I want to address how the genre of the sitcom has transformed over the years from 1951, when I Love Lucy began broadcasting, to 2005, when It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia did the same. My critical analysis will focus on how the changes in structure, narrative complexity, and the other formal aspects of the shows reflect the evolution of the entertainment industry and television’s role in that industry. I also plan to use the cultural differences in the two shows to highlight television’s role in American culture. The most critical difference is the goal of the shows. I Love Lucy mostly uses its comedy to promote and idolize the traditional family structure and general social structures of the time, whereas It’s Always Sunny is much more willing to use comedy to attack the norms of its time. As the American system’s failures have become much more present, especially in the nihilism of post 9/11 America that It’s Always Sunny was born in, television has been used as a medium to expose and critique those failures.
In terms of the form of the stories, the differences observed reflect the changing cultural roles of the shows. One place this can be observed is with the shift in narrative structure from one complete storyline to a mixture of two to three fragmented ones. I Love Lucy typically keeps the focus on just one main storyline, with the main cast members either working together or conflicting over that issue. At the end of the day, everything is resolved, and Lucy and Ricky are back to their beautiful, suburban American life. In It’s Always Sunny, the Gang usually splits up, with almost always at least 2 or 3 main plotlines happening in parallel. The plotlines will often not be fully resolved, either ending badly for everybody involved or just being left unfinished in general. The increase in complexity has been motivated by the increasing variety in TV and competition that TV has with media forms like social media. TV shows nowadays have to do a lot more to win the attention of their audience. Also, It’s Always Sunny has the freedom to weave the different plotlines together because there is no good life to return to. The Gang starts each episode unhappy and being under attack by the world around them, and that frees them up to also end each episode that way. Another thing that is facilitated by the separate and sometimes incomplete plotlines of It’s Always Sunny is its much darker range of topics. In the version of America that It’s Always Sunny paints, things don’t always make sense and that is true for both the moral and economic themes it tackles but also for the story itself.
Those darker themes also come along with the critiques that It’s Always Sunny pushes. In I Love Lucy, because at the end of the day, Lucy and Ricky have to work things out and we need to see them end back in their typically structured suburban American life, things can never go too badly and tackling intense subjects can risk revealing flaws in the lifestyle Lucy and Ricky lead. It’s Always Sunny wants to expose those flaws though, and thus intentionally tackles more problematic themes like racism, sexism, and transphobia, using them to highlight problems in the typical American worldview.
SOURCE LIST
From Class Readings:
Haralovich, Mary Beth. “Sit-coms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker.”
Lipsitz, George. “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs.”
Boddy, William. “Live Television.”
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