Sitcom’s Evolution into Database Format
By: Ria Garg
In the past few decades, we have seen a transformation in what is the sitcom. We saw sitcoms move from broadcast and cable television to streaming, and as the sitcom evolves through different mediums, we see creators experimenting with Internet aesthetics. In the same vein, we see young people, who have grown up savvy with both Television and Internet content, evolving the way classic sitcom stories are told in formats more apt to younger generations, namely database format. Social media creator and Youtuber, David Dobrik, achieved notoriety using sitcom tropes to frame his friends’ and his lives in content distributed in database form through the Internet.
Who is David Dobrik?
David Dobrik is a 23 year old vlogger who has a Youtube massive following at fifteen million subscribers . Recently, he has come into more mainstream success winning a People’s Choice Award and hosting the Teen Choice Awards. David’s vlogs have been compared to sitcoms like Friends but for the new media landscape. Through platforms like Youtube, Instagram, and Podcasting, he and his friends release content on their lives, reminiscent of classic sitcoms. This social media empire centers around David’s biweekly four-minute and twenty-second vlogs, where viewers find pranks, scripted bits, romance, and friendship.
The easiest way to illustrate the database and sitcom aesthetics of David’s vlogs is by watching a few:
During the jokes and stunts in the first two minutes, there are references to character archetypes, as most of David’s friends are portrayed as some sort of exaggeration of themselves. Jeff is depicted as the hot, athletic jock, which he references joking about riding his bike when he cannot sleep. David paints Dom as the scumbag, pothead type, expecting him to take the money he finds on the floor. Despite these minor references to their characters, the jokes and stunts are pretty insular.
The last two minutes follow David emotional about his Kids Choice Awards nomination and his ultimate win — a moment significantly more satisfying to those familiar with his journey to this point.
A few other notorious vlogs include when David marries his best friend Jason’s mom in order to be Jason’s dad (A story you can also explore through Jason’s perspective through his vlog channel).
The second is an intimate announcement of his break up with social media star Liza Koshy. Viewers grew used to seeing them together as a vlog staple and were heartbroken to see this bittersweet parting of ways.
Database in Dobrik’s Vlogs
As time progresses, different technologies dominate the way we tell stories, and consequently, the aesthetics that fit the medium also dominate. We are living in an age where we, especially younger generations, tell stories through the Internet, where information is organized in “database format”. As Manovich argues all of the Internet is organized by unordered lists of items — database. Users are afforded the opportunity to both access only elements they desire and construct their own narratives out of the pieces. Since users can access elements in a random order, “there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative”, but there still is value in accessing and experiencing each element (Manovich 85).
In true database form, a full visual description of the world David created is displayed above. The narrative of David and his friends’ lives are told is through short discrete entities and spread through different platforms as independent posts. Viewers create a specialized experience consisting of the people they care most about by following certain social media and watching certain videos. Viewers then get to focus on storylines that are interesting and relevant to them, or not even focus on a storyline at all.
Like in the first two minutes of David’s vlog “WINNING MY FIRST KIDS CHOICE AWARD!!”, there are self-contained moments of humor that need little context to be enjoyed.
Additionally, their social media feature random independent bits:
or bits that reference and continue narratives in others’ vlogs like the following TikTok his friend Zane made referencing the vlog where David marries Jason’s mom.
Zane also has vlogs where you can explore his own relationship with members of their friend group and his family. He has the unique background of coming from a conservative Muslim household, and his sister and him use his vlogs to explore it in comedic ways, an aspect of Zane’s life alluded to in David’s vlogs, but can only be seen in-depth through Zane’s vlog channel.
Significance of sitcom
Iconic sitcoms like I Love Lucy, Seinfeld, and Friends are easy to identify — all center around a group of friends, who for twenty minutes, enter in a cyclical structure of normalcy being disrupted by stress and restoring normalcy (Mills). Often they are structured with a main “A story” and one or two accompanying “B/C stories” (Charney). However, as sitcoms develop through different mediums, they become harder to identify, as creators abandon this structure. For the vlogs, this means deconstructing sitcom format and moving B/C plots to different social media or his friends’ YouTube channels.
