How to Fix TV Comedy

Is streaming stacked against comedies succeeding?

What’s your comfort show?

When you’ve had a bad day. When you’re sick on the couch. When you’re eating dinner alone. What do you put on? What’s your comfort show?

I’ll bet it’s not that prestige limited series everyone is talking about. Or that 8 episode streaming original that got canceled after its second season. Chances are, your comfort show has a lot of seasons and a lot of episodes. It’s a show that feels like a hang with friends, a show that you keep coming back to time and again. A show that you aren’t racing to finish but that you just want to savor. For a large part of you, I bet your comfort show is a comedy. (and the rest of you, it’s Law and Order, Dr Who, or Star Trek, I see you, and stick with me.)

When my son and I wrapped up Brooklyn 99, he said, “Why don’t they make shows like this anymore?“ I said, “Cop shows?” to which he replied, “No shows with a lot of episodes.” I said “streaming?”, but is that the reason?

I’ve been lucky to make a few shows with a lot of episodes, but the episode count keep going down as season orders went from 24-12-10-8-6. My most recent show, Black Monday, had 30 episodes over 3 seasons, and I remember someone saying, “30 is a good run”, and they were right. 30 in this day and age feels like a gift.

Especially when the most successful comedies in streaming history top out at around 40-50 episodes. Ted Lasso: 44. The Bear: 48. Only Murders: 50

So do people want fewer episodes?

And the answer is decidedly NO!

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How do I know? I did research. Get ready.

While sitcoms like Friends and Parks and Recreation are having a streaming renaissance, it isn’t just nostalgia for older people who grew up with them. Young people love these shows too, and not only that, they are actively discovering them. According to the Hub Research Group’s 2025 Conquering Content report, 65% of the TV consumed by people ages 16 to 34 consists of older shows that have several seasons. And viewers between 13 and 24 say they recently binged an older show, with The Office appearing in the top five for both teenagers and young adults, many of whom weren’t alive when it originally aired.

So if people want more shows like Friends (236 episodes) and The Office (201), and they keep returning to them on streaming platforms, why isn’t streaming capitalizing on this?

Well, it all comes down to the very private metric called “the completion rate”. Basically, if your streaming show doesn’t hit 50% of your audience finishing the first season within give or take 10-15 days, it’s considered a failure.

Think about what that means for comedy specifically. A drama can hook you right away. A comedy has to earn you. You have to learn these people. You have to understand the rhythms, the relationships, the running jokes. The Office’s first six episodes are fine, but season 4 is one of the greatest seasons of TV. Under the completion-rate model, it would be gone before it got to grow. The metric isn’t measuring love. It’s measuring how quickly you ingest it.

So what’s the solution? MORE PLOT! Have you noticed that streaming half-hours have story cliffhangers? For sitcoms to work in this landscape, they have to chase plot over funny. Isn’t the whole fun of a sitcom that there is no overarching story and these characters don’t change and don’t learn? We want to hang with our friends, not watch them go on a journey of self-improvement.

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THE NUMBERS

So, to understand my theory beyond a bar musing among friends, I wanted to see what the numbers actually say about viewer habits. Every year, Nielsen releases its rankings of the most-streamed shows in America. And every year the results are shockingly the same. But it seems to go ignored.

In 2023, Suits broke the all-time streaming record with 57.7 billion minutes watched, previously held by The Office (57.1 billion). Not a single streaming original cracked the top 10. Every spot went to a library show, which is a show that a broadcast network usually made and that a streamer then licensed because they needed more content.

2024: identical. Eight of the top ten were library titles. Behind Grey’s Anatomy sat Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, Young Sheldon, and The Big Bang Theory. Four comedies. All of them are network shows with hundreds of episodes.

2025: same story. Bluey first. Grey’s Anatomy second. The only streaming original to crack the top 10 was Stranger Things, and only because Netflix crammed 65% of its annual viewership into five holiday weeks by releasing the final season in phases. Strip that out, and it’s not on the list.

The most binged show of 2025 was Gunsmoke. A western that ended in 1975 and had 635 episodes. That one blew my mind but it was watched so much because it was FREE on Pluto TV.

The comedies that cracked the top 20 that year were all animated and long-running. Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, American Dad, and South Park all have hundreds of episodes spanning decades. Not one live-action streaming comedy original made the list. So do people not want to watch live-action comedy?

NO. They do!

Classic sitcoms make up 12 to 15% of all streaming demand, and nearly 60% of Americans who rewatch TV say comedy is what they return to most.

BUT “Original streaming comedies are slower to accumulate viewing minutes because they have fewer minutes. Brian Fuhrer, Nielsen’s SVP of Product Strategy, said, ‘it comes down to ‘real estate.” More episodes mean more hours of content to keep a show trending. Your algorithm cannot suggest what it doesn’t have.

