By Louise Phillips.
“Last week I talked about the parameters of the family group. During the Early Intermediate Period, it was customarily a traditional family unit. Mid Intermediate Period shows often dispatched with one of the parents, with a widower being the most popular choice. Adult children returned home to live with their parents, or moved in with friends and shared child-rearing duties. One sitcom of the Mid Intermediate Period featured two dads, heterosexual men raising a daughter together.
No matter if the family group consisted of a married heterosexual couple with adolescent children, a social group, or a work environment, plots involving romantic attachment were in absolutely every sitcom we have been able to study. On a show called Who’s the Boss? the sexual tension between Angela Bauer and her servant Tony Micelli simmered for nine years.
Mishaps involving dreams were common. Characters would often call out the name of their secret crush while dreaming; this was inevitably overheard by other members of the cast, and often occurred after the consumption of alcohol or medication. When two characters kissed for the first time, post-production supervisors would add a single studio audience member whistle, though this practice was largely abandoned by the Late Intermediate Period.
Promiscuity of a single member of the family group was also frequent, though the topic was mostly verboten on the sitcoms featuring parents and their offspring. The promiscuity of a character named Sam Malone, the proprietor of an alehouse and a former professional sportsman – one of the most acclaimed professions of ancient Earth – was a regular comedic plotline on the show Cheers.
The Older Siren was a popular archetype during the Mid Intermediate period. The rapacious sexual appetite of Angela Bower’s mother Mona on Boss remained a source of great amusement, and her entrances onto the set were greeted with wild ovations and wolf-whistles by the audiences in the studio. While shows in the Mid Intermediate Period contained ribald jokes, characters were never shown in positions more outr é than in a bed wearing nightclothes – though the men were occasionally bare-chested. It was much different for performers in the cinema, where actors could receive great acclaim for nude performances.
The shows starring children, in particular, could be moralistic. Extended, joke-and-studio-audience-laughter-free stretches of the thirty minutes were sometimes devoted to lessons. Sitcoms warned young audiences of the perils of cheating on tests, ingesting mind-altering substances, lying – especially to one’s elders – and the mortal danger of hiding inside a disused food storage container called a refrigerator. During the Mid Intermediate Period, these episodes invariably culminated with the protagonists locked in a frozen platonic embrace.
The Intermediate Period commenced in 1950 CE. Characters from the radio comedies of the preceding thirty year Early Period were transferred to the television. One show which made this transition starred a husband and wife called Ozzie and Harriet, their actual names, a common practice of the Early Intermediate Period. Their two sons played themselves, on a set duplicating their actual home. When they got married, the son’s new spouses were written onto the show.
The thirty-year Late Period which began in 2000 CE was marked by the medium’s decline and extinction. The half-hour situation comedies were largely supplanted by a genre called “reality”: loosely scripted conflicts or competitions dedicated to producing extreme emotional reactions in the participants. Like the stars of the Early Intermediate Period, entire families became famous playing slightly scripted versions of themselves. The stars of the Mid and Late Intermediate Periods participated in the new genre. They competed in the contests; they confessed misdeeds and sought televised absolutions.
During the Late Intermediate Period, the television studios sold bags and pouches embroidered with the names of their shows, and even clothes fashioned to look like the garments worn by crew members. Millions of mugs, wooden posters, and paper calendars with images from the sitcoms were produced. Great attention was eventually paid to the minutiae of the lives of the stars of these shows by the media and the public: their preferred brand of cosmetics, restaurants, and shoe designers.
These shows were dubbed into hundreds of languages. The number of households watching every program was meticulously tracked, and widely publicized. An obsession with victory and enormity persisted throughout almost every stage of their history. Parades of weaponry. The world’s largest man-made mountain. The world’s tallest free-standing structure. They engaged in eating contests. They held the World’s Biggest Barbecue, with 13.2 tons of beef. Images of these contests were disseminated to the entire planet in minute long bursts, then instantly forgotten. They were proud of their dominion over their planet with science, but they could also be incredibly superstitious. Oracles appeared on the television and claimed to be speaking with the dead relatives of people in the audience. A method of divining the future according to the position of the planets in the Milky Way galaxy was extremely popular.
These audiences felt that the characters on the sitcoms were their friends. Episodes of the most popular shows were rebroadcast recurrently, sometimes thousands of times. People would buy disks containing their favorite sitcoms, which they watched again and again. It was a form of comfort to them.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louise Phillips lives in Toronto, Canada. Her nonfiction work has appeared in La Rampa magazine. Her story ‘The Requisitioning’ was published this summer in issue 23 of Dream Catcher.
