Most sitcoms and cartoons, especially, you can rely on, because they go back to square one at the beginning of every episode.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The key to any good comic strip or television sitcom is to reset the board at the end of the episode because people like familiarity.
Sitcoms are making a comeback, but you've got to have a little quirkiness in there now.
I think the longer a sitcom is on the air, by necessity, the dumber the characters have to get: otherwise, they would be learning and growing, and they won't be funny, so they have to get more and more extremely whatever they are.
Characters can become boring. That's what's tricky about television. It goes on and on - you're playing this same character for five seasons and it gets easy to fall into just walking on the set and assuming you know how to play a scene.
I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format.
If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.
There are only about three really, really good sitcoms on the air.
I look at each episode in two ways - from a design standpoint and from an entertainment standpoint - this is TV, after all. We usually succeed on at least one of the levels.
Obviously, a lot of TV shows are based on chronological episode viewing, and the stories are contingent upon watching it in order. Syndicated shows, you don't have to watch in order. You're just watching characters that don't change that much.
Sitcoms, I always figured that would be an easy gig, but man, it is not.