Premise

Ken Levine’s new post “Your life is not a sitcom,” about people who think that their wacky workplace and co-workers would make a great show, touches on a theme I consider very important: the important thing about a TV show is not the setting or even the individual characters, it’s the relationships between the characters:

How long has it been since there was a show with a theme song that explained the premise? I can’t think of any since The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and The Nanny in the ’90s, and while both of those themes were terrific, there has really been nothing much since then. (Even British sitcoms, which have longer running times and might actually have time for a full-length theme song, historically tend to have shorter intros than American shows. I could never fully understand that.) I’m sure there have been some I’ve missed, and I’m sure someone will fill me in on the ones I’ve missed, but that kind of theme song is certainly out of fashion, even more so than theme songs in general. If a show absolutely needs to fill us in on the premise, it will do so with narration, like Arrested Development did, but not with lyrics.

Just to add a bit to my digression, in an earlier post, about “premise-driven” shows vs. “character-driven” shows: obviously you can’t make an absolute distinction between those two types of shows. Every television show with continuing characters is based in part on the hope that we, the audience, will find the characters interesting, and every show has a premise that is hopefully good enough to create cool stories for those characters. Even an anthology show can’t be called strictly premise-driven because we’re supposed to get involved with the characters, if only for one week.