional families’ offer a range of narrative
possibilities. Hancock and Steptoe (both written by
Galton and Simpson) largely feature ‘men without
women’. Later ‘pairs of women’ would become
popular in The Liver Birds and Birds of a Feather
and, most signifi cantly in Ab so lute ly Fabulous,
three generations of women in one family.
The ‘normal’ family/couple offers the opportunity
for equal billing for men and women (a feature
of The Good Life), but, again, the most successful
series have often seen one partner as the more
‘transgressive’ of male/female roles. In this respect
US sitcoms have benefi ted from a bigger pool of
major female comedians/stars, starting with Lucille
Ball and moving via Mary Tyler Moore (originally
part of the Dick van Dyke Show) to Roseanne
Barr. Signifi cantly, these three women built up
their own production companies and were able to
construct and exploit their own image and narrative
opportunities. Are similar female stars able to do
this in 2004?

Although they are perhaps more likely to be
viewed as ‘comedy dramas’, series like Ally McBeal and Sex and the City

have been major influences on
female-centred sitcoms.

Almost by definition, comic characters are
flawed – comedy arises from their inability to do
some things or their propensity to attempt the
impossible.

Classic British comedy characters are
always failing (in)gloriously and the concept of
‘loser’ as hero is what often distinguishes UK
and US sitcoms. We like our ‘heroes’ pompous
(Fawlty, Mainwaring) or pathetic (the ‘lads’ in Men
Behaving Badly) and we enjoy both their failure and
occasionally the serious and tender moments (most
famously the relationship between Harold and his
Dad in Steptoe and Son.)

Types
The constraints of sitcom production and the long
tradition of comedy, in literature, theatre, music
hall, radio, fi lm etc., has produced a whole set of
‘comedy types’. Media theory suggests that all
characters exist somewhere on a spectrum between
a ‘type’, represented through a few familiar
‘traits’ or descriptive features and a ‘fully rounded
character’ or ‘individuated character’ (often argued
to be found in the literary novel).

In a long-running comedy series, the central
characters come to be so well-known that
even tu al ly they become more like ‘rounded
characters’ (i.e. with a background or ‘back story’
and a personality displaying a complex array of
values and emotions). If this goes too far, however,
it shifts the series into drama. Most of the time, all
the characters will be based around one of three
types:

archetype: a type associated with very long
established characters, developed in folk tales, fairy
stories, myths etc. Comedic archetypes include
the ‘fool’, the simpleton (now seen as a form of
prejudice), the clown etc. In modern comedy it is
rare to fi nd a character who translates directly as
fool or clown, but ‘archetypal elements’ are part of
the make-up of many characters.

stereotype: comedies rely heavily on ‘social typing’
– characters based on traits related to social class,
age, gender and ethnicity. Comedy changes over
time as stereotypes change. Although stereotypes
originally developed as aids to market research,
they have become powerful ways of defi ning
social groups often by the dominant groups as a
way of labelling the ‘others’ in society. Negative
stereotypes are the source of considerable friction,
especially when they can be demonstrated to
encourage discrimination. Yet, there must be at
least a grain of truth in the stereotype for it to
gain some form of currency. Commentary on the
stereotype provides sitcom with plenty of narrative
confl ict and if accurately observed can ‘capture’ a
sense of ‘now’. The best ‘social comment sitcoms’
will undermine stereotypes and explore ‘real’ social
situations and the dynamics of social interaction.
generic type: because of their writing and
production constraints, sitcoms will generate their
own types – characters who help the 30 minute
narrative to work. The American convention of
the ‘guest star’ has seen a ‘transient’ character
appearing in a single episode. Of the consistent
characters, the one ‘normal’ character in the
work group, the long suffering offi cial who
must tolerate the daft behaviour of the leading
characters – these are types whose roles carry little
meaning in themselves, but who are essential to the
functioning of the narrative.

