The Great Debate

One of the big arguments I have with my friends (and that almost no one else in the world cares about) is which is better--one-camera or three-camera sitcoms. In layperson's language, this essentially means live before an audience or not.

While the biggest comedies today are live (Two And A Half Men), the most respected and "hippest" are not (The Office, 30 Rock). In general, the trend lately has been toward the latter, while previous decades, starting in the 70s, tended to favor the former.

If I had to choose, I'd probably pick live. Sure, one-camera shows let you go anywhere and do anything (and do it over plenty till you get it right), and, these days anyway, have no annoying laugh track. Plus, if live is so great, then how do movie comedies work? But there's still no replacement for the energy you generate when actors have to get up in front of living, breathing people and make them laugh.

Now great TV writer Earl Pomerantz is adding yet another wrinkle to the debate. He claims a show like Taxi (which he wrote for) was better not just because it was live, but because it wasn't shot digitally. Film has to be developed and edited, so there's no way to show it to a live audience. But now we've got digital tape that looks like film, so it's easy to go to sets the audience can't see, or shoot stuff quickly earlier in the day, and show it canned on monitors to get a reaction. That's not the same as a live show where the people in the bleachers are actually watching the actors directly. Also, it breaks up a story into many smaller scenes, taking away the feeling of actors doing a scene. (For better or worse, it is true that Seinfeld changed sitcoms, and made them much choppier. Before that show, you seldom had the number of scenes go into double digits. Now that's common. You also forced the writers to come up with the funny for a few regular sets and one or maybe two new sets per show.)

I see his point. Lots of little scenes, in and out, can be a crutch for writers and actors. But funny is still funny, and stories are still stories. Pomerantz's point is technological limits on writers can be a good thing. Relying on technology is bad, but saying the number of scenes deeply matters is like judging a book by the number of chapters.