The family is rarity in sitcoms

By Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

LOS ANGELES — Bill Engvall has not yet seen the overnight ratings for “The Bill Engvall Show.” It’s the morning after the premiere of the sitcom’s second season, and he’s concerned.

“Last night it was hard to get excited when you’re going up against the NBA finals,” says Engvall, one-fourth of the popular “Blue Collar Comedy” troupe. “Not that the entire country watches [the finals], but it does take a huge audience away from you.”

Basketball, however, is the least of his worries.

On television, “Engvall” has become something of an anomaly: a multicamera family sitcom played before a live audience in which the lead guy is actually married with children.

Once the staple of broadcast television, the traditional family sitcom has been relegated of late to niche cable channels like TBS, which airs “Engvall” and “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne,” and The Disney Channel, which has had phenomenal success with its Miley Cyrus-led comedy, “Hannah Montana.”

“Engvall” — with its current season average of 2.4 million viewers, up 8 percent over last year — is considered a ratings success for TBS. But those numbers don’t come close to past broadcast network family hits such as “Roseanne,” “Grace Under Fire,” “Home Improvement” or “The Cosby Show,” which at its peak in the late ‘80s averaged 63 million viewers.

“The family comedy is like that kid in the corner of the quad who’s not the coolest kid, but he’s a good solid kid,” says Michael Wright, senior vice president of content creation for TNT, TBS and TCM. “In this business of what we do, everybody wants to be associated with the thing that’s the hippest and coolest and newest and that’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t mean that this form is no longer relevant.”

In recent years, the proliferation of Internet and video game usage and the overall fragmentation of the American family has undermined the traditional family comedy “in a big way,” says Brian Lowry, television critic for the entertainment trade paper Daily Variety. “It’s not as much about let’s gather around the hearth and watch together as it is, I’m going in my room and watch what I want; you go in your room and watch what you want.”

“I won’t lie to you, it’s been an uphill battle,” says Engvall, commenting on the struggle to bring new audiences to his show, despite less than glowing reviews, including TV.com’s appraisal: “a complete waste of time.”

Though the half-hour family comedy hasn’t been put out to pasture entirely, “there seems to be this idea that everything needs to be reinvented, that everything needs to have some clever high-concept sort of idea that draws people in,” says Ali LeRoi, co-creator and executive producer of The CW family comedy “Everybody Hates Chris.”

“People are fairly simple. They like good actors, they like good stories, they like good writing, they like good jokes,” LeRoi continues, “and I am really under the impression, in terms of the development process, that these people have out-clevered themselves.”

When you look at what qualifies as family comedy on the broadcast networks these days, it’s family with an adult edge.

On CBS, for example, “Two and a Half Men” and “The New Adventures of Old Christine” are considered by the network to be family comedies, yet they seldom deal with kids’ issues, even though children are part of the shows.

In the fall, the network premieres another such comedy, “Gary Unmarried,” about a divorced dad with two kids who is re-entering the dating pool, and you just know it will be all about Gary.

As broadcasters become increasingly, and now almost exclusively, focused on adults 18 to 49, “they don’t care if kids watch their shows,” Lowry says. “They’re not really trying to do ‘Full House’ where they have a show that plays across as many levels because they can’t really monetize — which has become the favorite word — the kids as well as they can the adults.”

In the meantime, cable is taking full advantage of the broadcast shortfall.

“We’ve been lucky to work with some talented writers and producers that might not have opportunities at the (broadcast) networks who are running to Disney Channel wanting to work with us,” says Disney’s Adam Bonnett, senior vice president of original programming.

But for his part, at least, Engvall is not trying to “reinvent the wheel,” he says. “It’s just good family entertainment and I hope to God that TV doesn’t just bail on it.”