Salon's Kartina Richardson doesn't like this season's live-audience sitcoms (few critics do), but she's hoping for a rejuvenation of the format:
When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.
As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.
NOTE: I initially wrote "grandmother effect" to refer to the phenomenon of people adopting their grandparents' tastes in music, clothing, baby names, etc., either as a form of rebellion against their parents or just an a desire to be different. But when I looked it up, the phrase means something quite different. So is there a phrase that describes what I'm talking about, or did I imagine the whole thing?
Cross-posted at Robert David Sullivan.