A rant about sitcoms...
As much as I've always liked watching sitcoms, there hasn't been many in the past half dozen years I've even paid attention to. IMO sitcoms started really losing my interest when the commercial time got longer and longer and that's when more and more sitcoms started using the one camera filming instead of a live audience.
Most sitcoms, whether one camera or in front of live audiences, had a standard pattern. They'd often have both a tag in the beginning of the show and at the end, a short intro scene and ending scene. In the middle was two acts for whatever the situation was that week. The first act set it up and the second act was the payoffs. These shows running times were 25-26 minutes, including theme songs and ending credits. Over time the shows started getting shorter and shorter for commercial time. 24 minutes stayed around a long time when they got to that point, but what didn't was the opening and closing credits. Those got shorter and shorter. An opening theme has been almost nonexistent for a couple decades now. (When Everybody Loves Raymond was on the air, at some point they only used the entire theme in the first episode of every season.) Friends theme was so popular they never cut it down, but they slightly sped it up.
After the extremely popular sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends and Frasier left the air around the time BBM was released, more commercial time started altering how sitcoms were written. They were starting to be written more like sketches. They'd have a theme and each 3-4 minute segment something to do with that theme. Or, there were so many people in the sitcoms that each segment was different people. Example: Modern Family dealt basically with three families all related in some way. The older Father with a young wife and kid, the Mom & Dad with three children and the gay couple, which adopted a child early on. Sometimes each episode had each family with their own plots. Instead of three commercial interruptions, standard for some decades, there were as many as 6-7. I once timed an episode of this show, I think, or it could've been Raising Hope, and segments in between commercials ranged from 2 mins. to 4 mins. 30 secs.
The point is, it's harder to write sitcoms this way. A premise and then payoffs becomes unworkable when you're inserting 6-7 breaks. The Big Bang Theory tried leaving the formula intact by having two 4 or 5 minute commercial breaks. This only worked for them because the show was so popular.
I've been watching Young Sheldon streaming this past season and early on I was pretty astounded to see that most episodes were only around 18 minutes and some seconds long. That's quite a ways away from 26 minutes. And it makes you wonder how the industry in the 1950s and much of the '60s did upwards of 30 episodes a season. From 1964-67 Gilligan's Island did 36, 32 and 30 in their three seasons. And they were all longer episodes by several minutes. And hour shows are now anywhere, in actuality, from 41-43 minutes when they used to run 51-52 mins.
Network viewership has shrunk along with the running times. Besides the structure of a sitcom plot now, what you also miss are actually just more human moments. There's no time for them. Like at the end of Bewitched when Darrin and Samantha would react to a remark or something else with a knowing look, a glance, or maybe a kiss.
