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Introduction Television has undergone dramatic changes over the past two decades. 1 Swept up in this change has been the situation comedy, a generic fxture of the small screen whose emergence at the tail end of the 1940s coincided with the invention of the television itself. 2 Sitcoms have come a long way since the days of I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951-1957); in fact, postmodern experimentation has led to the development of new narrative languages of televisual comedy. 3 Tis essay will focus on contemporary sitcoms and their experimentations with traditional sitcom narration and temporality. Since nonlinearity and temporal distortion are two of the defning features of postmodern fction, these ‘postmodern’ sitcoms embrace the vaudeville aesthetic of anarchistic comedy, utilizing cutaway gags and talking head segments to transgress classical conventions of the traditional sitcom genre.4 Such experimentations – as exemplifed by Family Guy, Scrubs, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Te Ofce, and more – do not exist in a vacuum: As Melissa Ames argues, these temporal experimentations on TV may be “an aesthetic response to the cultural climate from which they derive.”5 I will argue that the postmodern sitcom’s digressive, distracted style – heavily indebted to the anarchistic comedy tradition – is a visual analogue of our nanosecond culture, representational of multitasking in particular and the Internet Age in general. Narrative, Temporality, and the Conventions of Traditional Sitcoms In order to analyze the temporal transgressions of contemporary sitcoms, one must frst direct attention to the norms and customs of traditional sitcoms. In his insightful book Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes, author Saul Austerlitz observes that the traditional sitcom is a genre characterized by a paradoxical desire to both overturn the established order and preserve a sense of equilibrium.6 Te traditional sitcom - and 55 DANiEL KoNiKoFF its prioritization of eternal repetition and sameness – did not begin in earnest until 1951, with Lucille Ball and real-life husband Desi Arnaz’s frst foray into television: I Love Lucy. Lucy was the frst sitcom to be shot on flm before a studio audience, allowing Ball and Arnaz to perform for an energetic crowd while circumventing the technological setbacks of live broadcasts.7 Not wanting to fracture the studio audience’s experience by stopping to reset the camera, Arnaz conceived to shoot their show with three cameras simultaneously, and brought in cinematographer Karl Freund to design a lighting system that would allow long shots and close-ups to be shot in the same take.8 Tis even, fat lighting soon became one of the most immediately recognizable signatures of the traditional sitcom. By not having to change lighting or camera position, classical sitcoms were flmed scene by scene (instead of shot by shot) on a soundstage with infexible sets, as if the performance was taking place in a proscenium theatre. Positioned between a live studio audience and the constructed sets, the multiple cameras that surrounded – but did not cross over – this proscenium served to spatially “situate” the situation comedy’s action.9 Space is a core component of these classical sitcoms, and the scenes that unfold within them are confned to closed, recurring locations that act as the focal hub of all comic activity.10 Tis aesthetic repetitiveness and immutability was indicative of broader cultural phenomena. Emerging at the tail end of the 1940s, “the sitcom,” writes Austerlitz, “bore witness to the conformism borne of the horrors of the Second World War. A generation forged in the fre of the war sought placidity and sameness on the home front…[Television] would mirror America, not necessarily as it was, but as it should be: peaceable, middle class, eternally unchanging.” 11 From a storytelling standpoint, classical sitcoms i contain defned character groups, perpetual hijinks (“hilarity ensues”), and a linear narrative. A traditional element of fctional narration, linear progression “carries with it the implication of an arrow of time, pointing from the past to the future.”12 Linearity in narrative comes down to a “cause-and-efect” directionality to a story’s sequences and events. Te conventional sitcom narrative is no exception. Despite minimal academic literature on the precise construction of sitcom narration, one may ascertain the nature of i Over sixty years since its inception, the classical sitcom aesthetic rages on as if still under the spell of the post-war 56 CAMéRA StyLo sitcom narratives by simply watching them frsthand and observing their predictable, mechanistic narrative patterns. Unlike a flm, whose narrative governs its ultimate duration, a television