The laugh track, which fell out of favor when hipper single-camera comedies such as The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine drew substantial audiences and buzz, may be experiencing a rebirth. Among the series using them are Frasier, which recently received a second-season renewal on Paramount Plus, and a pair of NBC offerings, reboot Night Court, in season two, and rookie sitcom Extended Family. Viewers don’t care how many cameras are involved, producers on those shows said, as long as the show is funny, and actors said they feed off the studio audience. 

Night Court star John Larroquette addressed the topic of comedies shot with multiple cameras (more like a stage play) versus a single camera (like a movie) during a Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour session on the Warner Bros. lot. “If you look at the landscape of four-camera, I don’t watch a whole lot of television, but it seems to me that it’s having a bit of a renaissance,” he said. 

Single-Cam in Scranton  

Some trace the single-cam trend to Malcolm In the Middle, which was on Fox from 2000 to 2007. Modern Family and 30 Rock were other popular single-cams with long runs that helped change the dynamic. “It taught [viewers] a new way to watch TV comedy,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review TV critic Rob Owen said. “Viewers were taught to go without a laugh track, and it became easier to slam the laugh track as something one should be ashamed of.”

Current comedies with laugh tracks — audio with audience laughter — include The Conners on ABC, Bob Hearts Abishola and The Neighborhood on CBS and The Upshaws on Netflix. 

For some, hearing canned laughter brings them back to watching TV in a different era, and not necessarily in a good way. A review of Night Court’s season two on The Daily Beast said, “The braying, instructive laugh track creates a halting rhythm of setups and punchlines closer to the person-to-person energy of the theater than the rapid-fire density of jokes flourishing over the past couple decades of standard-­setting comedies.”

TCA president Jacqueline Cutler called laugh tracks “annoying.” 

“I feel like it’s telling me how to feel when I know how to feel,” she said. 

Extended Energy

Yet some multicam actors said it’s easier to be funny in front of an audience. At the TCA tour, Donald Faison, who plays Trey in Extended Family, shared that the studio audience gives actors “so much energy.” 

He talked about shooting in front of the crew, and then of the joy of welcoming an audience into the studio. “You want to make every one of those people laugh just as much as you made the crew laugh,” Faison said. 

Cutler said she’s heard from a number of comedy actors, particularly those with a stage background, about how they feed off the crowd. “They talk about needing that energy from the audience and how much they get from it,” she said.  

Larroquette mentioned coming up with jokes while waiting for the audience to stop howling. “Some of the best comedy that’s ever come out of my world, out of my brain, was waiting for you to stop laughing,” he said. “Because if you’re shooting, you can’t just wait. You’ve got to stay alive.”

Multiple Multicams

Time will tell if multicam comedies retain their place in television. CBS has ordered a multicam spinoff of Young Sheldon, while ABC ordered a Tim Allen multicam called Shifting Gears. 

Larroquette, for one, thinks the multi­cam will stick around. “The intimacy of four cameras and an audience sitting, watching it, and people at home know that it’s sort of like a little play that’s going on,” he said. “I have a feeling that that’s something that will always be desired.”

Owen noted that TV trends cycle in and out. “I do not think multicams will completely go away,” he said. “With television, there are always ebbs and flows for formats and styles.”

Speaking at the Warner Bros. lot during press tour, Chuck Lorre, whose shows have included multicams The Big Bang Theory, Bob Hearts Abishola and Two and a Half Men, called it “a wonderful form of storytelling.”

The audience, he said, does not care if a show is a single cam or multicam, as long as it is funny and they dig the characters. “Some of the greatest shows in the history of television have been in front of an audience,” Lorre said. “Why would that not be true now?”

The untimely death of Matthew Perry this week was mourned by millions of people the world over. 

It’s a testament to how talented Perry was, but also to how much Friends and other sitcoms have become cultural touch points for the people who grew up with them.

It is why, at a time when churn is the biggest threat facing most streaming services, reviving the classic sitcom makes a whole lot of sense.

Yes, sitcoms have their faults. 

