I'M TRAPPED INSIDE A SITCOM AND I CAN'T GET OUT

Whenever I have Modern Family or One Day at A Time pulled up on my laptop, I have to explain to others: “It’s for a class, I swear!”

This semester, I’m working on a project investigating diversity and representation in sitcoms in a Special Topics course I have meticulously designed. This class—and its associated project—is something I’ve probably devoted hundreds of hours to, spending hours on end in the basement of my library flipping through every sitcom-related book and hand-picking series and episodes to watch and analyze every week.

Eight weeks in, with 25 poorly written pages of the project and 56 pages of annotated bibliography, I still haven’t lost my deep love for sitcoms that has been alive and well for about 10 years (though that doesn’t mean I haven’t been driven insane a few times in the process). In the process of taking and designing this class, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the structure of the sitcom and its functions.

One of the most significant breaking points for me during this semester was when I began reading more critiques of the sitcom format and how limiting it can be. I started spiraling, wondering if my work is even worth anything and if I should give up.

It’s no coincidence that this coincided with what I consider the beginning of the Dark Days of Fall. Somewhere towards the end of September, I started to realize I had nothing immediate to look forward to, as October was a concert-less month. While missing live music left a deep ache, I was more heartbroken about not being in community with others.

The community my college has offered me comes with terms and conditions. For many years, I happily obliged because I was grateful even to have a community that wasn’t my hometown at all. But this past October, I started reading between the lines and realized I wasn’t getting what I'd thought I'd signed up for.

A common critique of the sitcom is the capacity for change. Part of the sitcom’s appeal is that, no matter what the characters learn, they generally return to the same situation they were in at the very start, generating a sad cyclical pattern and imprinting a permanent fate from the beginning.

Recently, I wrote in a poem: “The people I love the most are not willing to change for me.” I think about the ways I have changed for some of my friends, including putting on a happy face to help them throw a party they enjoyed. I think about crying alone outside the building when they left, deeming the party less fun and fulfilling than the one across the street they originally wanted to go to anyway. I think about how much of myself I’ve lost in the process of changing for them and how I’ve reached a point where I have nothing left of myself to give.

I sometimes refer to this situation I’m in as a time loop, where I wake up every day and wonder how I’ll be useful to people, forgetting that the moment they get bored or deem me un-useful, they stop giving a shit. But I think a more accurate way to describe it is to say it's like being a character in a sitcom.

I start every day, every episode, with bright hope in my eyes that’s then beaten out by the realities of cruelty before reverting to my hopeful, cheery, never-complaining-always-there-for-you attitude. Sometimes, I’m not even a character archetype but just there to comfort people by letting them commiserate about their misfortunes without pointing out the blatant irony of how they are responsible for mine.

When I look back at the way I wrote about feeling excluded (or “FOMO” as I called it) in the spring of 2024, it feels a bit like reading a stranger’s writing. Though I knew I wasn’t doing well, I was in such deep denial about being unhappy that I was writing in such strangely stilted terms. I also tended to write about change in purely objective terms—such as my accomplishments—finding it hard to pick out anything new I truly liked about myself.

Accepting that I’m deeply unhappy with my current life, constrained by where I am physically, prompted me to try to see if I could test the limits of change within the sitcom. I began spending more time calling my long-distance friends and people with whom I haven’t spent as much time. In a three-hour FaceTime call with someone I hadn’t called in about three years, though we’ve been friends and regularly in contact for five years, I was struck by just how understood I felt and how much I had missed talking with them.

It’s not necessarily true that characters never change within a sitcom. Their relationships with other characters often evolve over the course of the series. They find ways to change the way they interact with the same world they’re in, even if who they are at the core stays the same.

Changing for my own benefit has felt like an enormously radical feat when it shouldn’t be. Deep down, I know it’s because I never really liked myself enough to recognize that I deserve better, and it isn’t normal to be met with defensiveness and spite when expressing a desire for something better than this.

When I think about my love for sitcoms, I also remember all the people I became friends with through talking about my favorite sitcoms. I think about how I’ve dedicated so much of my life to researching something I deeply care about, and how I have people in my life who have celebrated and encouraged that passion instead of wondering why I’d define my life in terms that don’t make sense to them.

Most days, I can hear the laugh track echoing, the sounds of a studio audience finding entertainment in my life. But other days, I sit in the quiet and that’s all there is to it.