But that changed. Just ten years ago, we have to expand our sample from the top 20 to the top 30 shows to find a good handful of sitcoms: Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Modern Family, Mike and Molly, Two Broke Girls … and Rob. (ROB???) Even as we cheat our sample size to include a few more comedies, sitcoms are down to 20% of the list.
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Five years ago, the number one show on television was CBS’s monster hit Big Bang Theory. But that’s misleading as a barometer for sitcom popularity — it was the only comedy among the top 20 shows. Anna Farris’s Mom checked in at #27. Six percent.
Today, you won’t find a single sitcom among the country’s top 20 broadcast shows. Big Bang offshoot Young Sheldon is the biggest comedy hit at #22. Zombie sitcom The Connors lurches in at #26. That’s it.
Clearly, there’s been a shift in viewer appetites for 22 minutes of laughs. But it was surprising, even shocking, that NBC — the decades-long home of Thursday’s extremely profitable Must-See-TV comedy line-up — decided not to schedule any sitcoms on their 2021 fall schedule. Not one! Zero! The news was enough for Time to suggest we “pour one out for the network comedy.”
At least CBS is still in the Chuck Lorre business — isn’t it?
For most of the past decade, traditionalist CBS has been the last sanctuary for the good old-fashioned, filmed-before-a-live-studio-audience, American sitcom. And like multiple incarnations of hoary NCIS, those sitcoms have proven to be extremely profitable (even though the only time you might have actually watched one was in a hospital waiting room).
Never a critical darling, producer Chuck Lorre masterminded CBS’s lukewarm laugh factory, churning out hit after hit like the aforementioned Mike and Molly, Two and Half Men, Mom, and the behemoth Big Bang Theory. For most of the last decade, the ensemble hey-look-at-these-nerds-com was the engine that drove CBS, more often than not making it the nation’s most-watched network.
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