sitcom dictates the amount of time in which a narrative can be told. Only having 22 minutes to tell their stories, sitcom storylines must be established quickly and explicitly through accelerated exposition.13 Narratives are usually broken down into multiple storylines, with each episode having an A-story (its main plot), as well as a B- and C-story which, despite their relegation to lesser screen time, function identically to the episode’s principal arc. A standardized episode in the traditional sitcom model operates according to a commitment to equilibrium, beginning in a state of stasis that is soon disrupted by the introduction of a problem – which is, by the end of the episode, resolved, thereby returning the comedic situation to stasis once again. Te reinstitution of equilibrium is driven by the medium’s devotion to episodic (as opposed to serial) narration and the maintenance of diegetic status quo.14 Comedic situations, of course, unfold not only through linear time, but through space, as well.15 As previously mentioned, traditional sitcom spaces are – by virtue of the spatial constraints of a multiple- camera setup and a proscenium-style stage – strictly organized, limiting the action of an episode’s narrative to enclosed, recurring locales.16 Tis space acts as a sort of “grid,” within which traditional sitcoms establish the topologies of their fctional worlds.17 Tese worlds are limited to a central locale (usually a couch or an apartment) as well as a handful of surrounding areas, which become the rote settings in which a show’s comedic scenarios may unfold.18 Whether it be the bar in Cheers (CBS, 1982-1993) or Central Perk in Friends (NBC, 1994-2004), the linear narratives of traditional sitcoms are frmly entrenched within series- specifc diegetic space, and, with the exception of the occasional exterior shot, rarely stray beyond the rigidly constructed soundstage sets. Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a new brand of sitcom. Tese new sitcoms are rooted within the televisual traditions of their ancestors and demonstrate a keen awareness of the classical conventions that begat them. Yet they exude stylistic profciency and narrative ambitiousness that far surpasses the humdrum aesthetics and simplistic storytelling of their humble progenitors. Having broken away from the multi-camera setup that dogged traditional sitcoms, these contemporary sitcoms stand as testament to a movement of postmodernity; free from soundstages and raucous laugh tracks, the sitcoms of the present day have 57 DANiEL KoNiKoFF been granted the liberty to dabble in spatio-temporal experimentation, shattering conventions of the classical school of situation comedy. Where there once stood linear narration now stands narratives rife with temporal disruption, a transition that has introduced a vast array of neologisms into the sitcom’s expressive vocabulary. Tese fresh additions to the burgeoning sitcom language have cropped up with the resurgence of single-camera comedies. Single- cam comedies overtook multi-cam comedies at the turn of the century, usurping the latter’s position as the reigning televisual format. Single- cam sitcoms ofer an abundance of freedom and creative opportunities; not restricted to a limited number of sets, these sitcoms are free to have scenes that take place on location.19 In doing so, they are deviating from the classical sitcom conception of comedic performance as a rehearsed theatrical event.20 Single-camera sitcoms also have more scenes than their multi-camera kin, and these scenes tend to be much shorter, making the story progress at a faster, more exciting pace.21 Te enhanced narrative speed of single-cam sitcoms fts well within the Internet Age from which these sitcoms arose. While it may appear counterintuitive to assert that the development of aesthetic televisual form corresponds to deeper historical context, Melissa Ames’ book Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First- Century Programming devotes an entire subsection of essays to this notion, examining “how the cultural climate impacts temporal manipulation on the small screen.”22 In this section, entitled “Historicizing the Moment,” Ames writes that Lost’s (ABC, 2004-2010) use of fashbacks and “fashsideways” formally parallels the post-9/11 longing to correct mistakes of the past.23 Similarly, 24 (Fox, 2001-2010, 2014) utilizes split- screens, and a ticking clock, to aesthetically represent “[our] culture’s ever-increasing tendency toward speed.”24 Te single-camera sitcom may be interpreted in similar fashion. Although the rise of the single-camera sitcom does not correspond with the invention of the Internet per se, its rise does correspond with the immersion of the Internet into the cultural status quo. In presenting their stories through increasingly complex temporal