Is the great British sitcom dying out? 

The BBC's director of comedy has called on the television industry to help "save our sitcoms".

In a keynote industry speech at the BBC Comedy Festival last week, Jon Petrie challenged the sector to protect homegrown storytelling and create the next generation of television classics, reported Chortle.

"The sitcom isn't dead", he said, but it "needs a couple of Berocca" and a "black Americano with two sugars".

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'One foot in the grave'

The death of the traditional sitcom would be "no laughing matter", said a leading article in The Times. However tempting it may be to "attribute the ­decline of sitcoms to a rise in political sensitivity on the part of audiences", the problem is "partly one of supply rather than demand".

Petrie also criticised production companies for failing to pitch the kind of "big laugh" sitcoms that he said the BBC wants to commission. This is partly due to the "present vogue among aspiring writers" to create "thematically challenging, eccentric comedy-dramas" like "Fleabag", said the paper, which are "easier to sell to global streaming services".

It's "not as though British writers aren't coming up with good sitcoms", said the Daily Mail – just look at the recent success of "People Just Do Nothing", "Ghosts", "Stath Lets Flats" and "Derry Girls". But those shows have been "sunsetted" because "viewers' watching habits have changed in the streaming era".

The genre has had "one foot in the grave" for a while, wrote Ian Hyland in The Mirror in 2019. Some would argue that networks have become "risk averse", because "why pump money into a sitcom that might not work when panel shows and quiz shows are cheaper"?

Speaking to The Times last year, comedian Lee Mack blamed "snobs" for the sitcom's decline. "Middle-class commissioners and journalists", he said, simply "don’t understand the 'working-class art' of the sitcom beloved by the mainstream". 

The studio sitcom "really is an art – a working-class art", he added. "If we're not careful it's going to die."

'The last laugh'

But "how on earth can sitcom be dead when we live in an age of constant new content, endless streaming and easily accessible reruns of old and new material?" asked comedian Viv Groskop in The Guardian.

What has "actually been consigned to the history bin", she added, is the type of "watercooler British sitcom" that "everyone watches and draws their references from". It has been replaced by "phenomena with dark comedic undertones, viral reach and 'a beginning and an end'" – "Baby Reindeer" and "Saltburn", for example.

And "we are still making great situational comedies", said Groskop. Look at the popularity of "Ted Lasso", "Fleabag", "Catastrophe", "Motherland" and the upcoming finale of "Gavin & Stacey".

People who say "sitcom is dead and that nothing is funny any more" are "simply expressing the fact that they miss the days of four channels, less choice, lowest common denominator" and "commissioners who targeted a certain, easily defined demographic".

At a "time when we need to laugh more", it's a shame to see that "this cornerstone of our culture" is "under threat", wrote Judith Woods in The Telegraph. But the British sitcom "will never die when we still crave the classics".

The "good news" is that both terrestrial and streaming platform producers are now "desperate" for "full-fat sitcoms with belly laughs and jokes", she said. So, if comedy writers dare to risk "courting the broad appeal of sitcom", said The Times, "they may have the last laugh".