by Joseph Adalian
November was another bad month in what’s been a pretty awful couple of years for the once-mighty network sitcom. NBC, which dominated the TV business for nearly two decades based on the strength of its comedy bench, announced it was ceding custody of an already-filmed Ellie Kemper half-hour from producer Tina Fey and selling the project to Netflix. The decision had nothing to do with the show’s quality — Netflix liked it so much, it has already ordered a second season— but instead was a depressing admission by the Peacock that it felt there was virtually no chance it could make the show a success given the network’s lack of even a single sitcom hit. This week’s announcement that NBC would also burn through the final season of the Amy Poehler–led Parks and Recreation in under two months added an exclamation point to the declaration of surrender: Rather than use the swan song of its longest-running and most critically admired half-hour to launch a successor sitcom, the network (probably correctly) decided it would be better off giving Parks a semi-dignified send-off and quickly moving on.
A similar come-to-Jesus moment was likely behind CBS’s unexpectedly early cancellation of the Will Arnett–Margo Martindale sitcom The Millers, just weeks into its sophomore season. The same network that had always managed to make America fall in like with middle-of-the-road sitcoms such as Rules of Engagement, Still Standing, and Mike and Molly seemed to be conceding even it no longer had the power to force us to sit still for whatever mediocrity it slotted behind a monster hit (in this case, The Big Bang Theory). By themselves, the NBC and CBS decisions didn’t dramatically alter the small-screen landscape. Taken together, they’re symptoms of something far more depressing: Network TV is suffering through a Great Sitcom Recession, and there aren’t many signs of recovery on the horizon. read article