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Virtually all American (and American-style) sitcoms follow the same simple formula.

In the UK, the rules of sitcom are very different. The BBC commissions a large proportion of sitcoms, so the standard length is a full 30 minutes. Our series (seasons) are typically just six episodes long, and few programmes are commissioned for more than three series.

As a result, huge committees of writers are unnecessary, and most programmes are written by just two people with help from a handful of editors and consultants. Scripts can reflect the idiosyncratic voice of the writers, rather than having to conform to an industrial process where writing can be delegated within a team. Characters and plots don't have to reset to zero by the end of an episode, because there is no expectation that a successful series will run indefinitely.

An obvious comparison would be the British and American versions of The Office. The British version finished after just 12 episodes (plus two Christmas specials), following a clear dramatic arc; The American version ran to 201 episodes. The British version was written wholly by Gervais and Merchant, while the American version had over 40 credited writers. One is a work of art, the other is an industrial product.

The medium is the message.

Not all BBC sitcoms are like that, look at Not Going Out (which I do love), Citizen Khan and Mrs Browns Boys. While not as sickeningly produced as American sitcoms they do follow a common pattern not dissimilar to the one in the article.

I do agree with you though, I'm just playing devils advocate. The Office isn't a great one to choose because the American and English versions cannot really be compared as they are very different beasts, and while the American series shares inspiration it is trying to be something completely different while the English series is a one off stroke of genius (and not really a sitcom).

There are plenty of lazy and derivative British sitcoms, but I wouldn't call The Office a one-off stroke of genius. A great many British sitcoms have similar depth and substance - Gavin and Stacey or The Inbetweeners would be good contemporary examples. Going back further, you have programmes like I'm Alan Partridge, Blackadder, Porridge, The Likely Lads and so on. None of those sitcoms could plausibly have been produced in the US, they're just not sufficiently marketable.

British TV commissioning isn't perfect, but it affords a level of creative freedom that is largely absent in the US, and that is necessary for programmes like The Office to come into being. British commissioners really do think in terms of artistic merit rather than purely commercial value.

American networks are excellent at producing huge international hits, but there's no room in the system for smaller, quirkier productions. The BBC and Channel 4 tend to take a lot of small risks on cheaper productions rather than always swinging for the fences. Success and failure is far less binary when there isn't the pressure to recoup a huge budget. Some of those cheap experiments will be total flops, some will survive as lowbrow primetime filler, some will find a small but loyal audience, a rare few will be huge hits. None of those outcomes are career-ending catastrophes, they're just part of the process. Commissioners expect and allow that level of variance.

Whenever I watch a British show, I always feel like the writing is much better than American sitmcoms. Don't get me wrong, I love American TV too, but watching British TV doesn't feel like "TV". It usually feels like a series of movies.

This completely backs up what you said, and makes a lot of sense in the context that it's ok for characters to change and that most shows only get a limited run.

The thing about perceptions like this is that you have to recognize that there's a filter in place for you that isn't for the people consuming it at the source. Bad British shows are pretty unlikely to make it across the ocean because there's very limited shelf space for foreign media product in the American market.
I wouldn't put British media on too high of a pedestal. Churning out inspector/detective crime drama swill is one of their specialties. Many of these are about as creative as an episode of Law & Order, some less so.
Yes, it's true that American series run for a long time. In many cases it's really bad for the story - but for comedy,i find that the story is of less importance and good jokes at a rapid pace are the core - and good comedies can do quite a few great seasons before they lost their charm.
i remember watching my way through rowan atkinson's "thin blue line", and being really taken aback that it had so short a run for so enjoyable a comedy. when i asked some british friends about it their opinion was that it was likely written to be two seasons from the outset and then just not extended for the sake of extending it, rather than an indefinite run with each season's existence depending on the popularity of the one before.
You might explain this better to our American friends by reminding them of the fact that they have a highly commercial film and TV industry, where the profit and loss of individual shows is monitored very closely.

What works gets repeated and hence the industry is highly formulaic, with those in control of the money going for the explainable and repeatable.

That is not the case in other countries, where the lack of business sophistication has given more room for the creatives to flourish.

I don't think there's much substance here.

Given the constraints of a typical sitcom - 22 minutes, comedy, resets each week (no new characters, no major changes to character's lives), the "formula" is basically the only option: You present a problem, you wrestle with the problem, and you resolve the problem (maybe with a subplot or two). What else can you do?

You can avoid having a problem at all. But that loses all the usual dramatic structure and tension that we expect, not just from comedies but from tragedies all the way back to ancient greece.

Or you can have multiple problems, each resolved in turn. This was done by the Simpsons in several seasons (but not in the earliest or latest). One problem would occur, quickly get out of hand, then either get resolved or morph into another problem. It made the Simpsons feel much more "chaotic" and "dense".

Otherwise, the "formula" is basically the only way to do it. Maybe I missed something the article was saying?

