AV Club has a great piece on 1980’s sitcoms.
Where the sitcoms of the ’70s had reacted against the plastic, single-camera worlds of the worst ’60s sitcoms, the very idea of setup-punchline humor punctuated by audience laughter was beginning to feel more and more reductive to many TV writers. Wasn’t there another way to do this? Sure, Cheers was great, and everybody wanted to get a job in that writers’ room, but wouldn’t it be possible to do away with the audience laughter or the laugh track altogether? Couldn’t something more like a film comedy emerge?
