Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Hollywood Killed the TV Sitcom

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!Sitcoms from decades ago are dominating streaming platforms... so why is Hollywood fundamentally incapable of making new sitcoms?Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a Headgum podcast. Have you ever wondered where all the TV comedies went? I mean, 20 years ago, we were all waiting with bated breath to see Jim's latest prank on the office. But here in the 2020s, we're all just still watching The Office. Well, Dwight Shrewt himself has a theory. Rain Wilson went on Fox News recently and said, I don't think there's been very many good comedies that have come out in the last 10 or 15 years.

and I wish we could find a way to make good comedy again. And I do feel like you couldn't make the office today. I think that would be too hard to be as politically incorrect as the show was. Okay, first of all, you know, it's kind of weird seeing Rain Wilson complaining about cancel culture on Fox News. He's a self-proclaimed hope hippie whose logo is literally a space unicorn. Dude took a wrong turn on the way of the love commune and wound up in Rupert Murdoch's hate dungeon. And it's also a strange argument to make because one of the only comedies being made right now literally is a spin-off of the office. But, you know, Rain is right about one thing.

We are in an unprecedented TV comedy drought. Sitcoms only account for 1.7% of new TV shows this entire decade. And it's not because people don't want to watch sitcoms anymore. The Big Bang Theory, which ended in 2019, is still in the top 10 most stream shows of May 2020. And sitcoms punch way above their weight for streamers. They make up 13% of Hulu's total subscriber retention, despite only being 7% of their catalog. And the same is true at the other streamers.

So if all of us still want to watch sitcoms, why isn't Hollywood making any new ones? Well, it's not because of cancel culture. Much like a Jenga tournament on the San Andreas' fault, the problem isn't cultural at all. It is structural. See, Hollywood used to have a well-honed pipeline for creating new comedies.

They built it over decades from I Love Lucy to Parks and Rec. And once it was up and running, it was a comedy factory, if you will, that pumped out insane, funny new characters, ridiculous situations, and hit new series at a steady clip. But then, about 10 years ago, the streaming company showed up. Hollywood shifted its business model, and in so doing, they systematically burned that factory to the ground. They did so by making three big changes to the way the TV industry works

that literally make it impossible to create the comedies of the past today. In this video, I'm going to explain exactly how Hollywood killed the sitcom why that is such a loss and what it would take to get them back. So let's get one thing straight. There are some shows on the air today

that a lot of us call comedies. But if you really look closely at them, they're actually written more like dramas. Think of the bear, which won Emmys in the comedy category several times, despite not being remotely funny. I mean, when someone tells me why I need to watch the bear, they don't say it made them laugh, they describe how stressful it is.

And frankly, I'm on medication specifically to avoid the feelings that the bear causes in me. It's not a comedy if I need to call Dr. Schwartz at the end of every episode. Even Hacks, a show that I really love and one of the absolute funniest shows on air in the last couple years, is written like a drama. Every season of Hacks is a serialized, high-stakes story about Debra and Ava trying to achieve a specific, seemingly impossible dream. And like a drama, it has a series and season arc, and it's full of scream at the TV cliffhangers

and surprise double crosses. Just like how Breaking Bad is a show about Walter White cooking meth for healthcare coverage, Hacks is about Deborah Vance trying to win Hollywood immortality in increasingly c-y fur coats. And yes, my female writer said I could use the C word. Only once, though, that's all I get.

But by contrast, in a true sitcom, the comedy is what drives the action. sitcom is literally short for situation comedy. And that means every episode puts the same characters in a different comedy situation. In Cheers, maybe the know-it-all mailman goes on Jeopardy. In New Girl, there's an amazing episode where Winston simply does a puzzle in increasing states of undress to the great annoyance of Schmidt. One of my favorite sitcoms, News Radio, has an entire episode where Phil Hartman's character starts using a cane, which annoys Dave Foley so much, he steals it from him. That's it. The episode is literally called The Cane and this is how it ends.

You do realize I'm just going to go and buy another cane, don't you? Yeah, and I'm just gonna steal it again. Too shay. Beth, here's one you can take right now. This one you can break later. Here's one for the Hamptons. This one I like, I keep. This one displeases me. Characters don't learn anything, they don't grow as people, there's no season arc, it's just goofy fun.

