No Laugh Track Required: The Comeback of the Sitcom

Once upon a time, kids, there was a TV show called Seinfeld. It was a "sitcom." This was a term for a popular genre — watched by tens of millions of viewers — in which amusing things were said and done not by politicians trying to dance or amateurs trying to sing but by professional actors pretending to be real people, for 22 minutes at a time. When Seinfeld aired its finale in 1998, about 76 million people tuned in.

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Starting Oct. 4, the cast of Seinfeld reunites for five episodes on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom from Seinfeld co-creator Larry David that a couple million people watch on Sunday night on a good week. Which sums up what's happened in the sitcom world since Seinfeld left. There have been sitcoms in the decade since — even great ones, like Curb and Arrested Development — but no monster hits. As the great comedy explosion of the '90s faded, networks made fewer and fewer new sitcoms, and those that got on the air were eclipsed by dramas and reality shows. (See the 100 best TV shows of all time.)

Now a funny thing — literally — is happening in prime time. Sitcoms don't have the ratings or reach Seinfeld did, and probably no single one will again. But collectively, TV sitcoms are better and more diverse than they have been in years. Any roundup of the best new TV shows of 2009 would be mostly, if not entirely, comedies. And they're expanding the definition of what sitcoms can be: musical, complex, more than a half-hour long and sometimes even dead serious.

Tracking the Laughs
The truth is, comedy didn't go away when sitcoms did; it just moved. Even as TV dramas became more complicated and dark, many of them, like Lost, Rescue Me and The Sopranos, also provided some of the funniest moments on television. (Think Christopher and Paulie Walnuts stuck in the Pine Barrens.) And one reason audiences flock to reality shows is that they are often funny — be it because of Tim Gunn's witticisms or Donald Trump's hair.

Today's best sitcoms have adapted by relearning their art from the genres that superseded them. The Office borrows its mockumentary format and the device of interviewing characters in "confessionals" from reality TV. This is a perfect fit for a show that's about the mundane routine of work life, but the filming technique — in which the handheld camera reacts almost like another character — also lends itself to sitcom wackiness. The opening of its post–Super Bowl episode (a fire drill goes wrong, leading to chaos that includes a cat being thrown through a ceiling panel) was probably the funniest scene on TV this year. (See pictures of cubicle designs submitted by The Office viewers.)

The Office's quasi spin-off Parks and Recreation applies the same technique to politics, with Amy Poehler playing an overzealous Indiana bureaucrat seeking to build a park on an abandoned development site occupied by a giant pit. (Throwing stimulus money into a literal hole in the ground left behind by the real estate bust: it's the official sitcom of the Great Recession.) And Modern Family, a hilarious new mock-doc on ABC, adapts the style to domestic comedy. When one half of a gay couple blames his weight gain on a nesting instinct spurred by their adoption of a baby, the scene cuts to night-vision-camera footage of him binge-eating in the pantry.

An old-school sitcom would have told this joke as a zinger ("Yeah, well, tell your nesting instinct it left a Ding-Dong wrapper on the kitchen counter!" [Canned laughter]). This screwball-vérité style, by adding a layer of visual irony, allows Modern Family to pack its jokes tighter (the straight line and the contradiction are simultaneous) and connects the audience more intimately. You're not just a fan; you're a voyeur.

The Comedy of Drama
Not coincidentally, none of these shows — with their filmlike editing and numerous outdoor and location scenes — look much like the sitcoms of a decade ago. One reason sitcoms guttered out after Seinfeld may have been their predictability: too many people sitting on couches, peeling off one-liners. Seinfeld was the apotheosis of this kind of comedy, but like Raymond Carver, it inspired numerous lesser imitators that made the same approach seem stale and empty. It takes real genius to pull off a show about nothing.

See pictures of Amy Poehler's life in comedy.

See TIME's photo-essay "A History of Stand-Up Comedy."