From Friends to Upstart Crow - What Went Wrong with the Studio Sitcom?

I’m not great at watching comedy these days. I’m trying to become a comedy writer myself, so often if something’s funny I just burst into tears or start frothing at the mouth out of jealousy. If a show is truly exquisite I might even kick stuff over. After an episode of Brass Eye you’d be forgiven for thinking a feral boar has run amok in my living room, giving me rabies in the process.

Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem when I sat down to watch series three of Upstart Crow - BBC Two’s Shakespearian sitcom starring David Mitchell. It’s a clumsy, dated affair that feels like a bad Mitchell and Webb sketch drawn out over half an hour.

I miss Peep Show.

It also assumes knowledge of Shakespeare, and the first episode is rife with nudge-wink references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These feel a bit snobbish, but any intellectual superiority is dramatically undermined by the show’s obsession with bum, willy and poo jokes. The humour is so staggeringly childish that Bottom at one point says the word ‘turd’ and it brings the house down. 

It’s a weird experience, feeling looked down upon by something with the maturity of a Tweenie. In fact the bizarre mishmash of high and low-brow makes Upstart Crow a bit of a roller coaster. One minute you feel stupid for not knowing what kind of socks Othello wore, the next minute you’re watching a man in a wig produce an extended metaphor on ejaculation. It’s like if my most condescending Cambridge professors had delivered their lectures in clown suits, punctuating every sentence by collapsing onto a whoopee cushion.  

Despite the quality of jokes, the studio audience provide the kind of disproportionate laughs you'd expect terrified North Korean officials to give Kim Jong-un if he started quipping about a new execution method. Who are they, I wonder? How tough are their lives that Liza Tarbuck shouting ‘fanny’ is the highlight of their week?

This was my expression too.

Now, I'm aware that Upstart Crow isn't really aimed at me. It’s not aimed at anyone my age. In fact, I think broadcasters have decided that young people don’t want studio sitcoms (those filmed in front of an audience) at all.

Why? Maybe they think we’re so isolated and anxious that we’d assume the sound of the audience laughing was inside our own heads and have a nervous breakdown. To be honest if you’re going to commission shows on the basis of millennials not having nervous breakdowns you’re fighting a losing battle, but the channels persist.

Look at the BBC studio sitcoms that have been commissioned in the last few years: Upstart Crow, Mrs Brown’s Boys, Still Open All Hours, Porridge, Count Arthur Strong, The Bigley Sisters, Cruisers, All The Way To Limbo. I made the last three up. But you didn’t notice. You don’t watch any of them. They’re for old people. They’re nostalgic non-coms aimed at soothing the 20% of the population in partial comas. 

May as well be real.

And of course, BBC Three, the ‘youth’ channel, hasn’t commissioned anything with a studio audience in about eight years, and is basically just PSHE-themed animated gifs. The message is clear. Young people don’t want studio sitcoms. They want Jack Whitehall and 3-minute documentaries about skin disease.

Sadly, all this is wrong. Young people do want studio sitcoms, and I’ve got the proof to prove it (should be a valid expression IMO). You see it was recently announced that the most popular show on Netflix is Friends, a studio sitcom. In fact it’s not just the most popular show on Netflix, it’s the most popular show across all streaming services. While I’m not going to argue that streaming is the preserve of young people, I feel like the kind of people who watch Upstart Crow probably don’t own an Amazon Fire Stick. In fact if you told them about the Amazon Fire Stick they’d probably panic and say something politically incorrect about ‘tribes’.
 

Weirdly the best picture I could find.

Friends’ online popularity shows us that young people aren’t opposed to comedy with a laugh track. We don’t kick off because it’s filmed in front of some excitable mums who whoop at anything that moves, nor because it’s longer than twenty seconds and doesn’t have a clickbait title (“These New Yorkers went to the same café every day for ten years and the internet can’t handle it”). Execute a studio sitcom with the warmth, joy and sheer quality of Friends and we’ll happily use it as comfort food fifteen years after it’s finished.

Obviously I’ll be too busy punching furniture and shouting ‘it’s not fair’ to watch it properly, but that’s the biggest compliment I can give.