Multi-dimensional production? What the hell is that? I honestly didn’t even consider there might be a difference between the ways television is filmed present day but it turns out there is quite a bit of time and energy exerted into the way a show should look. This makes sense because obviously certain material will need a specific look but I never put my thought into it. I also didn’t realize the army of people that was required to get one of these sitcoms rolling. The number of writers, stage crew, and other overhead staff was insane. It wasn’t as simple as gathering a couple of actors, a cameraman, and a writer; it is way more complex. When I was in middle school, I was a part of the stage crew and even though it was small, I had a blast doing it. So, seeing what the stage crew went through for Friends was a cool glimpse of what profession stage crew looks like.

I understand why these sitcoms are considered low brow when you look at them from the outside, but when you actually go behind the scenes and look at the amount of work put into these productions, it shows the amount of talent required. The actors are given a tremendous amount of pressure because they are in front of a live audience. This also effects the stage crew because they must make sure everything is perfect because they do not get an extra chance. It’s not like normal production where you can screw up, then cut the scene and try it all over again. The writers also must be familiar with the multi camera set up because they have to adapt the camera angles in order to give the best emotions to the audience. There is a lot more science behind it than what meets the eye.

I agree with Betancourt saying that the multi-dimensional sitcoms create a “sense of community” when they have a live audience and a laugh track. It is comforting finding humor in topics as other people and having the opportunity to laugh with others is a great feeling. It also gives you a little nudge to laugh, even if the material wasn’t that funny. I can honestly say that there were several times while watching One Day at a Time that I did not find the material to be very funny, but when the laugh track would start to play, I would find myself laughing with the material. This happened quite a bit when watching the show due to the fact that I didn’t find the humor to be too great. Except for the Grandma, that old lady had my girlfriend and I laughing our tails off especially because my girlfriend is Spanish and Mexican so she found the humor extremely relevant.

I personally am not a huge fan of the multi dimension sitcom. I find the laugh tracks to be extremely corny and they are outdated. The humor that the writers used seem to be too exaggerated and I absolutely despised the character of Elena. I think they googled the characteristics of an annoying, progressive, millennial and threw a character together with whatever Google search they found. Without her character, I would have found the show to be much more entertaining but unfortunately, she ruined it for me. Other than that, Grandma and Schneider seemed to be good characters that had me laughing.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s