Remember 2012? It seems like forever ago now, doesn't it? The entire country was in a fever of excitement over the least exciting presidential election of recent times, Instagram was just on its way to becoming a thing, and um...well, everything else wasn't that much different than it is now. Except comedy on network television was in a bit of a golden age. At the time, NBC's remarkable Thursday night line-up of 30 Rock, Community, Parks & Recreation and The Office was still in tact (though it was occasionally interrupted by nonsense like Up All Night and Whitney), ABC was picking up their queue with three uniquely off-beat comedies of their own (Happy Endings, Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23, and Cougar Town) along with a handful of solid family comedy options (The Middle, Suburgatory and a slightly less decayed Modern Family) and FOX had the rising star that was New Girl alongside promising newbie Ben & Kate. Sure, not all of these shows were hits, but they showed a serious revamped creative energy sparked by the rise of the experimental single-camera comedy that was pioneered by Arrested Development and transported to popular success with The Office. Cable and premium channels had completely dominated the dramatic landscape, but network TV was still able to hold onto the integrity of the sitcom. It was as if there truly was some sort of merit to the archaic process of writing a network television show when it came to comedy, the process of getting a bunch of talented writers to collaborate around a singular creator's idea and create something special with it.
And yet, almost immediately after that golden age, the ax began to fall. NBC's Thursday night line-up was dismantled in the 2012-2013 season, as The Office and 30 Rock were put to rest and Community lost its creator and its edge (only to eventually return again, but that's a story for a different day). It was all part of a new "broad comedy" initiative that was spearheaded by Greenblatt, an initiative that was technically unique to NBC but soon began to seep through the rest of the networks, as well. Now two years later, the remnants of the shows that once pioneered a golden age of network comedy are either dead (30 Rock, The Office, Ben and Kate, Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23, Happy Endings, Suburgatory), shipped off of network television to greener pastures (Cougar Town and Community) or on their way out (Parks & Rec and, if ratings keep going in the same direction, possibly New Girl as well). So what happened? Well, one might argue that none of these shows were ever cut out to be network television hits. Shows like 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community made it as far as they did basically on a technicality; they only survived because they looked marginally less terrible in the wake of their network's total collapse. (Unsurprisingly, it was when NBC began to rebound a bit that they started ditching them). Happy Endings and Don't Trust the B lost most of the audience from their Modern Family lead-in, then got cast off to another night and lost all of their audiences. To be fair, these shows probably had no place surviving on network television. They played fast and loose with the rules of the sitcom format, their humor often lied on the margins on what TV comedy was capable of, and they experimented in ways that a network television show is not supposed to experiment. It was totally understandable that network execs had to ditch them to pave the way for shows that could truly sell ad dollars.
Here's the thing, though: they didn't. They tried, sure. NBC's touted "broad comedy slate" of the 2012-2013 season promised to relate to the American people in ways their "overly sophisticated" Thursday night fare of years past didn't. The fate of all those shows? Every single one was cancelled by May. The only two comedies that survived the year were...Parks & Rec and Community. The next season was more of the same, but some minor success in other areas gave NBC enough confidence to axe Community and announce that the end was near for Parks. But here we are yet again, with a third straight year of failed NBC comedies: Marry Me, from the creator and one of the stars of Happy Endings, is barely surviving even with a strong lead-in from The Voice, and A to Z and Bad Judge are pulling in numbers that make the NBC Thursday ratings of years past look downright respectable. The pattern is mostly the same on the other networks (to ABC's credit, they've at least developed some hits in Black-ish and The Goldbergs, but also had this seasons' first cancellation with Manhattan Love Story and had a string of embarrassing failures like Super Fun Night and Mixology last season). FOX has given us the delightful Brooklyn Nine-Nine but has only been able to keep it alive by nursing it in between its high-rated animated shows; and on Tuesdays, it has a little NBC Thursday situation of its own, as fan beloved comedies New Girl and The Mindy Project repeatedly find themselves crushed by all of their competition. The networks can't make hit comedies anymore. Even mighty CBS is struggling: they have The Big Bang Theory but very little else: 2 Broke Girls was set up to be their next anchor, but it has failed to live up to the task and now mostly relies on buzzy guest stars to pull in ratings that can be passed off as acceptable, and both their attempts to get a little weirder (such as their foray into single-camera comedy last year with The Crazy Ones or the darker comedy of Mom) and a little safer (such as the paint-by-numbers The Millers) have panned out to results that bring in less than half of what Big Bang does or even what Two and a Half Men did in its heyday. So the networks have abandoned quality, subversive comedy only to find that safe, bland options don't work either. So what does work?
Cable is what works. What network TV has lost in 2014, cable has gained. This year has seen a murderer's row of exciting, promising comedy debuts on cable, from the whimsical sci-fi hybrid of Rick and Morty to the surreal DIY vibe of Broad City to the constant form experiment that is Review to the twisted romantic comedy of You're the Worst to the already promising and surprisingly politically pointed underdog story of Benched - not to mention the achievement of returning shows like Veep, Louie, and Nathan for You - cable seems to be the place where the spirit of the turn-of-the-10s "anything goes" network comedy vibe has gone to thrive. And who's really surprised? Cable has long been the home of most of the most exciting drama on television, allowing the freedoms of the form to dig into holes that a network drama would be restricted from going to. Those freedoms now seem to be starting to be seen in cable comedy, which has had plenty to offer for a long time now (dating back to the days of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the premiere of It's Always Sunny) but, since the success of Louie, seems more comfortable than ever messing around with its own form. And maybe that's what killed the creativity of network television. There used to be a popular thought process that the restrictions of network TV led to some of the most creative comedies there were - Community wouldn't have felt so revolutionary if there weren't forms for it to break down. But now that those restrictions have been broken down, do we really still need to point them out? When there are shows abandoning the form as well as Broad City and Review and You're the Worst are, do we still need the restrictions? Network TV is dying, but maybe it doesn't have to. Maybe if it just breaks down the barriers that it sets for itself, it can run and play with cable just like we know it really wants to. Or maybe it can just keep showing endless singing competitions and Big Bang Theory spin-offs until the only people still watching it are people whose TVs are stuck on CBS and they can't find the remote. Either way, if you need me, I'll be watching cable.
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