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The Big Bang Theory (2007-19), Atypical (2017-21) and Community (2009-15) are sitcoms paradigmatic of a recent representational shift, in which center stage is assumed by individuals who face psychological and neurological challenges. Sheldon Cooper (TBBT), Sam Gardner (Atypical) and Abed Nadir (Community) are young male protagonists who all fall somewhere on the spectrum of autism. These representations signal a breakthrough from past, mainly cinematic depictions, which stereotypically addressed mentally challenged individuals as unstable, problematic, and crazy. Our goal is to examine the narrative and social function of autism in these three sitcoms. The theoretical context uses Thomas Elsaesser 's concept of "productive pathologies" (2009) to argue that autism is also a "productive pathology" that can be applied in the study of contemporary sitcoms. Autism spectrum disorder as a "productive pathology" is then combined with the Incongruity Theory of humour in order to analyze how Sheldon's, Sam's and Abed's developmental disorder is used to create a distinct type of incongruous comedy and at the same time destabilize notions of identity and social "propriety." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes "The Politics Episode" of One Day at a Time, an animated very special episode produced and aired during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on two aspects that prompt broader considerations about the role of scripted television in responding to pressing social issues. First, I demonstrate how the episode's narrative structure appeals to democratic deliberation as an idealized form of conflict resolution. Second, I consider how its production and airing timeline responded to—and failed to account for—the current events its narrative attempted to incorporate. Although the disjuncture between these two elements demonstrate the pitfalls for fictional television to address social issues in a time of constant crisis, I conclude by proposing that these "failures" can also serve to illustrate a specific "post-pandemic" structure-of-feeling, one where futures are perpetually deferred and where dealing with new social realities requires constant speculative iterations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O formato televisivo conhecido como sitcom tem sua estrutura determinada pela poética aristotélica, conforme comprovado por manuais de roteiro norte-americanos e estudos sobre obras estadunidenses. Este artigo tem como objetivo verificar a presença e a influência de fórmulas narrativas clássicas na produção contemporânea brasileira, tendo como objeto de estudo o primeiro episódio de Borges. Para isso, adota-se o método da engenharia reversa, em interface com a análise poética do audiovisual. No corpo teórico, propõe-se um diálogo entre Duarte (2008), Austerlitz (2014) e Pellegrini (2014; 2015), no que se refere à história e ao conceito, e entre Bordwell (2008), Rodrigues (2014) e McKee (2015), no que se refere à produção. Como um dos resultados, viu-se que Borges apresenta características do sitcom moderno, mas inova ao trazer em seu conteúdo fenômenos tipicamente brasileiros, atrelando o produto a seu contexto cultural.

Nuevos programas humorísticos en Estados Unidos y el Reino Unido están revolucionando el género de la comedia televisiva actualmente. Algunas de estas tendencias anglosajonas están llegando a países europeos como España. Este artículo sistematiza la producción de comedia televisiva en España entre los años 2000 y 2010 con el fin de identificar cuáles son los formatos internacionales más populares (sitcoms, dramedias y sketches) y las características más significativas en torno a la producción, narrativa y creación del humor de este formato de entretenimiento televisivo. Se prestará especial atención a la producción de la sitcom por ser uno de los formatos humorísticos de más éxito en el mercado español como Siete Vidas (TV 5, 1999) y su spinoff titulado Aída (TV 5, 2004), junto con otros formatos que representan la contribución española a la nueva comedia con programas como Camera Café (Tele 5, 2005), Muchachada Nui (La 2, 2007) o Qué vida más triste (La Sexta, 2008), el primer programa de sketches que ha sido adaptado a la televisión y cuyo origen fue Internet.

Advancing the proposal that conversationalists frequently engage in humorous communication to convey propositional meanings, the paper aims to employ pragmatic inferential mechanisms specified in a relevance-theoretic framework in order to explicate the viewer’s recovery of additional cognitive effects in sitcom discourse. On this observation, it is assumed that processing of humorous utterances may result in the recipient’s being amused and/ or in making more insightful observations concerning goals a speaker wishes to attain. For example, an interactant would like to communicate a potentially impolite meaning, which is mitigated by means of humour. The corpus is drawn from the American situation comedy Modern Family (2009-2020), created by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd. The focus in the paper is on how the viewer can grasp meanings that are (un)intentionally communicated by the production crew while s/he is sitting comfortably in the armchair. The main thrust of the present paper is twofold. First, extra cognitive effects can be best described in terms of propositional meanings they communicate, which in turn necessitates a relevance-theoretic notion of weak communication. Second, I postulate that accessing humorous effects is just the first step in order to fully understand a conversational episode in the sitcom, granted that viewers may be eager to spend more processing effort in exchange for extra cognitive rewards. It is frequently the case that the recipient’s mental representations are strengthened or challenged by the production crew’s (cultural) representations. More specifically, it will be demonstrated that the functions of conveying and/ or challenging of social norms, disclosing character-specific information and providing cultural references aim to strengthen or challenge the viewer’s personal beliefs.

