I’ve been watching the first season of The Bob Newhart Show lately. Very watchable stuff, holds up quite well. But there’s something that it’s got me thinking about: B stories. You watch a sitcom, and it has its A-story (Grace can’t tell Will that his boyfriend broke up with him in a phone message) and its B-story (Jack and Karen try to start a new charity, Clothe the Homeless). Some shows even have a C-story (Friends would go that way, in their effort to really include all six friends in every episode). It wasn’t always that way, as the Newhart episodes remind me; of the 20-some I’ve watched so far, only one had even a vague attempt at a B-story. That’s the way things used to be. And you know, I really should know when the changeover came, what the influential sitcoms were that brought about the change… but I don’t.
Meanwhile, my wife is focused on how sitcoms reflecet cultural development. We just watched an episode in which Bob’s wife decided to take a job, and it caused a lot of conflict in the home, and ultimately she decided to keep the job. Lara reflected on how on The Dick Vany Dyke Show a decade earlier, the same events would have a different outcome, with Laura Petrie chosing the housewife role in the end. And today, the husband would probably reject any attempt for the wife to end her job…
I think the addition of B plots may have been the result of sitcoms changing from the Big Star/Supporting Cast model of shows like those starring Dick Van Dyke or Mary Tyler Moore (which seemed to require the main star be majorly involved with the single plot line of the episode) and the workplace/ensemble shows like Taxi and Cheers, which (although they had a lead like Judd Hirsch or Ted Danson billed like a star, they weren’t of the stature of folks like DVD or MTM) included several featured characters who were popular with the audience. This seemed to be a gradual shift that began during the mid to late 70s.