With his newest TV comedy Bookie currently streaming on Max, Chuck Lorre once again transitioned from traditional multi-camera sitcom duties to the audience-free shenanigans of single-sitcom productions. Unfortunately, the Sebastian Maniscalco series’ arrived around the same time CBS revealed that two of Lorre’s successful co-creations are coming to an end, with Young Sheldon wrapping after Season 7, and Bob (Hearts) Abishola ending with Season 5. That doesn’t mean he’s giving up on the “dying” art of sitcoms, however.
Even though Bookie goes the more modern route in telling the story of Maniscalco’s sports bookie Danny attempting to collect on owed dues, Lorre doesn’t consider multi-camera comedy to be extinct, even if it’s fallen out of favor. In an interview with The Wrap, he credits The Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady with the following bit of entertainment industry wisdom:
It was somebody — I think Bill Prady, who I created Big Bang with — who said it very succinctly. He goes, ‘The audience doesn’t care how many cameras you’re using. They just care if it’s good.’ Fundamentally, if I’m giving this show my time and it’s a comedy, or purports to be a comedy, the amount of the cameras is irrelevant.
That take seems almost too logical to believe anything else, since comedy can happen in everyday life both when zero cameras are involved, or when dozens/hundreds of cell phone cameras are at play. The art is in the writing and the performances, not the way the series is captured or displayed.
Bookie even had some fun with that idea, in a way, for those watching with Max subscriptions. The single-cam comedy features the creator’s long-awaited reunion with Charlie Sheen, who famously starred in Chuck Lorre’s CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men for most of eight seasons before his highly publicized exit. And the Max series even poked fun at that situation, with Danny telling Sheen that co-star Jon Cryer was the true MVP of that show.
While he can obviously understand that traditional sitcoms’ popularity is waning, even with his frequent successes, Lorre points out that the multi-camera format in front of a live audience is the purest way to test whether or not jokes and lines are working. In his words:
If you’ve been to tapings, you know that silence is horrifying. But it tells you that you’ve made a mistake. In essence, it’s what movies do with focus groups. We do that every week on a four-camera show. Those 200 people in the stands are telling us we weren’t not as smart as we think we are, and they don’t really care if I think it’s funny. It’s whether they think it’s funny. It’s humbling, but it’s also an endless education.
That test scenario obviously isn’t so viable when it comes to single-cam series, which often film on location and with various exterior settings, which aren’t so easy to pull off with audiences in tow. And while it might make a show seem more modern to not have people laughing in the background, it doesn’t necessarily make it funnier.
Considering Young Sheldon transitioned away from multi-cam in order to embrace its dramedy tone, it’ll be interesting to see what Max does with its new-ish take on The Big Bang Theory universe, which was confirmed to be in the works back in April 2023. Big laughs or no laughs, fans are going to watch in droves regardless.
With Friends, Seinfeld, Full House and other classic sitcoms seemingly as popular as they’ve ever been within the pop culture zeitgeist, I can’t imagine the format will be completely eradicated at any point in the near future. Especially with Chuck Lorre still in the biz.
New episodes of Bookie stream Thursdays on Max. Head to our 2023 TV schedule to see what other new shows are still set to drop this year.