The award winning, Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019) broke new ground in representations of sexual violence. Recalibrating the energies of the sitcom to address issues of trauma, memory and witnessing, Unbreakable has helped craft a new esthetic of the genre. The four-season series replicates key features of the historical captivity narrative and the contemporaneous #MeToo movement. Ignoring the slave narrative of captivity and dispossession allows the series to sidestep the racialized dimensions of sexual assault. The narrative's resolute focus on white survivors permits the series to mobilize trauma for comedic effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sitcom has had significant impact on how images of later life as well as later-life femininity are perpetuated, legitimized, transformed, and deconstructed. Not only have they increasingly featured older female leads at their centre, but comedy offers an arena for (older) women to be unruly and behave in ways that contradict stereotypes of ageing and femininity without being punished for doing so. The following article explores how the sitcoms Waiting for God and The Old Guys employ stock situations and stereotypes in order to construct later-life femininities, but also how the mechanisms of the sitcom allow for a transgression of these stereotypical notions of femininity. Particular attention is paid to the question of humor and the domestic spaces (older) women inhabit and how these spaces may be mobilized by older women in order to be "funny" and behave "badly" without being punished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sitcom Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998), created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, presents a series of ethical problems in a complex and entertaining way through its narrative and its aesthetic characteristics. The famous “show about nothing” is also, in a way, a meta-series that reflects on itself, and regularly pits our attachment to the characters against their problematic behavior. In so doing, it questions the surges of sympathy that the serial form of the sitcom is likely to generate, and the processes of projection and identification associated with it. A cross-sectional study of the series will highlight its ability to call into question the notion of family, the ideology of work, the classical virtues, but also social responsibility and conjugality. In the end, Seinfeld seems to give meaning and value only to friendship and humor, and transforms all-too-human flaws (selfishness, meanness and cowardice) into raw material that invites audiences to laugh and think.

The sitcom has had significant impact on how images of later life as well as later-life femininity are perpetuated, legitimized, transformed, and deconstructed. Not only have they increasingly featured older female leads at their centre, but comedy offers an arena for (older) women to be unruly and behave in ways that contradict stereotypes of ageing and femininity without being punished for doing so. The following article explores how the sitcoms Waiting for God and The Old Guys employ stock situations and stereotypes in order to construct later-life femininities, but also how the mechanisms of the sitcom allow for a transgression of these stereotypical notions of femininity. Particular attention is paid to the question of humor and the domestic spaces (older) women inhabit and how these spaces may be mobilized by older women in order to be “funny” and behave “badly” without being punished.

Buffalo Pictures' long-running television series Doc Martin (ITV, 2004–22) has recently concluded, eighteen years since production began. Filmed every second year – excepting COVID interruption – in idyllic Cornwall, the show begins with exceptional but irascible London vascular surgeon, Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes), moving into the fictional fishing village of Portwenn as local GP. This show, with its 79 episodes, weaves together situation comedy, medical mystery, drama and idiosyncratic romance. In this article I want to explore layers of comedy in this long-running 'dramedy' by heuristically deploying the comedy theory taught by Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics. By reference to the 'three forms of comic action' found in Hegel's lectures – the comedies of 'coincidence', 'reduction' and 'negation', to adopt Mark Roche's terminology – I aim to show how this television serial uses humour to raise questions about what is existentially meaningful within human experience; test the usefulness of Hegel's ideas on comedy for analysis of contemporary forms of media such as television and film; and contribute to literature on the nature of comedy in television serials, particularly those that utilise situation comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches fictional telecinematic discourse from a perspective of inter-character negative evaluation in a specific context. The paper adapts a categorisation for interpersonal negative judgements and uses it to analyse instances of negative evaluation where participation in career practices are negotiated between the marital couple of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in the classic sitcom I Love Lucy. A recurring theme in the show, Lucy’s desire to star in show business and Ricky’s attempts to thwart her ambitions have been discussed as both a representation of domestic containment typical to Post-War gender roles as well as an example of early feminist representation in televised sitcoms. The analysis reveals three intertwined facets of containment: Moral judgements condemning the oppressive behaviour of restricting Lucy’s access to career opportunities, moral judgements condemning the subversion of authority, and moral judgements of fairness condemning the distribution of social resources.

