Today’s NY Times has an article about the death of the sitcom. This is the kind of article that could write itself every few years. We’ve had periodic deaths of the sitcom and deaths of the dramatic one-hour. Every entertainment rag toots about this every so often—Tamar laughed about Entertainment Weekly’s eulogy to the sitcom not too long ago.

But this time, writer Bill Carter insists, it’s really really different:

Inside the offices of television comedy writers last week nobody was laughing.

For good reason. Amid the hoopla of last week’s presentations to advertisers of the broadcast networks’ prime-time lineups for the fall, it became strikingly clear that the network situation comedy was in as bad a state as it has been in more than 20 years.

It is not just that “Friends” and “Frasier” have left their weekly homes. The trend across all of network television is sharply away from comedy as a staple of entertainment programming, pushed aside by an audience bored by a tired sitcom format, changing industry economics and the rise of reality shows.

No network added to its comedy total in the fall schedules announced last week, one season after ABC and CBS added to their comedy totals. And two networks, ABC and in particular NBC, cut back.

NBC, which built its dominance in network ratings on the backs of hit comedies like “Cheers,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends” (and which at one point in the late 1990’s had 16 half-hour comedies on its schedule), will have only four comedies in its lineup next fall. That total will be NBC’s fewest since 1980, when it had only two, “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”

The impact throughout Hollywood is already profound. “In the comedy writers’ community, it’s pure panic,” said Sue Naegle, one of the heads of the television department for United Talent Agency, which employs scores of comedy writers and performers. She and agents from several other agencies said about 150 comedy writers would be out of work this fall. Those still working, they added, would be making much less money.

The article ascribes blame to the current sitcom drought to:

• the expense of running a sitcom versus a reality show and
• the tried-and-true sitcom format of “setup/joke and four-to-six characters sitting around a sofa on a Hollywood sound stage.”

How true. God knows I had said often enough that I cannot stand sitcoms, which require people to act like idiots and have 22 minute conflicts based on some stupid exaggeration or misunderstanding. And if that were all there were to sitcoms, he might have a point.

However, Bill Carter wrote this entire very long NY Times article without ever once mentioning Arrested Development, Scrubs, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. And when you stack the deck, you can come to any conclusions you want.

I cannot stand sitcoms, and yet Arrested Development is my favorite show. It contains several laugh-out-loud moments per episode, and there have been a few times when we’ve had to stop the show in order to recover from laughing. Scrubs is one of Darin’s favorite shows, and it manages to swing between the ridiculous and the sublime in a heartbeat, being both hysterical and affecting in the same scene. (If the Brendan Fraser episode from this year doesn’t win an Emmy, there is no justice. So I guess it won’t win an Emmy.) And I personally can’t stand Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I couldn’t stand Seinfeld either—and even I can tell that both shows are completely brilliant.

It’s possible to make a great comedic show. It’s just gotten a lot harder because the audience has seen thousands and thousands of hours of the stuff on their hundreds of channels, stupid. They’ve seen your stupid-ass sitcoms before with the stupid-ass one-liners and stupid-ass “Oh my gosh, Janie said WHAT?” variety of comedic setup.

It’s quite possible that neither Arrested Development nor Scrubs has caught fire because they require the viewer to have an IQ slightly larger than their resting heart rate, but both shows have rabid partisans who actively proselytize for them. (Curb Your Enthusiasm is on HBO, which could care less if you like the shows, so long as you pay your monthly fee.)

As soon as the studios worry more about making shows that we haven’t seen before that are, you know, funny and stuff, they’ll have an audience.

What the hell: they cancelled Firefly, so screw ’em.

(Slightly edited for unclear language.)