Sitcom And Family: A Comparative Study On A Genre Of Television Drama

Sitcom and Family: A Comparative Study on a Genre of Television DramaSituation Comedy (Sitcom) is an artistic genre imported from Euro-America into China and quickly localized. Within mere ten years, Chinese sitcom has achieved a great deal. The most important accomplishment is that Chinese television artists have combined the basic characteristics of sitcom they have learned from the West with particular characteristics of the Chinese society, thus creating a brand new model for sitcom - Based in family surrounding but not limited by it, the new model maximizes the potential of family members as societal members, especially women's roles outside of the family, thus expand the width and depth of sitcom's reflection of the society without increasing production costs. There are two goals in writing this thesis. First is to summarize the accomplishment of Chinese sitcoms, especially in how it avoids the limitations of Euro-American family sitcoms and creates a new Chinese model combining family and society. The second is to suggest that the rapid development of Chinese society in the past ten plus years has also shown that we need to start exploring other sitcom models based on society per see instead of on family.