The article examines the possibilities of the close-up as an independent artistic technique, using the example of Season 2 (19951996) of the Friends TV series. The visual norm of the series is medium shots, which is due to the shooting technology; whereas close-ups, as shown in the article, sharply contrast with the norm and are used in a situation of genre shift (as markers of the western, drama, romantic comedy, horror, soap opera, etc.). Each close-up in the second season of the Friends TV series is one of the tools for introducing features of an alien genre, which is mockingly played out and destroyed, generating a comic effect. In addition, in some cases close-ups are also related to the narrative situation of a “film within a film”: They are used in soap operas, music videos, and commercials watched by the characters of the series. Thus, the article proposes a way to analyze the size of shots as a tool for determining genre boundaries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how older queer identities are represented in the contemporary American sitcom Grace and Frankie (2015 – 2022). By watching this TV show through the work on the depiction of sexuality in American family sitcoms provided by Tison Pugh in his book The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018), this paper argues that different, unsung queer realities are starting to get more recognition in the U.S. television system. Grace and Frankie’s political statement of “being queer and in my 70s” and Pugh’s theoretical framework on the representation of queerness in U.S. television, are the tools this paper uses to analyze how a contemporary American comedy show deals with the intersection of age and sexuality.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Kim's Convenience is the first Asian-led sitcom in Canadian broadcasting. This popular sitcom, lauded by both audiences and the television industry, joins the wave of minority-led production which started only recently in Canada, despite Canada's pride in multiculturalism as one of its national characteristics. Emerging within Canada's unique model of "multiculturalism within a bilingual framework," Kim's Convenience, with a story about a third-language Korean Canadian immigrant family, offers a critical site to understand how cultural diversity is communicated in Canadian television today. This study conducts a thematic analysis of Seasons One and Two with a special focus on interactions across cultures characterized by social categories such as ethnicity/race, gender, class, language, and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on Greg Daniels, the acclaimed comedy showrunner whose credits include the US version of The Office (NBC, 2005-2013) as well as King of the Hill (Fox, 1997-2010), Space Force (Netflix, 2020-2022), and Upload (Amazon, 2020-). The author analyses press and podcast interviews with Daniels and his co-workers, as well as other articles connected to the showrunner and his works, supplementing them with quotes from a previously unpublished in-depth interview. The central emphasis lies on Daniels’s creative methods, situated within the broader context of television and streaming shows authorship. The sources are interpreted with the help of methods characteristic of the critical media industry studies and utilize Jason Mittell’s model of authorship by management.

