With the news that CBS has canned The Millers for this season, Saturday Night Live decided to poke fun at the current climate of network sitcoms and create their own version with The Dudleys. The sketch, which aired this Saturday with host Woody Harrelson, creates a sitcom that includes two parents and two children and chronicles …
A sitcom has two primary jobs in terms of becoming a success: to build a world viewers will want to continue spending time in, and to make them laugh. The former is perhaps the more daunting task, but both are nebulous, hard to measure, and difficult to figure out in advance. British television is often vaunted as superior to its American counterpart, but if American TV has one advantage, it is that the increased episode orders on network television give American sitcoms time to find themselves in their first season. You, Me & Them, the new sitcom from writer/creator Steve Turner, does a decent job at building out a world and cast of characters worth spending time with, but in its six-episode first season, it all too often forgets to be funny.
When Happy Endings debuted in the spring of 2011, it was largely written off, either as yet another subpar Friends clone (in a spring that was strangely full of them) or a “hang-out” sitcom with not enough meat on its bones. It didn’t help matters that much of the abbreviated first season was aired out …