In the traditional family sitcom, the ‘straight
characters’ are often neighbours (e.g. in Keeping
Up Appearances or One Foot in the Grave). In the
more couple/group centred modern sitcoms such
as Coupling, there is often an absence of such
characters, although one character will certainly be
more ‘straight’ than the others, in order to allow
certain kinds of confl ict to arise.
Female types in sitcoms
Here are some suggestions for specifi c female types
developed across comedy and drama since the
1950s:
• Matron/Working Battleaxe
• Sexy assistant
• Business matriarch
• Woman in a Man’s World
• The Vamp (1980s)
• Woman in Power
• Women who fi ght other women
• Woman who who watches her ‘biological clock’
(from the Channel 4 documentary Ballbreakers
(2001)
Can we devise a similar list of male types?
• ‘little man against the system’?
• self-important man?
• the would-be lothario?
• the man who won’t grow up?
• the man who is afraid of women?

Five Key Questions about representation
These questions can be applied to any text:
• what strategies does the [sitcom] adopt to represent
the ‘realism’ of events? What kind of
world does [sitcom] construct?
• how are familiar ‘types’ used as a form of
shorthand to represent people? What kinds of
ideas of what is ‘typical’ does the programme
entertain?
• who is in control of the representations in
the programme – whose values and ideas are
‘spoken’?
• what likelihood is there that different audiences
will make different readings?
• to what extent are the representations in the
programme part of the struggle in the ‘real
world’ to either maintain or change the power
relationships between groups of people or sets
of ideas and values? What is the political role of
representations?
(based on material from Stafford 2001)

These five sets of questions (derived from Dyer
(1985) indicate the complexity of any analysis of
representation. In relation to ideas of audience, it is
worth noting that since the move to multi-channel
television in the 1990s, the big ‘event’ sitcom has
ceased to command a large audience share. Sitcoms
now target more defi ned niche audiences on a
range of channels. It is more diffi cult for a sitcom
to ‘tap into’ contemporary issues and become
the subject of what is sometimes called a ‘watercooler
discussion’ (i.e. something discussed at work
when people meet) since a varied audience is not
watching.

At the same time, sitcoms are endlessly rerunning,
both on mainstream television and on
specialist comedy channels. In addition, videos and
DVDs of popular series are also being rented and
bought as a series. The social issues and social types
in these programmes may be read very differently
than in the fi rst broadcast of the series. With some
sitcoms, the endless repeats may allow audiences to
make much deeper readings of complex characters
– but they may also effectively remove characters
from their social context.

Questions
1. What are your favourite sitcoms?
2. Why do you like them? Do you identify with the
characters or the situations?
3. Or, do you simply fi nd them amusing in a more
detached way?
4. Are your favourite programmes contemporary or
archive repeats? Do you think you ‘read’ the older
programmes differently?
Reference
Richard Dyer (1985) ‘Taking popular television
seriously’ in Philip Drummond and David Lusted
(eds) Tel e vi sion and Schooling, London: BFI
© Roy Stafford 23/11/03

My Family – Which families in the UK do the Harpers represent?
Steptoe and Son – do we watch sitcoms differently 30 years
later? Have representations of British men changed – or is the
father/son relationship still representative of what modern men
experience?
Images © BBC

Extracts
The examples in the presentation today are
likely to be drawn from the following series (in
chronological order):
Hancock’s Half Hour (1956-61) (61 episodes)
The first major UK television comedy ‘event’ – a
‘comedian-led’ sitcom.
Steptoe and Son (1962-74, 59 episodes)
First UK ‘actor-led’ sitcom.
The Likely Lads (1964-6, BBC2, 20 episodes) &
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1972-3)
(27 ep i sodes)
Two ‘lads’ in Hartlepool written by Dick Clement and
Ian le Frenais
The Rag Trade (1961-3, BBC, 36 episodes), (1977-8,
LWT 22 episodes)
Women in a small clothing workshop
Are You Being Served? (1972-84) (69 episodes)
Grace Brothers’ old style department store
No Problem C4/LWT / 27x30m-e / 1983-85
Four young people left behind in a Willesden house
when their parents return to the West Indies.
The Sitcom Story, BBC1 2003
Roy Stafford, in the picture
email Roy@itpmag.demon.co.uk
www.itpmag.demon.co.uk