Comedy Is Hard

This is probably going to upset a lot of black people who concluded that Bill Cosby lost his right to speak on their behalf when he badmouthed the the hip-hop culture of the black urban underclass, but comedy's most famous recipient of honorary doctorates is coming back to television.  The Cos is playing the patriarch of a large multigenerational family in a new NBC sitcom.  (And before you ask, no, I don't know if Phylicia Rashad will co-star.)

If this sounds like a familiar play, it should.  NBC already has a sitcom starring an actor from an earlier sitcom that aired on the same network in the eighties.  I am, of course, referring to Michael J. Fox's homonymously titled show on Thursday nights, which premiered to great fanfare in September 2013 and was forgotten by October 2013.  It's still on the air because of contractual obligations, but NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt isn't giving up on it just yet; he's considering moving it to another night in the hope of finding an audience for it. 

Critics have faulted Michael J. Fox's show for being too generic and too schizoid  - is it a family sitcom? is it a workplace sitcom? - but its main flaw may be that it's a sitcom.  There hasn't been a big hit sitcom that's debuted on any of the broadcast networks since "Modern Family" debuted on ABC in 2009, and only "The Big Bang Theory" on CBS has anything approaching "Modern Family"'s ratings success.  Apart from these two shows, the sitcoms with the best ratings are successful only by default.  CBS brags about "The Crazy Ones," with Robin Williams, being the top new sitcom of the 2013-14 season, but it's increasingly becoming obvious that that's the equivalent of being the best opera singer in Little Rock.  To be blunt, the genre is dying.  Fewer people are watching comedies, and if the most popular ones after "Modern Family" and "The Big Bang Theory" disappeared tomorrow, no one would really miss them.

Yes, we were told that the sitcom genre was on its way out right before "The Cosby Show" revitalized it in 1984, and we were also told so before "How I Met Your Mother" did the same in 2005, but Cosby is old and "How I Met Your Mother" - which featured a wonderfully conceived cliffhanger plot twist leaving Marshall and Lily's marriage in the balance in its most recent episode, even as we learned more about Barney's job and Ted's future kids - is almost done.  Even if Michael J. Fox's sitcom picks up momentum and finds an audience (the prospects for which may have been hindered by Fox failing to win a Golden Globe award he was nominated for) and Cosby's new show is a breakout hit, don't expect sitcoms to come back in a big way.  If ABC can't fill the half-hour gaps on Wednesdays following "The Middle" and "Modern Family" with bona fide comedy hits ("Suburgatory" is back on that night at 8:30 Eastern, though I already gave up on that show because it got too weird), what hope is there for comedy elsewhere on the dial?  Especially for NBC, which appears to be ending a full decade of being in the ratings basement and may start a second come September?   

On the other hand, NBC just renewed "Parks and Recreation."