The Episodic Sitcom

One virtually universal aspect of all sitcoms is their episodic nature. This refers to the tendency for each installment of a sitcom to comprise a self-contained story that is introduced and resolved in the same broadcast. Each episode of a sitcom is constructed so that whatever may have happened in the last episode is almost always irrelevant to the current narrative, allowing any viewer to understand who the characters are and what is happening even if they have never seen another episode. At the end of each episode everything returns to the status quo so that the next week's episode can unfold with the premise and context unchanged. Although many sitcoms habitually include some kind of lesson or "moral of the story" in most episodes, in order for the episodic structure to persist individual characters cannot undergo any significant development, something that would upset the ability for for the show to begin from the same point each week.



Examples of this episodic structure can be found in one of my favourite shows, the British sitcom Black Books which ran from 2000 to 2004. The show was co-created by and stars Irish comedian Dylan Moran as Bernard Black, owner of Black Books, a small bookshop in London. Over the course of the series there are some small changes in the context, like Bernard’s best friend Fran becoming unemployed when her nicknack shop goes out of business, but for the most part each episode ends with any changes that may have happened reverting back to normal, sometimes without much explanation. At the end of the episode “The Big Lock-Out”, where Bernard is locked out of his shop (and thus his flat) overnight by a new security door that is paradoxically difficult to open from the inside and impossible to open from the outside, the problematic door is miraculously gone by morning with only the explanation that it seems to have been stolen.

The Security Door

Shots in Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude, the 1971 black comedy directed by Hal Ashby, often uses wide, long shots to emphasize the feeling of the characters being alone in their own world. Good examples of this are during the sequence after Maude has helped Harold convince his uncle that he is unfit for military service. The two are driving across the countryside with no signs of human life for miles, and the wide shots with them barely visible at the bottom of the frame symbolize how they could be all alone in the world for all they care.

Close ups are fairly rare in the film, which uses mostly wider establishing shots or medium shots to show action. Following the sequence of distant hillside shots, when Harold and Maude are sitting together by the bay, there is a brief zooming close up of Maude’s arm when Harold notices a serial number tattooed on her inner forearm - clearly the type given by the Nazis to prisoners at Auschwitz. The close up is used here to show a key detail that places the film in time and remind the audience what it meant to to be Maude’s age in the 1960s and '70s. The detail revealed by the close up is made more poignant by the fact that it is almost immediately replaced with a wider shot in which Maude points out the seagulls visible from where they are sitting, exemplifying the contrast between what she has been through and how she is able to appreciate life now

The final sequence in the film shows Harold driving from the hospital to the side of a cliff and uses a series of shots ranging from close ups of his face, to very far shots where he can barely be seen on the edge of the cliff, to the final medium shot of him walking away from the camera. This progression (from very specific to very broad to somewhere in between) symbolizes how Harold is moving through his grief; first he is very focused on what has just happened and how he is feeling in that moment, then it zooms way out to show his car going over the cliff then show that he is still alive but very lonely and isolated, then the medium shot where he walks slowly from the camera with his banjo shows that he has found a balance and is moving on with his life.

The Studio System: B-Movies

One key aspect of the type of vertical integration utilized in the studio system involved film studios being in control of distribution of their movies, through the running of theaters. The five major studios, Paramount, Loews/MGM, Warner Brothers, Fox, and RKO all had the power to show films where and when they pleased, and reap the profits.

By owning the local cinema a studio was able to ensure that only films it produced were shown there, and to this end were produced low-cost "B-movies". B-movies were generally of lower quality, since their low budget precluded use of big-name actors and directors, but had a predictable profit and could be used to fill up screens when more expensive, "block buster" type pictures weren't showing.

Out of the five major studios, RKO can be noted for being the most invested in the B-movie industry. Films like "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) and "Cat People" (1942), both directed by Val Lewton, were vaguely supernatural horror movies which were incredibly successful without great cost to the studio. The nature of these films was such that the studio did not take much notice of their production, which left the directors and writers and B-movies to their own devices, allowing them to include aspects not normally featured in bigger budget pictures, such as more complex and non-stereotyped black characters.