When writing comedic characters, Judd Apatow often starts by reading self-help books, which allow him to think psychologically about his characters and build them from flaws and insecurities. The comedy has to come from somewhere intrinsically tied to who that character is. Funny can’t be the characters primary defintion though. Unless you have comedic characters you’ve just written something more akin to a soap opera.Ī sitcom will not succeed unless it has characters who are funny. So far, all we have is a part of the situation. However, a precinct doesn’t make it a sitcom. There, they can link up to go on a variety of antics. But it is vital for your own sitcom writing experience that the characters have a location where they can all meet. It is rare that a sitcom only centres on one place. Each episode focuses more on the characters being put into a new situation such as a theme park trip, night out or work experience. The school is the meeting place of the main characters in The Inbetweeners , but the show itself rarely centres within the school.Friends also centres around two neighbouring apartments and a coffee shop.Frasier includes the radio station and Frasier’s apartment as the two main bases but also frequently features a coffee shop.The precinct is not always the only location and almost all shows include a number of bases for the characters to interact in, both in private and public. Therefore, the casts consist of biological families or makeshift families formed of roommates or friends. The primary location of each of these shows is a place where people live. These types of sitcoms include Friends, New Girl, Seinfeld, Modern Family, What We Do In The Shadows and Spaced. The home precinct is demonstrated in the aforementioned eternal sitcom The Simpsons, and in a number of other shows based around where people live. But it could also feature recurring characters such as customers and delivery drivers. To create an example, a sitcom could be set in a pizzeria, which is a place of work that would allow for a central cast of pizza chefs, owners, and waiters. The concept of the workplace could also be less literal and include schools, universities and colleges, as in Bad Education and Community. The casts are therefore work colleagues or a work ‘family’. Other examples of workplace sitcoms include the TV studio in 30 Rock, the bars in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphiaand Cheers, the basement filled with nerds in The IT Crowd, the various political buildings and offices in Veep and The Thick of itand the offices in The Officeand Parks and Recreation. This is classed as a workplace situation comedy and features police officers in their various roles. When it comes to precincts there are three typical types of locations in which a sitcom can be situated.īrooklyn Nine Nine uses a literal precinct in the form of the 99th Police Precinct. This will be the starting point for the controlling idea of the show. The location and the cast of characters is vital to fuelling the comedy. The situation is the place to start when writing a sitcom. The Simpsons is a sitcom which best exemplifies this lack of change as even after 30 years, the central characters are still the same age, in the same house, in the same town and even in the same clothes. Frequently, this incorporates an ensemble cast of characters, who rarely change and rarely develop. So a sitcom is simply a comedy in a situation.
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