Op-Ed: Online Streaming Is Killing the TV Comedy

TV's funniest category isn't looking very funny, argues former Key & Peele showrunner Jay Martel in a New York Times opinion piece. Of the eight Emmy nominees for outstanding comedy series on Monday night, he says only ABC's Abbott Elementary is a straight-up sitcom: characters behave badly, don't really grow, and episodes wrap with a modest win and an actual punchline. The others? Streaming-fueled hybrids heavy on trauma, mystery, death, and "propulsive" story arcs meant to keep you auto-playing all night, not laughing.

Martel traces how the business model shift from broadcast to streaming has sidelined the classic reset-every-week sitcom and virtually wiped out sketch comedy, a form that "resets" every few minutes and is thus the opposite of binge-friendly. He notes that sitcoms once delivered TV's biggest financial hits, yet now make up less than 2% of new shows. The result, he says, is a comedy landscape full of well-intentioned, haunted characters and very few Lucys, Archies, or Seinfeld-style jerks. For his full case that sitcoms are in hospice, read Martel's column in the New York Times.