The filmmaker is a reporter with a camera instead of a notebook.” 14 Docusoaps build off of the cinéma vérité aesthetic (if not its ideology). Tripods, heavy lights, cables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of studio shooting are eliminated. The filmmaker must be free to follow action without dominating it through sheer mechanical presence. Rather than constructing artificiality, both of these cinematic modes are concerned with portraying the “real.” “Cinéma vérité is a practical working method based upon a faith in unmanipulated reality, a refusal to tamper with life as it presents itself.” 12 It is “an attempt to strip away the accumulated conventions of traditional cinema in the hope of rediscovering a reality that eludes other forms of filmmaking and reporting.” 13 To do this, cinéma vérité employs “hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound” so that “instead of having people come to the camera, the camera goes to them. On the opposite end of the cinematic style spectrum, there is documentary filmmaking (cinéma vérité) and its reality TV-based cousin, the docusoap. 8 These clearly-outlined genre conventions help sitcoms to differentiate themselves from serious programming and establish a comedic environment “in which the laughter track, the theatrical shooting style, and the displayed performance clearly demonstrate sitcom’s artificial status and its clear, precise, single-minded aim: to make you laugh.” 9 “By distancing itself from the verisimilitude associated with other, more serious genres, sitcom form signals its intentions to be understood as nothing more than entertainment.” 10 These concrete boundaries help to reinforce the conservative, stable format of the genre and its content. Sitcom intentionally neglects the capabilities of the television medium in order to foreground “the aspects of its own performance, offering pleasure in the presentation of verbal and physical comic skill” rather than cinematic development. Situational comedy, “sitcom” for short, is a television genre that has always been criticized “for its simplistic use of stereotypes, outmoded representations, and an apparent failure to engage with social or political developments.” 3 Initially formed as a “compromise between theatrical origins and the necessary strictures of television and radio broadcasting,” the general sitcom format has “developed little since it was first created.” 4 While the “majority of genres have now evolved their own televisual language” that separates them from theatre, “a major part of the pleasure derived from sitcom results from its attempt to recreate the music hall experience.” 5 Sitcom remains “one of the few genres that still, on the whole, shot in front of a live audience, and staged as if theatre… format ‘the electronic substitute for collective experience.’” 6 Held to its theatrical origins, sitcom is one of the few television genres that neglects to form a “complex and fully-formed narrative space,” instead retaining a “shooting style which serves to ‘encode presence and the status of live performance,’” 7 through a three-camera setup and omission of the fourth wall. Through its use of the comedy vérité style, Arrested Development heightens the absurdity of its comedy by treating it with a serious, “truthful” tone while also furthering the form of the television sitcom. This new form can be seen in a number of post-millennial TV shows, among them Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, both the British and American versions of The Office, and, as this paper will focus on, Arrested Development. This new style, described by scholar Brett Mills as “comedy vérité,” 2, i utilizes a mixed genre form to shift situational comedy away from its music house origins and towards an individualized comedic structure, specifically tailored to the television medium. However, to his dismay, the women he meets find his job laughable, disgusted that he can “write that crap.” The repetitive, monotonous nature of the situational comedy had led several critics to proclaim at the turn of the century that “the sitcom is dead.” 1 But within the last decade, a new format of the situational comedy has come forth, blending in elements from documentary filmmaking in order to create a wholly new comedic form. In the season four episode of the ‘90s sitcom Seinfeld entitled “The Virgin,” George Costanza uses his newly acquired job as a sitcom writer to pick up women.
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