The 10 Longest-Running Sitcoms Ever (With Hundreds of Episodes Each)
The secret to the long life of sitcoms lies in their name: it's a situational comedy, meaning that it uses a currently available situation as a setting for a known archetype of a character.
Anything can be adapted for a sitcom if it has proper writers, so some of them were able to survive cultural changes and go on for decades.
At first, sitcoms were created for American TV as something that would bring the whole family together in front of a TV and instill the values of a nuclear family.
The times have changed alongside the purpose of sitcoms and their characters: the focus shifted from depicting the daily life of a family to showing the lives of a group of individuals that are connected somehow, be it work, blood, or just a place.
And while sitcoms are mostly comedic, they learned to blend perfectly with other genres, often using humor to explain some raging social and political issues or tone down the specifics of a certain hard job.
The sitcoms that were able to run for so long have something in common: they were quickly reacting to the things that were happening in the world and adapting them.