Lessons Behind Sitcoms

After watching Wandavision (2020) I started to think about how sitcoms affect us and our lives. By the end of the series, we realize that Wanda is grieving everything and everybody she lost in her past. Wanda created a fantasy, a comical fantasy, based on sitcoms she used to watch as a kid and when she got older. It was her way of running away from reality.

Therefore, I started to think why do we enjoy sitcoms so much? Are they a way for us to let go of reality? And if they are, is there a type of sitcom that we seem to enjoy the most?

Through some research, I learned that sitcoms were born in the US through a podcast format back in 1926. Later, in 1947 the program Mary Kay and Johny (1947-1950) launched the series genre on network television. Next, in the 1950s, came other popular shows such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), followed by, in the 60s, The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966), and many others that came through the years. They helped the directors, producers, and screenwriters create Wandavision in 2020.

Unlike other movie genres like science fiction or fantasy, sitcoms (situation comedies) are able to captivate the audience by simply showing the daily normal lives of a group of characters. We fall in love with the similarities that they have with us. We watch people that are enjoying or suffering from everyday issues such as expressing their feelings or being overwhelmed with work and personal lives, just like us.

So, it creates a sense of identification with both the character and the situation presented by showing a fantasy of what could happen to us in real life and allowing us to release uneasy energy that may be contained inside of us. Hence laughing at characters that are similar to us is revealed as an unconscious defense against self-injury.

Therefore, situation comedies in many ways also allow us to search for our personal freedom and significant truth (SANES, K. - Transparency*), by taking a basic and mundane human flaw and showing it without a filter. In addition, patterns and stereotypes that may define a character we love represent a mask in which we may occasionally recognize in ourselves too. And once the characters evolve, allowing those masks to be removed, the sitcoms provide moments of truth and insights for them and us, the audience.

We watch this happen to Wanda (and the audience) on Wandavision because as she starts to realize who she really is and the length of her powers and actions she grows into acceptance, which many say is the last stage of grieve.

Thus, we are able to run from reality as we watch sitcoms. They are a way for us to release energy that may be overloading our minds, at the same time that they may be teaching us something important. But different sitcoms captivate different audiences and even though they all talk about daily situations there are many ways to look at life and various personalities and people in society.

For instance, Friends (1994-2004) and How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) talk about friendship and relationships through the years. They are similar but take particular perspectives on what happens in life. For example, it is interesting that many fans don’t like the ending of How I Met Your Mother, because of where each character ended up in the final episode. Friends fans may have been sad with the ending but didn’t complain publicly about any disappointment. Their different storylines and perspectives also bring different opinions to the fans as well.

Another example is One Day At a Time (2017-2020). Firstly, many people don’t even know it exists (which already tells us something), secondly even though it is an american sitcom it openly talks about racism, immigration problems in the US, homophobia, sexism, and many other topics that have become big problems inside society. Those topics are not openly discussed normally and especially during a pandemic (when everything seems to be going wrong in the world) the audience may not be interested in talking about them. Consequently, One Day At a Time was canceled not once but twice and currently has no future, even though it brings up important topics in a more comical, but still sensible way.

Therefore, I believe that sitcoms have become a good way for us to run away from reality. They have changed a lot over the years, but I also think that each sitcom is targeted at a particular audience and that its success relies on the personal identification that we have we the characters and the situations. That way we enjoy the experience and may also learn more about ourselves releasing negative energy that we may be keeping inside. Wanda decided to create her own fantasy in order to leave the past behind her but ended up learning from that experience that she needs to move forward.

Main source:

• *SANES, K. Situation Comedies and the Libering Power of Sadism. Avaiable at: https://transparencynow.com/sitcom.htm. Accessed on March 21th of 2021.