So they should make more right? I mean, isn’t it odd in a system that rewards a large catalogs, not a single American series originally made for streaming ever reached 100 episodes? Not one. In the entire history.

So we are caught in a loop where NEW Half-Hour Comedies are destined to fail in a system that elevates old ones simply because they have more eps.

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So how do we fix it?

What would you say if I told you someone did? Not at a prestige streamer. Not at a legacy broadcast network. Just a guy who has made a career of giving audiences what they want, Tyler Perry.

In 2006, Perry introduced the 10/90 model. You make 10 episodes. If the ratings are good, the network is on the hook for 90 more.

Under this model, Tyler Perry’s House of Payne ran for 254 episodes. Meet the Browns ran for 130. These were hits. The model spread, or at least tried to, FX used the model for Anger Management. But it never really took off.

Granted, the 10/90 was built specifically for multi-cam sitcoms going to syndication; it was cheaper to produce and was structured for syndication (ala Library Titles). What if we brought that back but updated it?

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The 6/50 model.

Six episodes. If they work, and by “work” I don’t just mean the numbers, I mean the execs actually believe in the people, the cast, the world, you get 44 more for a total of 50 episodes.

I’m sure you are laughing at the fact that I said “believe,” but people forget about Seinfeld, The Office, and 30 Rock: some exec believed in them before the audience did. That trust and willingness to commit to something before it had fully proven itself is what created the conditions for those shows to become what they became.

It’s too easy to blame this on Executives who greenlight TV. Every exec I’ve ever worked with is passionate, and if they are taking a shot on you, they are also putting their career on the line. It’s a giant risk for them because their success is measured in Completion Rate, not quality. If the show doesn’t hit the completion number, it’s a failure not just for the show but for their career. So they have to be strategic about what they think they can buy and, more importantly, what they can sell upstairs, and if that will connect with a larger audience, which is why we have so many BIG STAR shows and IP-based shows. It’s all an attempt to get the most eyeballs on a show right away.

But the 6/50 is a commitment to creators, actors, writers, and the entire industry. It’s not about picking up EVERYTHING, but about recognizing that something interesting is happening here. Let’s see what happens. It says we believe in these people enough to build something with them, not just let an algorithm decide.

Mainly, sitcoms start Bumpy; rarely are the first four episodes of a show the best version of itself. I mean, would you judge Community by it’s 1st 6 episodes? Bill Lawrence retooled Cougar Town after 3 episodes in because he realized that this wasn’t the show the audience wanted, but he knew he had the right pieces to make a better one, and he did, and Cougar Town ran for 100+ eps.

Those 1st few episodes are the ones being judged and expected to be a hit. We’re trying to measure love on a first date. That’s terrible for dating and TV watching.

Sitcoms are a slow burn like Schitt's Creek, one of the most beloved comedies of the last decade, was barely on anyone's radar for its first few seasons. It wasn't until it hit Netflix after season 3 that it got its "Netflix bump" and became a phenomenon. That's 40-plus episodes in before the world caught up to it.

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Why 50?

Guaranteeing 50 is also good for everyone who actually makes television. It lets a show find its creative footing, makes the show cheaper for the network, supports the surrounding economy, and creates the next wave of our favorite new talent, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera.

Committing to volume is often cheaper per episode than the alternative. Knowing you’re making 50 episodes means permanent offices, longer crew deals, and production infrastructure that gets more efficient the longer it runs.

But beyond the economics, when you know you have 50 episodes, you stop working in fear. You stop treating every episode like it has to justify the show’s entire existence. You can take a breath. You can do the weird one. Remember The Office, where Toby and Dwight go undercover to investigate Darrell’s insurance claim. It advances nothing. It is just: what if these two people, who would never voluntarily spend time together, had to spend a day together? That episode exists because the show had room to play. Fifty episodes give you that room. Six doesn’t.

The 6/50 model helps keep shows on schedule. The gap between seasons of scripted television keeps widening. Average gaps between scripted streaming seasons nearly doubled from 12 months in 2020 to 21 months in 2025, more than doubling over the past decade.

Word of mouth takes time. Some people don't check out a comedy until the third season; that's just how it spreads. But that only works if the show is still there when they arrive. Bravo has figured this out. Real Housewives franchises run like a relay race across the calendar year. Then other big shows like Survivor have two clear drops every year like clockwork, and the audience always knows where to find them. That regularity is a relationship with the audience, a trust to give a show a shot, and it's exactly what scripted comedy has abandoned.

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I know I’ve been talking about comedy this whole time, but this extends to all genres, especially sci-fi, but comedy is where I’m planting my flag. Because somewhere out there right now is a writer with the next Schitt’s Creek, the next Parks and Rec. The next Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s you. All it needs is for someone to believe in it long enough to find out.

Six episodes. Then 44 more.

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