From the outset, domestic comedies explored identity and individual roles within the family rather than in the contexts of sexual relationships. In some ways, the form complements the soap opera genre, which specialized in neighborly comportment and focused on the drama among families. Soap opera covered the street, neighborhood, pub, or mall, while in domestic comedies, the point of social congregation was the living room couch (Hartley, p. 172). Like soaps, however, family comedy taught identity formation and life skills (how to talk rather than fight). Interestingly, while domestic comedy remained primarily a prime-time genre, its efficiency in the matter of family role-play and wish fulfillment, and its characterization of the family as a place of leisure, refuge, and talk rather than productivity, danger, and work, also made it a major component of children’s TV.

Domestic comedy was well suited for broadcast television production methods, using a studio with one or at most two sets (living room and kitchen) and few or no film inserts. Stable characters in a given situation meant that it could be produced in-house in industrial quantities. It was tolerant of commercial imperatives, allowing for segment-length acts, interrupted by commercial breaks, fitting into the TV hour or, more commonly, half hour. It could produce spin-off shows, such as Rhoda from the Mary Tyler Moore show, Frasier from Cheers, or Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? from The Likely Lads. It was flexible enough to remain recognizable as a genre despite the variety of “situations”—from prehistoric grunts with a Welsh accent in the Gogs (S4C in the United Kingdom; FOX Family in the United States; ABC in Australia) to the almost imperially classy Cosby Show.

Minority TV channels rarely attempted domestic comedy for general audiences, unless the situation in question was an affront to everything held dear in “normal” families, as in U.K. Channel 4’s The Young Ones or Fox’s The Simpsons. Indeed, one of the pleasures of watching “normal” sitcoms was to observe how bizarre some of the family setups were, no matter what their surface smiles suggested about family values. After the pioneering and patriarchal Father Knows Best, traditional nuclear families became rarer: solo father and sons in My Three Sons; father, uncle, friend, and daughters in Full House; father and sons melded with mother and daughters in The Brady Bunch—with never an on-screen sexual frisson among them, and no talk of divorce to account for family melding. “Blood families” were monsters (The Munsters), witches (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Bewitched), or aliens (My Favorite Martian, Mork and Mindy, Alf ). This tendency suggests that like modernity, progress, science, and reason themselves, the modern suburban family was shadowed by darker and mostly unspoken “others” from premodern and irrational traditions (Spigel).

Within the sphere of everyday ordinariness, then, families were fractured at best. Cybill was divorced, Ellen was gay, and Murphy Brown was a single parent. One Foot in the Grave was about a grouchy old man. Where families were intact they were dysfunctional, as in Married...with Children, the British 2.4 Children and My Family, and The Simpsons, which combined cultural savvy and underlying decency with the most dysfunctional family situations imaginable. Homer Simpson’s philosophy of family aspiration (“aim low and miss”) began as a comment on the role model fathers of classic sitcoms. Perversely, it made him a more plausible model for many real families than the fathers who “knew best.”

The Simpsons joined a long line of animated sitcoms going back to The Flintstones and The Jetsons, showing how the format could migrate happily away from live action and yet still improve the genre. There were animatronic family comedies too, notably Dinosaurs—which correctly identified the god of contemporary family life in its “Fridge Day” episode (see Hartley, pp. 99–107).

Sitcoms’ attention to the downside of family life, and to some of the grittier issues lurking under suburban consumerism (even as audiences lived in it and endorsed it at elections), made them active in cultural politics. Classic in this respect was Till Death Us Do Part, making a national hero out of a working-class bigot whose sexist, racist, xenophobic chauvinism and insularity were mercilessly lampooned by writer Johnny Speight. Speight thought he was inoculating the English against some of their nastier cultural heritage. But they loved Alf Garnett in their millions. In an early example of “re-versioning,” Garnett crossed the Atlantic to become Archie Bunker in Norman Lear’s All in the Family, which also politicized both traditional family values and the sitcom format. Ellen sparked public debate about gay and lesbian issues in families just as Murphy Brown did about single parents. Roseanne put working-class life and nonidealized body shapes into the prime-time sitcom.

Domestic comedies waxed and waned, hitting a low period in the 1980s (before Cosby) only to reemerge a little darker and wilder in the 1990s. In the meantime the format gravitated to television for children and adolescents. Here there seemed to be a need to delete the mother from the family in order to propel the situation. The family was intact in Clarissa Explains It All, but the perspective was that of the teenage daughter, not the parents (see Hartley, pp. 181–85). In Sister Sister the main characters were (and were played by) African-American twins who were supposed to have been brought up separately by different parents not married to each other. The white version of this was Two of a Kind, played by the Olsen twins (who debuted as the baby in Full House), whose mother was absent. In the highly successful Sabrina (Melissa Joan Hart), the central character lived with two witch aunts. Moesha featured an all-black leading cast, with a teenage girl (Brandy Norwood) having to deal with her father’s new partner and the absence of her natural mother.

Although ethnic diversity was apparent in some more recent programs and was introduced very early through Lucille Ball’s marriage to Cuban-American Desi Arnaz, the sitcom family tended to be monocultural (white or black) and rarely mixed or foreign. Minority identities were slow to appear in domestic comedies, but eventually black and Hispanic (although not Asian, indigenous, or mixed-race) shows proliferated on U.S. TV, leading Herman Gray to comment on the sitcom as “a site of some of the most benign but persistent segregation in American public culture” (Gray, p. 123).

In some cases sitcoms hybridized, joining aspects of the domestic sphere (a focus on living together and the home) with those of the workplace (presence of those beyond the family, presence of sexuality, flirting). Friends and Seinfeld are classic examples of this development. These 20- and 30-something heterosexual home-building shows sometimes eventually placed their characters in romantic relationships (such as in Mad About You). Significantly, many workplace sitcoms reproduced the family formula, such as Just Shoot Me!, where boss and employee are also father and daughter. In other programming strategies, many domestic comedies required a novel situation to appeal to younger audiences. For example, in the British Game On, the “family” was composed of three young flat-sharers who talked constantly about sex (as did characters in workplace sitcoms) but who lived in an internally celibate household.

Some sitcoms seemed so full of raw new energy that they could be viewed as products of Research and Development for the genre itself, renewing its very form for a new generation of writers, performers, and audiences. The Young Ones achieved this status in the United Kingdom, The Simpsons and South Park in the United States. More recently, The Royle Family managed the same rare trick of being “about” TV as well as life, testing its genre and any vestigial faith we may have had in the family.

Meanwhile, the family was redeemed in an unexpected way. Domestic comedy was invaded by reality TV. As the drama of family comportment, reality took the form of The Osbournes—MTV’s fly-on-the-wall docudrama of life with Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne and his family. Its “actors” played it deadpan, but the combination of the family’s underlying sensible good-heartedness with Ozzy’s spectacularly feral appearance was pure domestic comedy, giving a new twist to Bill Cosby’s famous catchphrase of the 1980s: “I just hope they get out of the house before we die.”