I don’t remember the age of broadcast TV with much fondness. I always hated having to be in front of the TV at a specific time to see what I wanted, especially since we couldn’t afford a VCR until the year 2000! Today, with on-demand streaming, you can watch any episode of a show whenever you like, and you know which shows have oodles of episodes to choose from? Sitcoms!
Sitcoms were the prime time darlings of the broadcast era, and entertained families over dinner time for years. Now, I think they’re getting a second chance at life and might even be a key pillar supporting the streaming business as a whole.
The Evergreen Appeal of Sitcoms
Sitcoms are a marvel of media engineering. They are shows that are made to appeal to a very broad audience, offer a story of the week anyone can drop in to watch, yet still have long-running story arcs and can even make for impactful storytelling, despite being largely comedic in nature.
Whole countries have huddled around the TV to see pivotal episodes of sitcoms. The M*A*S*H finale pulled almost 106 million viewers. When popular sitcom characters are in danger of dying, or when a major event happens like a wedding, people care.
At the same time, these shows are true comfort food, and they stand up to repeat viewing. It’s why sitcoms are some of the best media to own a physical copy of. If you own a box set of Friends, you’ve always got something you can put on for yourself, for a friend, or for anyone and it will probably go down pretty well!
Licensing and Cost Advantages for Streaming Platforms
The nature of sitcoms makes them perfect for streaming catalogs, but the other factor is cost. Sitcoms were some of the first shows to benefit from syndication, which is where the owners of the show in question license it out to be broadcast on other networks, usually in other regions. Syndication often leads to more popularity, which incentivizes new seasons of the show.
Streaming services licensing old sitcoms is the modern equivalent of this, and honestly probably the reason why some old sitcoms are getting revival seasons years after they were canceled or ended. The key benefit for the streaming service, though, is that older sitcoms are relatively cheap to license, and add hundreds and thousands of hours to the catalog.
Sitcoms Can Help With Subscriber Retention
Do you remember when King of the Hill was removed from Netflix? The service didn’t renew the license, and no one else picked it up, so for a good while there was a bit of a panic because it was a comfort show for a big chunk of people. Of course, you could and still can just buy the DVDs online, but clearly most people have moved past physical media or they’d just have done that instead of lamenting it online.
The reason I bring it up is that I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people kept paying their monthly subscriptions just to maintain access to their comfort shows. That’s exactly what I did when it came to Star Trek: The Next Generation until I ponied up for the TNG Blu-ray collection, and something tells me a lot of people do the same thing for The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother.
If you look at the numbers, it certainly seems like sitcoms are pulling much more than their own weight. An analasis by Parrot Analytics showed that “sitcoms account for 13.4% of Hulu’s total subscriber retention—a remarkable figure given that sitcoms make up only 7.6% of the platform’s TV catalog.”
Hulu is the most dramatic example, but their data shows a similar pattern across the board, so sitcoms may not be the main reasons new subscribers come in (that’s thanks to new original content), but they are a significant reason why current subscribers stick around.
Cross-Generational Appeal Makes Sitcoms Future-Proof
What’s even more interesting to me is that sitcoms can easily have a new lease on life thanks to streaming, and have appeal across generations. Parents can introduce their favorite sitcoms to children, and, of course, young people can discover them without any help.
I literally see people in their early 20s walking around with Friends T-shirts and I think many sitcoms will probably become more popular in the streaming age than they ever were on TV.
