Hollywood Killed The Sitcom

Adam Conover on why the sitcom vanished. Rain Wilson went on Fox News and blamed cancel culture; Conover’s answer is structural. Short season orders, writers’ rooms severed from the shoot, production shipped overseas to save money. The old comedy factory was literally dismantled, and you can’t decide to make a show funny after the fact.

What lifts it above a piece about TV economics is the closing turn. Sitcoms, he argues, sit people who’d never share a lunch table in the same bar until they start to like each other. The Cheers of it all. That’s the same loss the death-of-the-monoculture writers keep circling: culture needs a shared room to matter, and the streaming services have quietly taken the room away. Conover describes the specific mechanism by which one wing of it got demolished.