Studio Audiences

If I were looking for a single word to sum up why Chuck Lorre has managed to build a comedy empire in an era that didn’t seem very sitcom-friendly, the word would be “efficiency.” Two and a Half Men may be kind of cruel and mean, but every element of that show is calculated to make the show an efficient laugh machine, and remove anything that might stand in the way of generating jokes on a regular basis: no needless set clutter, no extra plot complications, no verisimilitude in staging or lighting. It is, as all multi-camera sitcoms need to be, a machine that can produce 20 minutes of jokes every week. Not that efficiency doesn’t matter in other forms of TV, but it’s just even more important in a multi-camera comedy because every joke has to land in front of a studio audience, which means that the writers are literally writing for two audiences at once.