Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula
I think there are two separate viewpoints, both useful, neither true, that can be used to understand the structuring of stories. The viewpoint espoused in this article is that there exist certain timeless structures, imposed by the form that inextricably results in a type of output. And that the job of a writer is to discover these forms and work within them.<p>There's another line of argument, made by Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You, where viewers are trained by the media to read texts in a more sophisticated fashion. As viewers become more media savvy, the desire for surprise causes a constant creative arms race as structures that were once avant garde becomes commonplace, then tired, then old fashioned.<p>The A/B plot mentioned in the article is only about 40 years old (starting with Hill St Blues in 1981). Prior to that, television comedy followed a strict single line for fear of confusing the audience. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a sitcom go up to E plots. What's allowed them to do that is that television has developed increasingly dense visual shorthand that allows them to speed through a plot even faster, allowing for more story to fit into those 22 minutes.<p>Previous constraints on syndication meant that characters were required to remain in a stasis throughout the entire run but season long and series long arcs are now becoming the norm with even relatively retrograde sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory engaging in long term plotting.<p>If you look towards the cutting edge, you start to see people playing around with the traditional three act structure in interesting ways to keep the form fresh. How I Met Your Mother plays around with time and memory, sometimes establishing the conclusion at the front of the episode and then uses flashbacks to flesh out the central conflict in reverse. Louie routinely fits 2 or 3 stories into a single episode or stretches a single story across multiple episodes. Arrested Development S4 was an overly ambitious attempt to build a single, series long story, told and retold from multiple perspectives. And one of Girls' most polarizing episodes, One Man's Treasure (the bottle episode where Hannah has a tryst with the rich doctor) was hated by some precisely because it rejected the standard formula and resolutely avoided going for a climax and resolution.<p>Such techniques follow the standard adoption cycle, first appearing in cutting edge, low rated comedies aimed at early adopters before eventually gaining widespread appeal and mainstream success before becoming hacky and relegated to shows for children and old people.