We had a discussion at the coffee machine in our office about what has been the greatest sit-com ever. There were arguments for and against Seinfeld, Friends, Big Bang Theory and a couple of others.
It got me thinking about what makes sit-coms popular. I have a theory ; people are attracted to situations that they can identify with or aspire to.
Seinfeld fits in the first category, situations we can identify with. It is a show about the minutiae of daily life. About which place sells the best soup and how the proprietor is a mental case. About the locations of the best washrooms in a city. About our disappointment when we leave a large tip but nobody notices.
Big Bang Theory falls in the second category, depicting the lives of geeks who get to travel to the International Space Station, meet Stephen Hawking and date the gorgeous girl across the hall. The protagonists are not bigger than life heroes like James Bond or Gandalf the Grey or Harry Potter. They are like you and me, nerds who worked hard at academics and went to good schools and got respectable degrees and are perhaps slightly socially inept.
Friends, straddles the two. On one hand, it offers the familiarity of life in an apartment block in a big city with a group of friends who meet for coffee at the Central Perk and have fairly normal lives. Yet there are aspirational elements too. The nerd finally gets the pretty girl. The actor can make a living - though I haven't quite figured out how, and a couple keep their relationship under wraps.
I think this theory might fit soap operas too, but I suspect, that like me, the readers of this blog do not watch them enough to be able to confirm or negate this hypothesis.
No comments:
Post a Comment