Studio Audience

Following up on my post about comedies that have the laughter too distantly miked, ABC’s extremely bland but reasonably-performing new show Surviving Suburbia provides an example of that: even when a line gets an enthusiastic response (deserved or not) from the audience, the laughs are so far away that it sounds like a bad laugh track. It doesn’t help that ABC keeps trying to revive its old style of domestic comedy on film, rather than tape; I don’t know the technical reasons for it, but film has a way of making everything sound more distant than videotape, where both the voices and the laughter can sound more “present.” It’s not going to happen in the HD era, but I still think some sitcoms would be better off taking a cue from the late lamented Lucky Louie and shooting on videotape.