And sure, it can be nice to watch the Bridgeton's Doink or those doctors from the pit do blood stuff. But sometimes, at the end of a long day, you don't want twists and turns, right? You just want to relax and laugh with your funny friends in a place where everybody knows your name. And by filling that basic human need, sitcoms like these made the Hollywood companies billions. So, why have they stopped making sitcoms and peopoms? pivoted to drama-style comedies. Simple, because of short-season orders. See, in the old days at Broadcast TV,

sitcoms aired once a week, practically year-round. There was a fall season, a spring season, hell, they might have even thrown you a Christmas special. But now that we've moved to streaming, all we get is eight measly episodes per season, 10, if it stars a white guy your dad likes. And if you only get a couple episodes, well, you need a season-long dramatic storyline

to keep the audience hooked. because we never get enough time to truly know and enjoy the characters. Here's the thing. The most important ingredient in a great sitcom is time. Take Parks and Rec, for instance. You know, the first season of that show feels so much more uncomfortable than the fourth, and not just because you're dying for Anne to dump Andy in the pit. It's because you don't know the characters that well yet,

and critically neither did the writers. You don't know this Ron Swanson guy. Who is he? He seems like kind of a jerk. Hey, but by the end of season four, he's yours. Your jerk. A first season is kind of like a first hang with a new friend group. Just because it's a little awkward doesn't mean you won't wind up doing an emotional speech at Goober's wedding in 10 years. But now, instead of hanging out with your friends once a week for a year, you're expected to binge the entire show in a weekend.

And as anyone who's been on a bender with me knows, binging is no way to make friends. Instead of a friend group you hang out with once a week for years, the characters in a streaming show are like the random couple you get drunk with. on a cruise. Sure, you have fun and you all swear you'll get together the next time you're in Denver, but when you go back to real life, you never hear from them again. But by the end of a great sitcom, you form genuine social bonds with the characters, or at least parisocial bonds. And you know this because you feel sad when it's over. You might even cry. That clip still makes me emotional. We spent so many years in that room as a family. But reducing the number of episodes didn't just hurt our relationships with the characters.

Critically, it also changed how television shows are physically made. Like, all right, why was Cheers one of the greatest sitcoms of all time? It was created by Les Charles, Glenn Charles, and James Burroughs, who we sadly lost just a few days ago. And these guys were sitcom

legends. They didn't just make Cheers. They worked on Taxi, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, MASH, Wheel and Grace, Friends, Frazier, and Moore. They literally made thousands of episodes of television between them. turning them into experts in the craft. But now, getting that kind of experience

is straight up impossible. Instead of working full-time for years on end, TV writers today get eight episodes, then have to wait sometimes years before the next season is picked up, and that's only if their show doesn't get canceled by yet another goddamn media merger. Now, I know a lot of you TV fans out there

are worried about whether this latest merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers is actually going to go through, and if you want the dirt on that, well, check out our sponsor, Ground News. On ground news, you can dive deeper into the stories that shape our culture. And when you click on that headline on ground news, you get to see all of the different news sources covering a story

and how they covered it differently. Like, if you scroll down, you'll see some headlines talk about the merger like it's a done deal, while others talk about the way the merger can still be blocked. You can even see who owns the news sources you're reading, which is helpful when you're reading about a potential merger between two different news sources. You know, some that might have reason to be a little bit biased. So if you want to use ground news to get a... broader and deeper perspective on the stories that matter to you,

you can use my special code factually to get 40% off. Just go to groundnews.com slash factually and use code factually for 40% off. And if you want to support these videos and the people who make them directly, why you can head to patreon.com slash Adam Kahnover. I'll see you there. But you know, it wasn't just the experienced writers that made the sitcoms of the past so much funnier than the shows we have today. It was also where they were shot. See, multi-cam sitcoms, often filmed on a single soundstage in front of a live studio audience.

And, you know, even single-cam sitcoms mostly stayed in one place. Scrubs was filmed in a decommissioned hospital, and the office shot in an out-of-use business park in the valley. And that meant the writer's room could be located just next door. The writers could just walk over a few feet to watch the rehearsals and the tapings and punch up the jokes in real time to make sure the show is as funny as possible. But, you know, it turned out that making funny TV shows wasn't as important to the Hollywood companies as cutting their costs.

So, they move TV production overseas. That's right, the entertainment industry used the same strategy Nike did to make your Air Force One's cheaper. They outsourced production. Now, shooting the show in a cheaper country probably saves some money, but once you had to pay to fly a Hollywood writer all the way to England just to pitch a better fart joke, while the companies simply stopped bothering.