This article examines Guz Khan's innovative television comedy Man Like Mobeen (2017–2023), explaining how it serves the BBC's 2016 remit to produce socially-cohesive representations, portraying British Pakistani-Muslims. This is in sharp contrast to the predominant history of BBC comedy, which scholars suggest has played an institutional role, normalizing middle-class whiteness, and imposing a divisive "us"/"them" distinction which otherizes non-white, immigrant cultures. Man Like Mobeen was a reaction to these shows, in particular, the flawed sitcom Citizen Khan (2012–2016), which was the first led by a Pakistani-Muslim character—but was condemned by critics and the public for othering Muslims. By examining the production and the critical reception of Man Like Mobeen, this article explains how the show uniquely communicates the transcultural perspective of a Guz Khan, a second-generation, British Pakistani-Muslim. The audience reactions to the show suggest this relatability was achieved by three significant factors relating to its writing and production. First, critics praised the upscale, "realist" sitcom production style, designed to make its characters accessible. Second, critics appreciated Khan's comic expression of culturally mixed identities, merging the traditional "us" and "them." Last, audiences embraced his character Mobeen as a transcultural working-class hero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian television comedy Schitt's Creek (2015–2020) tells the story of the Rose family after they are reduced to poverty through the machinations of a criminal business manager and must take up residence in a small town. The series relies heavily on costuming to illustrate the personalities of persons on both sides of the urban/rural divide, especially in the case of Moira Rose. From the first moment we see her, hysterical as she packs her wigs, we understand she is a woman of fierce individuality with a wealth of personality and presence. While viewers may at first see Moira's clothes as ridiculous, it becomes apparent that, while outlandish and bold, they are also a statement to the town and the world that Moira Rose will not lose hope. Using Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's concept of excess, this article examines the role costuming plays in the creation of Moira Rose. In addition, by examining the costume design and philosophy in several sitcoms from the 2010s, we see that Schitt's Creek is not alone in using clothing to set the stage for characters' stories and personalities, and that costuming plays a significant role in providing meaning and messaging to the situation comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British teen sitcom Derry Girls has been noted for its unique spatial and historical setting: the Northern Irish city of Derry in the 1990s. These coordinates furnish a number of intersecting transition narratives in which place-based identities are negotiated against the backdrop of the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland as well as neo-liberal globalization and European integration. The role of pop music is of vital importance in narrating and structuring the teenaged protagonists' identity formation processes. Through a recognizable mix of commercially successful pop, Eurodance and hip hop songs, the show inscribes the main characters' experiences into a wider social fabric – one marked by post-ideological, post-nationalist and consumerist undertones. This social fabric is shown to be delineated by middle-class Whiteness, thereby reflecting the role of, in particular, Europop as the soundtrack of a (perceived) 1990s post-cold war liberal hegemony. The inclusionary and exclusionary aspects of western popular music are also shown to work in tandem with pre-Brexit nostalgia and the renegotiation of gendered power structures vis-à-vis local traditionalism. Overall, Derry Girls employs popular music in ways which foster accessibility for universalized adolescent transition narratives built around White cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A total of 10 highly representative sitcoms from the United States and China were selected, and questions were asked about how the laugh track insertion point (L.I.P) occurred due to the factor of "mixing reality and fiction", and what kind of expression between the American and Chinese sitcoms. Clarified if there was a difference. As a result, it was found that there were many points of occurrence of laugh tracks caused by the major category item "mixture of reality and fiction" in China with a significant difference. In terms of small classification items, the United States has a relatively higher ratio of "insertion of real things into topics," "logic justifying strange obsessions," and "serious discussion of fiction" compared to China. In China, the ratio of "exaggeration", "becoming serious after being lied to", "lieping and making mistakes", "strange proposal", and "successful operation" was shown to be relatively high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alf was created by Paul Fusco and Ed Weinberger and broadcast on the NBC network from September 1986 to March 1990. Over the course of the series's four seasons, we follow the weird and wacky adventures of an alien from the planet Melmac whose spaceship crashed into the garage of an average American family: the Tanners. The latter decide to harbour the strange little creature and hide him to prevent the army from seizing him and using him as a guinea pig. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this alien is the sitcom character par excellence. The first point of this article will be to define the specific features of television puppets, before presenting the character of Alf himself in greater detail. Secondly, I will attempt to highlight the mise en abyme of television within the sitcom itself. The television as object plays a central role in the show’s narrative structure. It serves as a revealing mirror of sorts, notably on the way in which American television and the major networks of the 1980s worked and developed. Finally, using a few examples chosen from the episodes of the show’s first two seasons, I will try to demonstrate how Alf may also be viewed as an echo chamber of the political, social and economic issues that peppered the Reagan/Bush years.

