History Of Domestic Sitcom

The traditional format of the domestic sitcom has been around since the dawn of television. It is one of the more traditional formats for a television program. But like all television programs, the structure and format of a “traditional sitcom” can vary and change according to various social and cultural factors. From the 1950’s to the 1990’s, domestic sitcoms evolved with the representations of the American family by expanding gender roles for men and women and revising notions of the traditional American nuclear family. In the early days of the domestic sitcom, programs worked to portray the facsimile of real life by representing the family in a very specific way, which emphasized that men and women had distinct yet separate roles in the

In the case of Malcolm in the Middle, the expansion of gender roles can be seen in the actions that Lois, the mother and Hal, the father, take in the episode “Bowling.” In the episode, Malcolm and his brother ask a parent to drive them to a bowling alley so they could hang out with their friends. The episode explores the alternate timelines and events that could happen to Malcolm and the rest of his family depending on who goes bowling with the boys. In the timeline where Lois drives the boys, Hal is left to discipline the youngest son Dewey. But instead of disciplining Dewey with a stern hand, from an objective medium shot, he can be seen reading Dewey stories. Instead of being the disciplinarian, this shot works normalizes the presence of males as a nurturing force in the context of the domestic space. Even though he does not discipline Dewey, the shot proves the competency of males in the domestic space and therefore expands gender roles for men. In the timeline where Lois stays home with Dewey, she acts as the disciplinarian by confining Dewey to his room and immediately telling him to go back if he’s found outside of his room. In the scene where she punishes Dewey, the camera tilts upward before cutting to Dewey at a lower

The evolution of the sitcom also parallels the change in television from the Classic Network area to the convergence era, by illustrating that as families began to get busier and parents have to take on more work both inside the domestic sphere and out, families became more mobile to keep up with the lack of time they had due to work or other obligations. The prevalence of too much obligations and a mobile family unit worked to change the function of television from an event to one of distraction, whereby people would watch sitcoms that would closely mirror their own life to distract themselves from their own