That means today, an entire season of television is usually completely written before a single-stained. shot is filmed rather than writing and producing happening at the same time. And, you know, that can work okay for dramas, which are all about building cliffhangers towards a climax, but it really hurts comedies because comedy is not just a monologue. It's a conversation between the writer and the audience. Like, let's talk about the studio audience for a second. You know, a lot of people think the sound of laughter in old sitcoms is just a cheesy editing trick that's inserted in post, but no, it was usually a real live audience made up of real people. And the reason they were there wasn't just to provoke you

to laugh at home. It was because the writers and actors needed to make those real people laugh for real in the room so they needed to make the show as funny as possible. And they would use the audience feedback to help them do that. Comedy and comedians often need an audience in order to make a comedy as funny as possible. That's the reason I toured my new hour of stand-up for 18 months before I taped it this April, and it's the same reason Conan O'Brien tests out as Oscar jokes at open mics around L.A. every year. That's because laughter is a visceral reaction.

So the best way to judge what joke is funniest is to do it in front of real people to see how they react. If I can hear you gasp, if I can feel the awkwardness of a pause when you're bored, or if I can hear you laugh at the thing I never thought would land, well, that gives me information I can use to make my set or a show funnier. But if I can't hear you,

Suddenly, I might as well be doing crowd work with my plants. So, what are you up to these days? Eh? They're not reacting, but I'm pretty sure the joke works. That work? Yeah. Thank you. Tony's my audience.

He's helping me out. You guys can't see that. I literally asked Tony how he likes every joke after I did it, because I can't fucking hear you laugh at home. This is what I'm reduced to on YouTube. Now, sure. Some beloved comedies like the Office 30, Rock and New Girl didn't have a live studio audience.

But they did so many episodes a year that the writers were still in the room writing the end of the season as the beginning of the season was airing. And that meant they could use the ratings, the critical response, and even your mean tweets and overwhelmingly sexual fan art to improve the show. The point I'm trying to make is sitcoms, comedy of all forms, it doesn't just come out of thin air. No art does. You can't just decide to make a show funny. the process is the product.

These shows were funny because of how they were made, because of the factory that produced them. And now, by cutting down the orders and separating writing for production and sending the shoots overseas, the factory is gone. We don't make shows the way we used to make them anymore. And the writers and actors who used to make those shows

have moved on to writing prestige dromedies about rich people who travel a lot, because that's what works on the streaming services today. So even though there's still a massive audience for sitcoms, the streamers are actually incapable of making a new friends or Seinfeld or even a news radio. So instead, they just keep trading the rights to the classic sitcoms of the past, like medieval nobles trading Roman statues that no artist alive can sculpt. And that's a shame, not just because people still love sitcoms and want new ones to watch, I know I do,

but because the sitcom is exactly the kind of show we need right now. You know, it's no secret that people feel lonelier and more polarized than ever. And sitcoms do something that no other kind of show or media does. They offer us a model for how to come together. I know, I know it seems a little silly, but stay with me, okay? Because the secret sauce of a sitcom, what really makes the format work is that it forces characters who should have very little in common to find reasons to love and respect each other despite their differences.

Like, think of cheers. Sam was a cool jock, a retired baseball player, but you know what? He spent most of his time hanging out with a socially awkward mailman, a drunk accountant, and a feminist nerd. Every one of these people would be in a different click in high school, but the sitcom brought them together.

One of the most memorable scenes in the office is the one where, after years of fights and pranks and seemingly irreconcilable differences, Jim comforts a broken-hearted Dwight in the stairwell. You know, in a time when it seems more and more impossible to coexist with each other, sitcoms reveal our shared humanity with even the weirdest, most different, most easy to overlook people. And that is the real reason I love this format and why I think eventually this sitcom will rise from the dead. Because sitcoms help us open up to each other. They help us

trust each other and they remind us that the true joy in life isn't just being a gym, surrounded by other gyms, but having the opportunity to let the Dwights of the world into our living rooms and into our hearts. I'm making a gym face. Can you tell I'm making a gym face? That was a HeadGum podcast.

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A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify, new episodes every Tuesday. Hello, I'm Johnny Knoxville. And I'm Jeff Tremaine. Welcome to Jackass the Podcast, a new show coming to Fri-H.

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Wee man. Jeff grabbed me from the back of the head and threw a punch. The whole bar just stopped and wanted to kill me. And some of the crew that's been with us from the beginning. I had to share a room with this guy. I left a nice surprise in the toilet form. Every time.

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