Things about situation comedy

With a few notable exceptions, I never used to follow serials before. But recently I found out some things about these serials which make them popular. There is something in these serials which make you follow them. This is probably the reason why I check Project-Free-TV to see if somebody posted How I Met Your Mother‘s links or not. It all started when I saw Friends for the first time. That was the most amazing sitcom I ever saw, and when I compared it with the serials which I used to hate, I found a great difference. These are some of the points that make situation comedies (sitcoms) famous –

The hangout place – In HIMYM, there is this bar called MacLaren's where the group meets almost every day and discusses their routines which often take a hideous turn. In Friends, it used to be Central Perk, the place where these guys had fun.

Characters with unique and bizarre characteristics – This is the essence of sitcoms. Each character has some weird traits, often to make things little more interesting. Friends has a great combo of such characters which made them a real success, HIMYM is not that great as Friends, but not bad either.

Sarcasm – I am a great fan of sarcastic people and believe that sarcasm should be considered as one of the most important things that human needs in order to survive. Chandler Bing is my favorite character in Friends and Barney Stinson in HIMYM. If given a chance, I would definitely like to meet those script writers who compose their dialogues. This job is really tough and needs a high level of creativity. So to make a sitcom famous, there has to be a sarcastic person who himself need not be a great character, but someone who knows how to hit the bull’s eye.

Differences – When I saw some episodes of Scrubs, I didn’t like them much, maybe because all of these characters belong to same hospital and there is nothing new in their lives. I mean there are some good moments but I never felt like laughing my heart out anytime, which was often the case with Friends. If the serial has few characters that go to totally different work places, then there are higher chances of getting variety of experiences, which adds a lot of masala in the plot.

Bindings and Breakups are important – The show must go on. Nobody feels too bad when someone breaks up, nobody feels too good either when someone gets into relationship. In fact, more the ups and downs in a character’s life more are the chances to create funny situations. In a comedy serial, you don’t expect a relationship graph as a straight line with slope 1. This might not be true about the serials I used to like before 6 years, but now I know that ups and downs are part of life, I take them very lightly and appreciate the comic sense behind it.

Making sure that addendums are taken out from time to time – Addendums here mean the characters which are important for an episode or two. You don’t really care what the hell happened to them when they are done with those episodes. This is difficult to achieve each time, some people might like the addendum and they may feel like he / she should be a part of group, but no. If you compare this point with usual soap serials, for them following this point is next to impossible. Their life can’t just go without complications, there has to be an infinitely long chain of family relations, with at least one extra marital affair between every possible pair. Indian soap operas might rule their world for the height of pathetic creations and series of nonsense incidents. There are some serials where the main character just do not die, it’s like he / she is immortal, time never ages them, even if it, the character is so strong by will that it can survive for almost ten generations. Anyways, I can write a separate post on my take on soap operas, don’t want to eat up space here.

Showing the facts – I like this point very much. Sitcoms are very good at showing what they want to show. There is no ideology which they follow, no guidelines as such. They do not give out any social / non-social message which are similar to self help books. There is absolutely no problem when rest of characters make fun of the lead character and he / she does not always win. The main idea is the lead actor is so common that he / she could be one of us, one of the common people. The belief that he /she is amongst the aam janata creates a very positive impression on audience and hence these serials win.