I think the geekiest thing that I do in life - and that’s a fairly competitive category - is watch great sitcom episodes with a spreadsheet in front of me, and map out the structures of the episode on the spreadsheet (and add other analytical notes), in order to try and learn things about how the comedy was created.

I was turned on to the idea of autodidactism in comedy screenwriting - learning through self-teaching and research; reverse-engineering the greats, to put it optimistically - by the wonderful online TV comedy teachings of Brent Forrester (the Simpsons, the Office). And I’ve learned incredibly valuable lessons from following Brent’s specific processes, as well as using his as a jumping off point for my own. And I want to stress that this spreadsheet geekery is the latter. This isn’t Brent’s idea. He’s a cool guy, and this isn’t cool. Nobody’s blaming Brent.

But anyway, I already did the tedious work of mapping out full episodes of Arrested Development, The Office (US), Friends, Frasier, and Colin From Accounts. And I’ll keep adding to it as I go. And it’s probably helpful way beyond my own personal usage. So I figured I’d share this hard-won, unsexy data on here, so that it might one day be found and read by someone else who needs to know exactly how many scenes were in The One Where Rachel Finds Out.

So it’s yours to use as you please, here:

DOWNLOAD THE SPREADSHEET OF MIRTH

Very important bit of context right at the outset - I’m not proposing to share this as an expert. I’m writing it early in my screenwriting journey, with a handful of BBC sketch credits under my belt and not much else, simply to share the research. And to document the journey a little bit, kind of.

Anyway. Disclosure complete. Back to my expert opinions:

What’s on this Google Sheet, and why should I care?

I mean, you definitely shouldn’t care in the slightest unless you’re keenly interested in sitcom structure and also comedy dynamics. But if that’s your bag, then it’s a breakdown of several sitcom episodes that I thought were instructive, principally to understand things like scene length and how the various stories are being balanced. And in some cases (the Office, Arrested Development) there’s also lots of analysis of some of the comedic dynamics within the shows too. It’s definitely going to be helpful to watch the given episode, as the notes are written assuming familiarity. (Note - you skip between shows in the menu along the bottom of the Google Sheet.)

Why those shows in particular?

So this started simply intending to break apart a single episode of Frasier, which I have always thought of as a very classic, very purist sitcom. I took one of my favourite episodes - Flour Child, the one where Niles carries around a bag of flour as if it were a baby, to test his own readiness to be a father - and basically mapped it out from start to finish. How many scenes? What length? How many stories? How do they intersect? And so on. And then, having done an episode of Frasier, I compared it with an episode of Friends, just since it was such a large contemporary of Frasier’s - albeit a much more ensemble-minded show. And there were interesting differences.

Then, I got to two of my favourites of all time - Arrested Development and the Office, and I went a bit deeper on the comedic analysis side on those shows. So there’s way more notes in those cases. And finally, I was researching a pilot I was co-writing with my writing partner Paul Hamilton - a two-hander about a couple who are in business together - and it became really useful to know certain things about how story within a two-hander show functions. So I studied an episode of the excellent Colin From Accounts, and learned loads from that too.

What I learned about minimalist sitcom structure from Frasier.

So the initial exercise with Frasier didn’t turn up too many surprises. Frasier’s an ultra minimalist sitcom - it has an A story and a B story, with a small cast of five principles, and it has a very small number of scenes, which are therefore quite long. The big revelation was just how true all of the above was - Flour Child has just six scenes plus a silent end-credits scene. For context, the episode of Arrested Development I studied had 20 scenes not including brief flashbacks. So the DNA is very different.

What’s useful and fascinating is that Frasier often plays the role of lead character in the A story, but also a key supporting character in the B story. The show will therefore use long scenes to progress both stories one at a time, with characters entering and exiting constantly like a stage play. And often, as people leave the scene - Daphne goes out to meet a friend; Martin goes to bed - the tone can shift from dense, sometimes farcical comedy, to heartfelt one-on-ones - between brothers, say, or between Frasier and his dad. As the cast reduces, so the comedy gives way to drama.

A brief note on blocking in Frasier.

The long scenes in early Frasier are synonymous with wonderful blocking. In particular the staging of the longest scene in Flour Child (directed by James Burrows) is masterful. The scene starts at 13:40 - they’re using every inch of this apartment to forward the story, and it feels incredibly naturalistic. They drift from the table to the door, to the couch to the bar; Frasier sits, and stands, and perches, and sits, and stands. Every little bit of wandering is motivated. Martin jokes around when he sits, but once he stands, things get serious. Niles makes a confession facing away from Frasier. And so on, and so on.

On the next Arrested Development…

Frasier is very classical in its construction as a sitcom, and so the gears aren’t hard to spot; this exercise really came into its own studying more modern shows such as Arrested Development and the Office. As such, the notes get much more interesting underneath the scene descriptions on those pages of the spreadsheet.

My favourite sitcom of all time is undoubtedly classic-era Arrested Development. In a future blog post, I’ll be deep-diving into the things I learned from Season 3, Episode 1: the Cabin Show. Come back for that, or just click on the spreadsheet above and read the notes right now!