I Watched New Sitcoms On An Old TV And I Am Forever Changed

“Why do they look different?”

I’ve asked that every time I’ve watched a new multi-cam sitcom in the past decade. New episodes broadcast in HD looked brighter and crisper and very little like how I remembered Friends looking back in its mid-’90s heyday. Regardless of the show’s content, something inside my brain was just inexplicably hesitant about new shows, even as I kept watching and enjoying them. This picture quality shift (for the clearer, I have to point out!) has bugged me for years, and only where classic-style sitcoms are concerned. I have never once watched a drama and thought, “Ugh, I wish Jon Hamm’s face was blurrier.” This is because sitcoms are my comfort blanket, a frayed and well-loved piece of my youth that I wrap myself in. New sitcoms have always felt like brand new silk sheets to me.

This shift was absurdly highlighted by an episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia from 2013 called “The Gang Tries Desperately To Win An Award.” The episode is super meta, commenting on Always Sunny getting shut out of the Emmys despite being a hit with critics and a cult favorite. The solution: make the show palatable by blasting it with a blinding amount of major-network-approved light. While that Sunny episode is brilliant, it also takes snarky shots at a medium I love. So, boo on that.

I’ve been really fixated on this vague, indescribable something more than ever because multi-cam sitcoms have made of a comeback thanks to Netflix and nostalgia. Fuller House, One Day at a Time, The Ranch, and Disjointed have pushed the classic format into the 21st century by ditching commercials and (in the case of The Ranch) adding the F-word. Networks have followed suit, with NBC bringing back a rejuvenated Will & Grace and ABC prepping a still politically-conscious Roseanne relaunch. But even though I’m a devoted multi-cam maniac benefitting from multi-cam mania, I still find myself asking “why do they look different?”

There’s a warmth to my favorite older shows, from The Bob Newhart Show and Cheers to The Golden Girls and NewsRadio. My brain remembers them rendered in a dull graininess, possessing a familiar something that I don’t get in modern sitcoms. Is it the lighting? Is it the switch from HD to SD? Is it the modern aesthetic? Is it just my dumb memory or a case of “all of the above”? And am I the only one that sees this?!

For some context, I spoke with Professor Robert Thompson, the Director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. He confirmed that what I have noticed is indeed a thing (“I’ll give you that high-definition sitcoms look different from standard-definition sitcoms”) and then he kinda blew my mind.

Everything, I learned, comes back to reality–and not reality reality, but the “reality” that people raised pre-2000 on 22-minute comedies became accustomed to. Take, for instance, sitcom sets. You never see the ceiling (that’s where the studio lights are) and couches never, ever hug a wall the way they do in nearly every IRL living room.

“If you actually shot something in a real space, our first response would be, ‘That’s so unrealistic.’ Because it’s not like it’s not conforming to reality, it’s not conforming to our idea of what ‘reality’ has looked like through the decades of our watching shows that were incredibly unrealistic,” explained Thompson. “And maybe HD has that same issue. It has that unrelenting high-resolution, and therefore, it looks faker maybe because higher resolution exposes everything including artificiality, but maybe because we’re used to seeing things in standard definition, therefore higher definition looks like it’s not right.” Take for example TruMotion, that feature you’ve had to disable on your parents’ TVs because it makes everything look smoother than actual life.

Thompson pointed out that new shows can expertly mimic the vibe of older shows, as seen in Adult Swim’s TGIFeverdream Too Many Cooks and Mr. Robot’s sitcom riff. The reason shows don’t look like that anymore is, bluntly, because television doesn’t look like that anymore. Those specific storytelling tools (the fonts, the grainy static of videotape) are reserved for when a thing deliberately wants to yank us back in time.

Mind-blowing fact #2: that halcyon era I compare new show to was actually not as uniform as I thought. Thirty years before the shift from SD to HD in the mid-’00s, there was the introduction of videotape.

“One of the first primetime shows that was on videotape was All in the Family, which debuted in January of ’71,” explained Thompson. “I remember, I would have been 11 or 12 years old at the time, and that show was different in a lot of ways. They had swearing, which nobody else had on TV, and that show was revolutionary in a lot of ways, but one of those ways was that it really looked different… When all of those other shows had been done on film, and it’s hard to come up with adjectives, but they had that more filmic [quality]. It seemed more mediated, and therefore, it seemed that mediation took away the sense of artificiality, ironically enough.”

That’s it. That’s the word I’ve been looking for: mediation. Growing up, all the shows–from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Step By Step–were mediated regardless of whether they were shot on film or tape. We all had SD televisions, so everything we saw was a few steps removed from reality. That, in turn, became what obsessed viewers like myself considered “reality” to look like on television.

