Broadcast TV Is The Last Bastion of Sitcoms, For Better or For Worse Keegan KellyThu, February 19, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC 0 Situational comedy has had a rough go of it during these later years of the streaming era, but, luckily, linear TV giants like ABC will always be a home to sitcom giants like Quinta Brunson and Tim Allen.
Broadcast TV Is The Last Bastion of Sitcoms, For Better or For Worse
Keegan KellyThu, February 19, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC
0
Situational comedy has had a rough go of it during these later years of the streaming era, but, luckily, linear TV giants like ABC will always be a home to sitcom giants like Quinta Brunson and Tim Allen.
Earlier this week, ABC kicked off its yearly slate of renewal announcements with an easy one: Abbott Elementary, Brunson's smash-hit sitcom about the hard-working and eccentric staff of an underfunded Philadelphia public school, will get a sixth season on the broadcast channel. Other mainstays, like the seemingly immortal Grey's Anatomy and the surprise hit amongst teens The Rookie, earned another year on TV, as did one of the hottest and most-watched new shows of 2025, Shifting Gears, Tim Allen's latest show about being cranky and conservative.
Meanwhile, in the streaming space, it seems like the only sitcoms that succeed are long-concluded linear TV shows, such as the ever-popular The Office (U.S.), and nostalgia revivals, like the well-received King of the Hill Hulu series.
In fact, since Abbott Elementary first proved that the sitcom genre could continue to evolve and succeed in this new media landscape back in 2021, the streaming world hasn't produced a single original sitcom that's captured more than a niche audience for a couple of frustratingly short seasons.
Sure, there have been plenty of streaming comedies that broke the mold, like Shane Gillis' serialized hit Tires and Tim Robinson's bizarro projects, but a bona fide situational comedy, fixed or multi-cam, has been hard to come by at all the powerful streaming houses.
Meanwhile, broadcast TV continues to crank out sitcoms to scratch every itch with actual double-digit episode counts per season. The fate of the sitcom seems to be tied to the fate of channels like ABC, CBS and NBC, which, from a business perspective, makes sense – broadcast TV needs to pad out its schedule with more than just reruns of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, and it's much easier to make large batches of episodic television, seeing as the sets and costumes largely stay the same and there is truly no limit to the number of bizarre, hilarious mishaps that can befall an inner city public school.
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The streaming giants are always hunting for that one show that captures the attention of the entire market, be it a action-sci-fi hit like Stranger Things or a low-brow, can't-look-away reality show like Love Island and its spinoffs. Since most of these shows drop in full seasons and are consumed within one weeklong binge, the episode count doesn't really matter, so long as the series does something massive and eye-catching that will have the show trending on Twitter.
Sitcoms don't really lend themselves to those dramatic, scandalous, meme-able moments that give the social media managers for these streamers enough repost-able content to last the entire year.
Broadcast TV and situational comedy has always been a match made in entertainment heaven, but, as streaming continues to establish itself as the dominant distribution system, recently eclipsing cable and broadcast combined in total viewership, both broadcast TV and sitcoms are sliding out of the zeitgeist at an alarming rate.
Until streaming companies develop a better business model for turning original sitcoms into must-subscribe hits, we may never get another Friends, Seinfeld or The Office (U.S.) that has the entire world tuning in and developing new inside jokes. The sitcom could become a niche genre, a relic of an era of TV long since passed. But, so long as the dinosaurs in broadcast TV keep making them, we'll keep watching them.
Well, some of them, at least – we feel much more at home at Willard R. Abbott Elementary School than we do in Tim Allen's garage.
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Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: February 19, 2026 at 10:00AM on Source: PRIME TIME
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