With changing structure, Brett Mills argues that comedy is the “aspect from which all other characteristics of the sitcom arise”. This is evident in the vlogs, as David employs many classic sitcom techniques for humor. For example, he frames his friends’ personalities as exaggerated archetypes, he uses his own laugh to emulate laugh tracks in sitcoms, and he relies on reaction shots for comedic effect, surprising his friends with flamethrowers, giant lizards, or the fact that he married his friend’s mom.
My favorite description of Television and sitcoms comes from a character on NBC’s Community, Abed:
“There is skill to it. More importantly, it has to be joyful, effortless, fun. TV defeats its own purpose when it’s pushing an agenda, or trying to defeat other TV or being proud or ashamed of itself for existing. It’s TV; it’s comfort. It’s a friend you’ve known so well, and for so long you just let it be with you, and it needs to be okay for it to have a bad day or phone in a day, and it needs to be okay for it to get on a boat with LeVar Burton and never come back. Because eventually, it all will.”
In David’s vlogs, there is an added feeling of connection that forms, as we experience the friend group’s content dispersed through our actual friends’ content on social media like Instagram. We see aspects of their daily lives — playing small pranks on each other and joking around, and we see larger moments — breakups, engagements, starting families, and achievements of major life goals like the Kid’s Choice Award. Content like this creates feelings of effortless fun, personal connection and comfort, as we return to the same group of people over the years and watch them grow.
Arrested Development’s experimentation with the database form
When Netflix bought a fourth season of Arrested Development, showrunner, Mitch Hurwitz, used the changing of mediums, from network Television to online streaming, as an opportunity to experiment with Internet aesthetics. His original intention with the season was to tell the same story in each episode from a different character’s point of view. So instead of having to watch each episode sequentially, viewers could view episodes in any order or choose episodes they were most interested in.
Ultimately, Hurwitz abandoned this concept, feeling like he could not get jokes to land properly, but there are still clearly remnants of this idea (Dionne). One of the biggest comedic gains from this format is how it lends itself to dramatic irony. For example, the season features a storyline where a character, George Michael, creates a software called “Fakeblock”, an app that simulates a woodblock instrument, but his family misunderstands it to be innovative security software. Consequently, different episodes explore different family members attempting to sell and profit off the software, while George Michael’s episode focuses on him dealing with the stress of his lie.
Traditional sitcoms have A stories and B stories, while David Dobrik’s vlogs have different channels, social media, and podcasts. We see Hurwitz also attempt to abandon the A/B story structure for database in season four. I think what is interesting between the two is that for David, creating his social media empire in a database format was a natural progression through his social media career. While with Hurwitz, he explicitly experimented with a new structure for Television and was not able to fully grasp it. This could be for a number of reasons, but I believe it has to do with how natural this format is to generations who grew up with the Internet. David Dobrik, who is 23, has been experiencing sitcoms, social media and the Internet from a young age, and effortlessly uses different platforms to release his content in discrete pieces. What is impressive is how he leverages sitcom tropes in this new medium, drawing in young tech-savvy (potentially social media addicted) audiences by manifesting the comfort and familiarity experienced through sitcoms.
Work Cited:
Charney, Noah. “Cracking the Sitcom Code.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 28 Dec. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/cracking-the-sitcom-code/384068/.
Dionne, Zach. “Watching the New Arrested Development Episodes in Whatever Order Won’t Work After All.” Vulture, Vulture, 16 May 2013, www.vulture.com/2013/05/arrested-development-viewed-in-order.html.
Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Database Aesthetics, 1998, pp. 39–60., doi:10.5749/j.cttts7q7.6.
Mills, Brett. The Sitcom. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
