Everyone has seen at least one sitcom in their lifetime, I mean, these things are EVERYWHERE! Situational comedies are the perfect television recipe and no matter how many times we see the exact same scenario, we keep coming back for more. So, my guess is, there has to be a reason, and this is my theory.
Before we can get into why we love sitcoms so much, we have to talk about their basic structure. For starters, I think that every sitcom to ever exist can fall into one of three categories. They are either location-based, family-based, or friend-based.
Location-Based:
Location based sitcoms always revolve around a central location. This basically means that at the end of the day the people within the location don't matter as much as the location itself, which is why these sitcoms have a larger cast turnover rate than the other two. The two most popular examples of this are The Office, and Parks and Recreation.
Family-Based:
Family based sitcoms, on the other hand, revolve exclusively around a specific family, meaning that nothing is more important to the shows continuity than the characters. I've seen family-based sitcoms fail because the actor who played a main character left the show and when they were replaced it kinda
ruined the whole show. One really great example within this category is Full House.
Friend-Based:
Now, friend-based sitcoms are some of my personal favorites. I view it as a sort of combination between both family and location-based sitcoms. This is because the cast/ main group of friends is very important to the overall story (like family based), but it's much easier to bring characters both in and out of the story depending on the situations presented (like location based). The most popular series within is category is definitely Friends.
Now, that's basically where the differences between sitcoms come to an end. The general equation (situation + disaster + person + idea = happy ending) stays the same no matter what the central theme of the show is. Like just about anything you see in the media, just because it looks a little different, doesn't mean it's not the same.
So, why exactly do we love sitcoms so much? Writers and producers get away with reusing the same equation, the same "disasters" in every show. Why do we keep coming back to them?
The simple answer is that they reflect our own lives back to us, or at least, the somewhat romanticized version of our lives.
We like sitcoms because they make us believe that everything is going to be okay, and to be completely honest, they will be. Just maybe not a quickly as we'd like.
P.S. Just for fun-zies I added a list of 10 sitcoms that are always worth a watch (including which category they fall under).