The Simpsons also had a few episodes where the initial plot would kind of fizzle out 1/3 of the way through and then suddenly they'd get to the real plot.
In quite a few of those episodes, the fizzled opening plot would be "surprisingly" resolved in the last act.
Some of my favorite episodes are like this, such as "When You Dish Upon A Star" and "The Mysterious Voyage of Homer."
I've noticed Family Guy do this quite a lot too. In an episode I saw recently (season 4 episode 4). Meg is turned down by a boy at school and ends up having a makeover at the mall (plot 1). Meanwhile, Peter, Joe, Cleveland and Quagmire try to stop the Clam going out of business and discover Karaoke as a solution (plot 2). So they decide to start a band but their first gig goes badly and so Peters family step in and put on a good performance (plot 3). Peter's family then go on tour and Meg, now the attractive lead singer of the band, lets success go to her head (plot 4). Meanwhile Brian tries to suppress his racism (subplot to plot 4).
I remember hearing about the sitcom formula watching an interview with the Simpsons writers. They were kind of reluctant to talk about it the same way a magician wouldn't want to talk about how the tricks are done.

The part that stood out was when they said they always reveal the main conflict just before the mid-episode commercial break so you'll stay tuned.

From then on I can't help not see it every time I watch a half hour show.

there is no question a framework of reference might be used, it has been used for fairy tales as well actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp
I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them.

There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned.

The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes.

Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting.

If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution.

Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.

> How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory

HIMYM was innovative in another way, too. The first person narrator is somewhat unreliable, leading to the same story being revisited multiple times. Sometimes this was all in the same episode, being revisited from each character's perspective. Other stories are told and retold through the entire run of the series, up to and including the very end of the show.

I'm not too impressed with Louie's attempts at 2 to 3 stories per episode. The show is hilarious, but I think that experiment failed, personally. However, I think when he does outlandish episodes like the one where he has a dream about his "Uncle Excelsior" are much better examples of throwing the rules out the window and making something really interesting and memorable.
> television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand

What are some examples of this "visual shorthand"? Preferably examples from a popular show (like The Simpsons) so I can really understand what you mean.

Would a 1950's audience understand the visual shorthand if they saw today's TV, or is this something you have to grow up with?

Sure. One common trope in sitcoms is one character saying "You'll never catch me doing X!", immediately smash cut to the character doing X. You've probably seen this trope performed a thousand times already. As a result, you've been trained to know how to interpret it. Scenes like this are useful for cutting through a lot of story very quickly. You no longer have to show how the character fought a losing battle and had their mind changed reluctantly.

But it's become so ubiquitous, just playing a scene like this straight is perceived as kind of hacky because of how boring it is. So you see writers start to play around with the form. One common variation is that the character themselves are jolted by the rapidity of the cut, adding a layer of meta-winkingness to the trope. Another variation is that the camera pans out after the cut, revealing a mislead and that the character is, in fact, not doing X.

Another, more concrete example from the sitcom New Girl, in what I consider to be the best episode (Cooler), there is an outstanding joke: To set the scene, Jess and Nick are room-mates, Jess is currently dating Sam & Jess and Nick have had a season long will-they/won't they simmering in the background. Jess and Nick get caught up in the loft's delightfully bizarre game, True American which results in them being forced to be locked in a room together until they kiss. Jess calls Sam in a panic and Jess and Nick sit down to have a heart to heart.

If you have Netflix, you can see there scene here, starting from 17:06: http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70196145

Just as the previous scene is reaching an emotional climax, we hear Sam banging on the door and asking if Jess is alright. Jess says it's a false alarm and Sam asks what she's doing back there. Immediate smash cut to Sam chanting "kiss, kiss, kiss" along with the rest of the roommates.

There's an incredibly amount of storytelling going on in that smash cut. We first are primed to believe, that Sam is the classic mid-second act obstacle and that we're about to enter a standard comedy of deception because we've seen that play out a million times before. By subverting our expectations That rug gets immediately pulled out from under us, showing that the central conflict of the episode is not external, it's Jess's internal struggle with liking two people. Next, it uses our knowledge of smash cuts to understand that in the intervening time, Sam's been explained the circumstances of the game by the other roommates and he's become caught up in it is now part of the mob. It also shows us that Sam does not view Nick as a romantic threat, giving us insight into the psychological state of the three main characters, and the foreshadowing that this obliviousness will come into play later.

This is incredibly dense storytelling for a 13 second scene and it typifies how New Girl is able to juggle 5 or even 6 plots in a single 22 minute episode and make it feel effortless. But only if you understand the logic motivating the direction does the story come out. Such a scene would look confusingly arbitrary to a 1950's audience because they would not be trained on the tropes and how they're either supported or subverted.

Weren't multiple plots already common in soap operas before the 1980s? In fact, I believe Soap (the sitcom, from the late 70s) already had them, as well as long running storylines, much like the shows it was parodying.
I don't think there were such restrictions on soap operas because they weren't heavily syndicated like sitcoms.
Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) seemed to be quite good at having a few subplots that all come together at the end for a harrowing but entertaining ending...
I'm reminded of a scene in Louie where Louis CK is approached by a Hollywood producer to discuss movie ideas[0]. The producer asks him for his best idea for a movie.

Yeah? All right, well well, you know how movies, there's always a guy and his life is, you know, okay?

