Sitcom Genres
 

Making this another thread. All the archetypes and shit talk goes in here, let's let the House thread be about House.

Have they really been? I mean you have Friends / Seinfeld / Whichever shitty sitcom they had running at a given time after Seinfeld, going back there was stuff like I Love Lucy or Mr. Ed, even a lot of stuff that ostensibly featured families like the Dick Van Dyke Show or Bewitched weren't really "family sitcoms" as we would understand them today. I feel a lot of people of our age group will actually have a skewed perspective of this matter due to having grown up at a time when such programming was unusually prevalent (that TGIF deal that ABC used to do was the mothership for this shit) but I don't feel it's more prevalent overall than any other particular subgenre.

Home Improvement, Bernie Mac, Everybody Loves Raymond, Malcolm in the Middle, Full House, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Even Stevens (to a degree, at any rate), Two and a Half Men and that's just scratching the surface for sitcoms family centered with kids. For sitcoms family centered with couples, there's 'Til Death, King of Queens, and tons more. This is all in the 02-07 ('cept home improvement) time period. I'd have to say POS makes a pretty strong case.

Now one could make the case that sitcoms based around aquaintances (Fraiser, Friends, Seinfeld) might be more prevelant and were ususally better than family centered, but seriously, it's a hard thing to tally (there's so friggen many!)

For Everybody Loves Raymond the kids were there, but most of the time they were more part of the scenery than anything else.

I'm not giving it it's own damn category. Raymond doesn't deserve it.

Basically, most (if not all) stereotypical American sitcoms are either:

A) All in the Family
B) The Honeymooners
C) The Brady Bunch
D) Some combination of the above.

But you never actually referred to my argument. You just said "You don't watch a lot of tv and are from NZ what would you know".
If you wanted to put out I'm illinformed then you should point out ill informed bits of my argument first. Which you tried to do more in the rest of this post so thank you.
Again you show a misappropriation.
The fact that you referred to Full House as full of tropes show exactly what I've been saying all along that you are confusing content with context. The appearance of tropes is useful for an archetype in its most superficial form but if we examining shows like this there is very little difference between British and American shows and that is not what I was arguing.
And your last point is exactly my point. That the American sitcom is based upon the set-up and the punchline and Scrubs is a good example to use in making this point because it doesn't use punchlines in the convential sense but it uses them in the structural sense.

You know, Barrel, using your criteria, I could put every sitcom ever made under "archetypal American sitcom". If you stretch enough, look enough, scour enough, it's not that hard.

In short, you're criteria has dissolved into a puddle of muck that really makes little sense and you have a multitude of people pretty much saying "Uh.. A-no." So, either more sharply define what you are talking about with multiple examples, perhaps some YouTube clips illustrating your points, also showing us the opposite so that there is a sense of contrast, or just agree that your viewpoint on what makes a archetypical American sitcom is not universal.

But that doesn't make it the archetype. That just makes it similar. My point is that you're misusing the term and saying that, because at its most basic level it uses a type of set-up/punchline formula (which all comedy has, don't kid yourself), it is the perfect generic example of any and all American sitcoms, which is false.

I'm not saying Scrubs is good or bad, I'm just saying that it is far from what you say it is.

Wouldn't the title archetype be subjective in this sense? What you define american humor as and what Barrel does are different, so how can you say that his definitive american sitcom isn't the archetype? (though, I do have to say if you think scrubs is the archetypal american sitcom, I'd advise you to watch more american television)

Well, an archetype is generally something that is a generally accepted definition of the subject. If something is not generally accepted as the definition, then it really can't be the archetype.