Unpopular Opinion: I’m Not Awfully Keen on Sitcoms

Sabina Weston
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read

Whenever someone makes references to popular (even iconic, as they are often described) American sitcoms, such as Friends, How I Met Your Mother, or even the Two Broke Girls (I don’t even want to mention Big Bang Theory), I just don’t care. Sitcoms are something that I prefer to be completely oblivious about, mostly for my own good. You see, I have the same attention span as the hamster my mother got me for my 10th birthday, and studying for finals (or any studying, to be honest) takes up twice as much time for me than for the average person — that is why I prefer not to throw myself down the hole of a 7-season show, as it may influence my grades (and my future as a whole). On the other hand, my distraction issue may be attributed to the dyslexia I was diagnosed with back in primary school, which I then did not care to do anything about (very stupidly, as it ultimately did cost me a place at King’s College London). Nevertheless, TV series (especially sitcoms) never really managed to grab my attention. Even Parks and Recreation, the funniest show I’ve ever seen, only managed to sustain my appetite for the first 3 seasons. I started watching How I Met Your Mother back in middle school, but it quickly became boring and I learned of the unsatisfactory finale/epilogue episode from my friend Sylvia.

But maybe it’s something else?

Last Thursday, during my one-hour lunch break (which I usually spend alone, with my phone, as I haven’t really made that many friends at my office), I was texting my high school best friend Julia (you might know her as the peer-pressuring, vodka-swigging friend from my other article, Drinking vodka is hard). Julia is an unpaid intern at one of the biggest Polish TV stations, while I work full-time at the consultancy branch of a major corporation. To be frank, we’re pretty much exhausted and low-key done with this (at least I am, Julia seems to be enjoying her job). Before any middle-aged person reads this and automatically starts bashing the egocentric and spoilt millennials that society labels us as, I would like to clarify that we are both 20 years old and this is our first summer with employment. I made a joke to Julia that our life right now is probably a spinoff called The Adult Years — an unnecessary, brutal follow-up to the hit show which was based on our lives in high school.

“This isn’t even funny, I feel the same about this,” she replied, “But the show is still pretty okay.”

“Yeah, like a heavier sitcom,” I texted back.

“I don’t know about you, but I have the feeling that the longer I live, I realise that all the absurd stuff which happen in TV shows are actually really probable. If I really watched a show about my life, I would definitely roll my eyes a couple of times.”

“Yeah. I stopped watching sitcoms because often the situations are quite similar to the events in my life — which is often funnier than most shows anyway.”

“TOTALLY.”

“Or maybe it’s just my really bad sense of humour.”

I never thought of my life as extremely out of the ordinary. It was entertaining, for sure, but I believed to be living the average life of a 20-year old in a Central European semi-democratic state (“I don’t think your life is average,” replied Julia, probably referencing the events which took place in 2016 and have been mostly thoroughly shredded and deleted from my memory).

A possible explanation to where the problem lies is that those sitcoms, which I don’t watch past the second season, survive on their viewership, on a large audience that lets them profit and get renewed (usually for another drag of a season). What really annoys me is that those TV shows tend to overcomplicate their plot to gain and retain the audience’s interest, but happen to become overwhelmingly annoying instead. A good example of that may be Supernatural (not even a sitcom), which became simply unbearable somewhere around its 8th season (and yes, I watched it all up to the 10th). Same thing happened with all of my childhood TV shows, whether it was NCIS or How I Met Your Mother. To be fair, I tolerate this flaw only in Doctor Who, as one could argue that it was supposed to be exceedingly complicated since its first air date back in 1963. However, neither NCIS nor How I Met Your Mother involve time travel, paradoxes, and aliens, and yet they choose to act as if they did — I simply cannot accept that.

To clarify, I believe that my pretty-average life is not only more interesting, but is also spared from such bullshit plot twists like ending a relationship because I WANT TO KNOW WHO I REALLY AM or something of that sort (looking at you, Lilly from How I Met Your Mother and Mindy from The Mindy Project). Relationships end because they were bad or they just weren’t meant to be in the first place. Not because one of the couple wakes up one morning with the desire to embark on an odyssey of self-actualisation.

“I personally think that such dramas and people’s fucked-up reactions to them also happen in Real Life,” said Julia, who probably has a more healthy approach to things than me and enjoys watching sitcoms.

But then again, this could just be caused by people watching too many shows and basing their life decisions on what their favourite character once did, which is frankly speaking, as mindless and sad as a 5-year old kid jumping from the 8th floor because he thinks he’s Superman. Except that those are young adults. “Life imitates art,” like Lana Del Rey used to sing.

But what came first? Where TV shows really based on people’s bad life decisions? To an extent, yes, as the idea had to come from somewhere. However, as I pointed out earlier, the writers tried to gain a greater viewership by playing up those simple human dilemmas. Then (somewhere in the 90s, when Friends got insanely popular) everything got blown out of proportion, and this might or might not have influenced a generation of people who took their life lessons from Hannah Montana episodes and not from, I don’t know, a simple conversation. Of course, I am not in favour of banning all TV shows just because they do not interest me that much as the next person. What I am looking forward to in the near future are shows of a higher quality in general — less tropes and stereotypes, and more realness. In essence, I believe that better writing is possible.

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