And then something happens, like a conflict and he has to resolve it, and then his life gets better?

Well, I always wanted to make a movie where a guy's life is really bad and then something happens and it makes it worse but instead of resolving it, he just makes bad choices and then it goes from worse to really bad, and-- and things just keep happening to him and he keeps doing dumb things, so his life just gets worse and worse and, like, darker and-- Like-- like he has-- lives in a little one-room apartment, he's not a very good-looking guy, he has no friends and he lives-- he works in, like, a factory, where they-- like a sewage-disposal plant, and then he gets fired, so now he doesn't even have his job at the shit factory anymore and he's-- and he's going broke and he takes, like, a trip and it rains, like, just stuff, just shit keeps-- horrible.

But then he meets a girl and she's beautiful and he falls in love, so you think that's gonna be the thing, the happy thing, but then she turns out to be a crook and she robs him, she takes his wallet, and now he's, like, stuck in the middle of nowhere and he's got no wallet and no credit cards.

---

[0]: Louie S2E10 "Halloween/Ellie"

Virtually all movies of all genres follow a minute-by-minute plan also. It was popularised with the book 'Save the Cat'. http://www.savethecat.com/ It is hard to watch a movie without mentally ticking them off...
Dan Harmon, creator of Community and some other great stuff, refers to this as a "Story Circle":

http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_...

He's become somewhat famous for this, having produced several "how-to" videos of varying levels of seriousness about sitcom writing. His writers on Community have even slipped references to this into the background of episodes, where set decorations (e.g., drawings on the study room whiteboard) sometimes subtly acknowledge which part of a character's story circle a scene depicts.

No surprise - lots of works of art have constraints that make them formulaic. Haiku. Greek tragedies. Sculpture. Oil painting. TV commercials. Its helpful to study the formula e.g. for teaching others how to succeed. No need to denigrate it.
Seinfeld was the first (only?) TV sitcom to weave multiple totally unrelated storylines together.

Saying every show has "a beginning, middle, and end" isn't really much of an observation.

Though it's not mentioned in the article, Seinfeld uses the weaving technique pretty straightly from "the Harold", a live performance form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_%28improvisation%29

No, it started with The Phil Silvers show, in 1955.
I'd like to see a followup article on how the meat of different sitcoms is presented. For example, I remember figuring out the formula for Three's Company, where in almost every episode the "muddle" mostly involves a misunderstanding between characters, or where the audience has information that one or more of the characters doesn't have. Whereas other sitcoms have information that is kept from the audience until the end, which builds a different kind of suspense (in the first case, you are wondering when and how a character is going to "get it", and in the second case you are waiting for the characters to reveal final information to you).
The muddle type is called a comedy of manners - where misunderstandings arise because the characters are too shy/ polite/ embarrassed/ intimidated to say what they really mean. There are many good books on this subject, but you could do worse than dig up Aristotle's Poetics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_%28Aristotle%29 hasa helpful list of translations, including links to multiple public domain versions. Also, while it doesn't have breakdowns for individual shows, the TVTropes.com website is enormously useful for figiuring out story structures. The only downside is that like wikipedia every variation on something eventually gets its own entry and it can be hard to get a good view of the forest for the trees.

That was terribly verbose for how much information was provided.
A friend of mine spent some time reading movie scripts for a major film company. He told me the business was so standardized (5 act play) that people would go straight into asking "so what the big change that happens to the character" and such.

It's not surprising given that it's such a big industry. If your wares don't fit, it just gets hard to get in the door. And on the producer side, there's a machine built over the years to create a specific kind of product.

Aristotle had more or less the same observation.
Metanarratives. Life might be one big metanarrative (ie people think their life is unique but we repeat a lot of stuff other people do).

Applied to startup pitches: https://medium.com/@seysconstantijn/an-analysis-of-start-up-...

You can take everything in that article and replace it with just one metanarrative: Transition from problem to solution. The similarity of start up pitches, or any sales pitch for that matter, is explained by the function of a pitch: to demonstrate the benefit of a product. I think the article you linked to needlessly complicates the matter. If you're writing a pitch, just tell them how your product improves someone's life.
This is true of most big movies, too:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollyw...

The book itself is worth a read.

Then there's Aqua Teen Hungerforce. The plots are mostly random and nothing ever gets resolved at the end. The movie was full on surrealism[1]. It's almost hard to remember what the plot of any episode was because they seem to take completely random directions.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Teen_Hunger_Force_Colon_Mo...

Gotta love the first sentence. Made me laugh.

> As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television.

Form != Formula
This usage of "formula" is entirely correct. Looking in the dictionary:

formula: 2. any fixed or conventional method for doing something: "His mystery stories were written according to a popular formula."

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formula

This is basically a way of rewording a compressed three-act narrative structure, not exactly a Eureka! moment.

You can lump a very large segment of historical and contemporary fiction into a similar dissection.

This formula would make a really interesting mashup/visualization between watching an episode and a text based timeline. Hmm.
I don't actually expect too much from the article which starts with:

"As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television."

More a "wat" then a joke. Happens to so many of us.