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The Importance of Character in Sitcoms
I just want to put this alert here that the contents of this post are all my personal opinions and preferences. I’m not claiming that this is a hard and fast rule.
The Big Bang Theory recently finished its eleventh season. Not a lot of sitcoms get all the way to their eleventh season, so what makes TBBT so special?
It’s the characters.
People care about and get invested in characters in television shows. That’s the only reason The Walking Dead is still alive, I would presume, since I quit watching after the plot got too boring for me. There can be movies without great characters that are still interesting and gripping because of the plot or the structure (Dunkirk), but that format doesn’t really work on television. It’s longer and more drawn out, so to get audiences to keep coming back, there has to be at least one good character.
That’s what brings me back too all of my favorite sitcoms, which include, but aren’t limited to, Big Bang, Modern Family, The Office, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Silicon Valley, New Girl, and Friends. Many times, the plots of the episodes are similar to each other. But I can get past that when the characters are engaging and lovable and the jokes are funny.
The love of character is both what made people stop watching and keep watching The Office when Steve Carrell left. For some people, his character was so lovable that he was the only reason they were watching the show. But for other people, they still loved the other characters. Dwight was interesting and funny enough to keep watching, Jim and Pam were “relationship goals,” and so on and so forth.
To bring it back to TBBT, a show that is bad or has unlikable characters shouldn’t make it to an eleventh season (more on that in a minute). The jokes in this show were definitely better in its first six or seven seasons, and it was funnier overall. But the reason I’ve still seen every episode five seasons later is because of the love I’ve built up for the core cast.
The same principle applies for the rest of the shows I listed. If you asked me to choose a favorite character on any one of those shows, I wouldn’t be able to just because they each have so many good ones. And like I keep saying, they’re the reason I keep coming back to the shows.
This is why I’m baffled by shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I’ve seen a handful of episodes of that show, some of them are known as some of its best episodes, and I haven’t been impressed at all. All of the characters seem to be jerks, crude, or stupid and not appealing to me at all.
But this isn’t to say that these types of characters can’t be appealing.
Sheldon on TBBT, Dwight on The Office, and Gilfoyle on Silicon Valley can all be mean and put the other characters down at times. But there’s something endearing about each one of them.
Something similar can be said about Michael Scott, Erlich on Silicon Valley, and even Joey on Friends. They’re all fairly crass and make crude jokes. But they all have redeemable qualities that still draw you to them.
As for “stupid” characters, every sitcom seems to have at least one. Penny, Phil, Haley, and Luke Dunphy, Kevin from The Office, Andy Dwyer, Kenneth from 30 Rock, Nick Miller, and of course, Phoebe. They’re all lovably dumb.
So all of this is to say that it’s important that a character be likable for me to be able to buy into and appreciate the humor that goes along with them. I tune into their shows over and over because I’m drawn to who they are as a person. The rest just stems from that.