Do sitcoms accurately represent today's friendships?

Remember, back in the days of yon (sometime between yore and yesterday) when you had to analyze passages for English class?  Today, I would like to do the same for David Brooks' column "The Flock Comedies", which ran in The New York Times on October 22nd. 

His basic point (at least in my opinion) is that TV sitcoms used to be about families ("The Dick Van Dyke Show", "All in the Family", "the Cosby Show") and now they are all about groups of friends, which is reflective of our lives today.  Also, we only have group friendships and are overly concerned with letting our groups mix. 

The examples he sites about sitcoms all being about groups of friends come from an article by Neal Gabler in The Los Angeles Times.  To quote directly, as he did, “Over the last 20 years, beginning with ‘Seinfeld,’ and moving on through ‘Friends,’ ‘Sex and the City’ and more recently ‘Desperate Housewives,’ ‘Glee,’ ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ ‘Cougartown’ and at least a half-dozen other shows, including this season’s newbies ‘Raising Hope’ and ‘Better With You,’ television has become a kind of friendship machine dispensing groups of people in constant and intimate contact with one another.”

This is pretty much where Mr. Brooks lost me.  I mean, I was already shaking my head, but that was the part where I may have rolled my eyes in irritation.  If, unlike Brooks, you watch any TV, you'd know that "Desperate Housewives" and "Glee" are not sitcoms.   Additionally, "Desperate Housewives", "Cougartown", "Raising Hope", and "Better With You" are all about families, though the first two do have a strong focus on friendships.  I actually wondered if he'd read the rest of Gabler's article, which has more to do with the way we lack connection in our lives than it does the replacement of nuclear families with friends.

I scanned through the listings for the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX) and, assuming that a sitcom is any scripted show that is intended to make people laugh and is half an hour in length, I found 19 different sitcoms on the air in the span between Tuesday, the 26th, and Sunday, the 6th.  Of these, three were what I'd call workplace comedies, four were about groups of friends, and 13 were based around families.  So, claiming that "Today’s shows are often about groups of unrelated friends who have the time to lounge around apartments, coffee shops and workplaces exchanging witticisms about each other and the passing scene." is not exactly true.  Also, workplace sitcoms have been around for years and they have reflected a true aspect of modern society for just as long: if you work full time, you spend at least as much time with coworkers as you do with your family.  It is perfectly normal and not particularly a new and different thing to be friendly with your coworkers.

Of the four I categorized as sitcoms about friends ("Community", "How I Met Your Mother", "The Big Bang Theory", and "Rules of Engagement"), I think only "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Big Bang Theory" are really shows about a group of friends in the sense that Brooks means.  I would not call 2 out of 19 "treating friendship norms thoroughly."

The rest of Brooks' column gets into that part about segregating (awkward word choice there, David) our friend groups and how we don't have one-on-one friendships anymore.  I think his point there is somewhat half-baked as well (really, what do geo-location apps have to do with "trading flexibility and convenience for true commitment"?), but it was more the lazy categorization of TV as reflective of today's friendships that got to me.

Don't get me wrong.  I loves me some TV.  While I do think there are shows that make some effort to be recognizably in the here and now, for the most part, I don't watch most sitcoms and feel struck by how they've hit at the inner nature of how my friendships work now, in these crazy times of the Facebook and the Twitter and the kids with their loud music.  Seriously, they're ruining their hearing by listening to their ipods so loudly on public transit.

A topic for another day might be why television can be the most traditional form of media, but when it comes down to it, I think we're all still waiting to see what this new era of electronic friendship and connection means.  Someday, sitcoms will no doubt reflect all of that, but for now, they seem to be sticking with what works best.  Have you heard the one about the crazy mother-in-law, the bratty teenage daughter, and the goofy dad?  You can, on 13 different shows, every week.