They’re formulaic, rely on see-it-coming-from-a-mile-away jokes, and the situations are often invented. 

Meaning they are nothing like hit streaming sitcoms including Netflix's BoJack Horseman, or even HBO’s Barry.

But that’s OK.

Shows like that reach a certain type of audience — more educated, more urbane, more likely to churn out when the series is done.

Classic sitcoms, however, are designed to reach a mass audience. People identify with the characters, regardless of how broadly they are drawn, and consistently tune in week after week.

And while mass audiences will rarely drop in to watch “snobby shows,” the snobby show audience will, indeed, watch a well-done sitcom, regardless of whether they care to admit it.

Sitcoms, American sitcoms anyway, average about 25 episodes per season, versus streaming sitcoms, which average somewhere between 10 and 12 installments.

Volume is critical in several ways. 

First, it creates a sense of intimacy with the audience. The characters are there week in and week out, and their stories become part of the fabric of viewers’ lives. This is especially true for long-running series like Friends that can last for as long as 10 seasons.

Secondly, it creates a very valuable asset for syndication. A series with over 100 episodes can become a major programming asset, filling a specific time slot five days a week on syndication, as well as an entire FAST channel.

These assets are even more valuable now, when the shift to streaming has greatly reduced the number of 100-plus episode series — Black-ish, The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family were the last few. With the possible exception of Abbott Elementary, which has been renewed for a third season, the networks don’t have much in reserve. 

Diluting the Laughs

The long seasons meant that there were many filler episodes and that plots often went nowhere. Multiple seasons also meant that the writers would run out of ideas and resort to more preposterous story lines as the years went by, introducing new characters and new situations that in many cases, did not work.

That said, fans are forgiving. They may not have liked Cousin Oliver, but they didn't turn their backs on The Brady Bunch. Long seasons also gave writers and showrunners the ability to fix things on the fly, altering plot lines that did not appear to be working.

Classic sitcoms are also great vehicles for advertisers. They are traditionally written around commercial breaks, and given that their goal is (usually) to make the audience laugh, those breaks mean that advertisers are getting their messages in front of consumers when they’re in a good mood and will, ideally, associate the advertiser’s message with that good mood.

Additionally, ad breaks seem less onerous on sitcoms, where they’re not interrupting a dramatic storyline or keeping viewers from learning who the real killer is.

Mostly though, they appeal to the sort of mass audiences that are critical to getting more ad dollars to flow to TV. Big brands want to run their ads against popular, first-run content. They also want to reach as many people as possible with their ads and classic sitcoms allow them to reach a wide audience that includes most of the audience segments they want to reach against just that sort of first-run original content.

One more factor is that unlike modern sitcoms, which are filled with quirky characters, classic sitcoms always feature at least a few likable characters. Even in a show like The Office, there’s always a Jim and Pam for audiences to root for. This is another plus for advertisers — they like when their products are associated with shows featuring likable characters. In their view, the positive vibes extend all the way to the brand.

This is not to say that streaming services should give up on shows like Barry or Shrinking, the new Harrison Ford/Jessica Williams/Jason Segel vehicle on Apple TV Plus. The good thing about streaming is that there is room for both and both types of series have their place. But for streaming services that are looking to boost their ad-supported tiers while also cutting down on churn (e.g. most of them), a return to the classic sitcom format might be just the ticket.

Digital broadcast comedy network Laff is adding the sitcom How I Met Your Mother to its lineup.

Laff, part of the E.W. Scripps Co.’s Katz Broadcasting unit, plans a two-day Labor Day weekend marathon to launch the show. Episodes will run from 8 a.m. through midnight on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8. 

How I Met Your Mother will get slapped into its regular time slot on Sept. 8, with episodes airing from 9 p.m. to midnight.

The show ran for nine seasons on CBS from 2005 to 2014. It stars Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Alyson Hannigan, Cobie Smulders and Neil Patrick Harris and is narrated by Bob Saget. 

Laff will be showing all 208 episodes.

HIMYM joins a Laff lineup that also includes Home Improvement, That ‘70s Show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, According to Jim and Night Court.