For more on the history of how sitcoms were shot, I got insight from Fuller House cinematographer Gregg Heschong, a sitcom veteran whose work stretches back to Family Matters and NewsRadio. “When each show was transferred to tape, the image was, in effect, dumbed down in the standard definition days of broadcast,” explained Heschong via email. “Those shows that originated on videotape had less of a dynamic range available which was addressed by how the sets would be lit. By and large, most videotaped shows would look flatter and brighter than the filmed counterparts. A cinematographer knew the broadcast limitations and would light and compose within that standard.”

Both Thompson and I were initially taken aback by changes, Thompson with videotape in the early ’70s and me with HD in the late ’00s. Sitcoms are always evolving, and while I wasn’t alone in spotting this modern difference, it’s hardly anything new.

With all that in mind, I set out to watch new, HD multi-cam sitcoms on a heavy Sony television from 2001. This would definitely add mediation to the new ones, putting them on the same level definition-wise as the classics. Leveling the playing field would allow me to analyze the other ways sitcoms have changed, like lighting and set design. My findings were somehow exactly what I thought they’d be, but also a total shock.

Watching sitcoms on an old TV packs a nostalgia punch. The clunking sound it makes when it turns on, the blurred edges, the glow–just as vinyl has stuck around despite the clarity of digital music, I could see the same kind of backwards-facing appreciation being applied to CRT (cathode ray tube) sets. Roll your eyes, but vintage TV nights featuring curated retro TV lineups could totally become a thing in Brooklyn bars (if they aren’t already… am I onto something?).

First, I watched a 1990 episode of Full House (“Secret Admirer”) and a 2017 episode of Fuller House (“Break a Leg”) back-to-back. With both shows in SD and in close proximity to each other, I was surprised to see that the 1990 episode was actually way more lit than I remembered. And with the HD removed, the 2017 episode not only looked like how my brain presumed Fuller House would look before it debuted, but it actually made me focus on the surprisingly varied lighting. There’s actual warmth to the inside scenes and a bright sunlight outside. On Full House, the “sun” was as bright as a “ceiling light.”

And that’s exactly what I learned from Heschong. “I would say there are more possibilities in lighting with current digital formats and an ever-widening array of lighting instruments and technologies available on a continuing basis,” said the Fuller House cinematographer. “I have always adopted the latest technologies but remain committed to photographing a production with an interpretation of the story’s reality. A show like Becker was shot as a darker reality than a show such as Fuller House. Though I will say there is much more of of range interpreting scenes in Fuller House than was used in the original videotaped Full House.”

That’s definitely what I saw during my TV experiment. I even noticed the updated set design, like how the living room is no longer a blinding white. The difference between Full House and Fuller House isn’t just an upgrade in definition, it’s a wider range of lighting options.

To compare Will & Grace, I watched 2017’s “Who’s Your Daddy” and followed it with a throwback, “A Chorus Lie” from 2002. I actually expected the two episodes to look similar on this old machine despite being shot 15 years apart, because Will & Grace took a shorter break in-between its series finale and relaunch. My jaw still dropped when the 2017 episode started up. It looked nearly identical to the show I’ve been marathoning on Hulu for the past few months. That attention to detail made this sitcom nerd cheer.

And that was the mission statement, as Will & Grace cinematographer Gary Baum informed me via email. Baum, who has worked on the show since 2005 (and did pretty much all of Mike & Molly in between), said that “the show retains the cinematic look that was created in the inception of the series.” He also gave me the show’s specs via email: “The original series was captured in 4:33 aspect ratio on Eastman 5294 film on Panavision Panaflex cameras with Primo 11-1 lenses, broadcast in SD for SD televisions. The current series is being captured in 16:9 aspect ratio on digital files on HD Sony F55 cameras with the same Primo 11-1 lenses, broadcast in HD for HD televisions.” While the aspect ratio and cameras have changed, the lenses remain the same.

My only real bugaboo, it seems, is the HD–and that’s only because I grew up with them in SD. This isn’t unique, either. Everyone forms strong pop culture attachments, even college professors. After saying that he has an “admiration for a number of different looks,” Thompson did say he has a “real affection for the ’70s [look], the likes of Three’s Company, that kind of thing. Though, if I were to really say from an aesthetic point, I think I like that because it’s the style I was watching at an important age in my life.” I feel that. So I say to myself, “Get over it!”

In addition to being a solid escapist evening (Little Caesar’s never tastes as good as it does when paired with TGIF), watching new shows on an old TV gave me a better sense of the care that goes into the shows I now watch in HD on my Apple TV. Before, I always had this ill-informed, nagging voice in my head grumbling that someone had done a vague something to my beloved sitcoms. Now that voice can shut up, because I’ve seen the difference the decades have made. Fuller House is visually richer than Full House ever was. And Will & Grace is keeping it real with its performances as well as its sharper-than-ever look. After getting all these answers, I feel like I can watch new shows with a new appreciation for the work that’s gone into making them look their best in the ever-expanding TV land.

“Why do they look different?” They look like that because TV is, and always has been, a medium that adapts to new technology.

Still, I might have a future in hosting these old TV parties…

Where to stream Fuller House

Where to stream Will & Grace

Where to stream Full House