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article offers a typology of modalities of reception based on the criteria of activity, (in)mediatedness and awareness, which aims to explain the presence of scenes and motifs with Plautinian parallels in the audiovisual dramatic products of the popular culture of our time: sitcoms, soap operas, quality drama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores queer and non-heteronormative subtexts in connection with representations of rurality in the Disney family sitcom Hannah Montana (2006-2011). The multi-layered world, which the protagonist Hannah Montana/Miley Stewart inhabits, is shaped by sexual undercurrents closely linked to an imagined rural space. This space is constructed as the 'sexual other' in relation to the gender and body politics of the show's main setting: Mailbu, California. In particular, the protagonist's original home state of Tennessee forms a cultural repertoire in which dominant norms of gender performativity are ignored or subverted. Certain hints at queer codes and practices become identifiable when the rural space is invoked and contrasted with the perceived, sanitized 'sexual normativity' of Southern California. Projecting the non-normative onto the rural allows Disney to protect the show's image as so-called wholesome family entertainment. The resulting play with queer practices, such as gender-bending and cross-dressing, is shown to connect with Disney's attempts to queercode characters and spaces in order to facilitate the effective marketing of the show across multiple segments in an increasingly multi-sexual teen market. The role of the extratextual personae of Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus complement this strategy, through their functioning as instructive models for ongoing negotiations of sexuality and gender among multi-generational audiences in the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considered the first fully Hebrew-Arabic bilingual television show on Israeli prime time television, Arab Labor (2007–2013) attracted the attention of critics and scholars for its sharp satire and criticism of the daily dilemmas and discrimination faced by Israeli Arab citizens. Although its success among audiences and critics opened the door for other bilingual television shows spoken in Hebrew and Arabic, it also caused frustration for the series' creator due the limits imposed by commercial television operating in an antagonistic socio-political context. While previous studies on the show have focused on its main narrative conflicts and themes, the present study proposes to examine the televisual spatio-temporal, linguistic and dramatic structures that foster the encounters and conflicts between the two languages spoken in the series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodistico is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Bob Hearts Abishola, a sitcom with a major Nigerian character, premiered on the American CBS network in 2019. This marks an important moment in the representation of African immigrants in the U.S. entertainment media. African immigrants in the United States experience symbolic obscurity because of their absence in media narratives and the ridicule or trivialization in their representation when stories about them are presented. This study examines the cultural relevance of this sitcom and its reception. Through analysis of introductory episodes of the show, interviews with Nigerian immigrants in the United States, and a study of social media responses to the sitcom, this study reveals the nature of cultural visibility the sitcom provides Nigerian immigrants. At the same time, the show also presents the consequence of ambivalence of media representation in the representation of African Americans, which inadvertently brings the friction in the U.S. Black community to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African television entertainment industry has created a utopia of perfect multilingualism despite existing cultural disparities. The object of any translation consists in communicating in the target language (TL) the message that is functionally equivalent to the one emitted in the source language (SL). This requires use of researched techniques, linguistic and extralinguistic competencies in both languages. However, sometimes the translation fails to tick all the boxes and this calls into question the translation processes followed. This article studies South African sitcoms and soap operas with the aim to explore audio-visual translation (AVT) techniques employed to render subtitles in English. It tries to establish to what extent the English subtitles are equivalent to the discourse uttered by Sesotho speaking actors and to determine how well translators handled both the linguistic and extralinguistic complexities as well as other cultural and creative expressions. It proposes scatologization as a form of subtitling technique that can be used in unique and befitting situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines and examines the role comedy and entertainment have played at the BBC in constructing a sense of national identity both in the UK and overseas. It demonstrates the ways in which UK national identities are intertwined with ideas of a sense of humour, and the extent to which this is a performative act. Beginning with a historical approach, the article shows how the BBC, over time, has employed comedy as a way to evidence particularities of UK national identities, and the importance of the organisation in contributing to this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En el siglo XXI la nueva comedia televisiva adquiere una mayor centralidad en los discursos mediáticos y académicos. Este es el caso de la serie de ficción producida por Marvel Studios y Walt Disney Company: WandaVision (Schaeffer, 2021). El objetivo de la investigación es determinar los parámetros audiovisuales de dicho proyecto en relación con la metatelevisión, y la representación de la sitcom. Se aplica una metodología cualitativa basada en la revisión bibliográfica y el análisis de las estrategias de producción, realización y narrativa de la serie. Los resultados revelan un ajuste de cada capítulo a las características del formato desde los años 50 hasta la actualidad. Para ello la narrativa acude a las herramientas de la metatelevisión y a las tramas del universo Marvel. Se concluye que WandaVision reformula los parámetros clásicos de la sitcom con una producción innovadora, atractiva para el público, y de interés académico y docente.

During the last decade, an increasing number of transnational and multilingual television shows have been produced, distributed, and consumed via global streaming platforms. The present study aims to examine bilingual fiction series through the analysis of two high-impact Hebrew-Arabic bilingual television shows, produced by the Israeli television industry: Arab Labor (2007–13) and Fauda (2015–present). While previous studies on these shows focused on the on-screen representation of the Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian population, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the present article proposes a methodology for a quantitative and qualitative analysis of multilingual fiction series. Instead of a linear textual analysis, it suggests focusing on the genre conventions, televisual structure, and linguistic performances that made possible the complex amalgamation of the languages spoken in both series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]