Mostly, yeah, but then again genuinely funny ones were always rare.

Worse (in terms of sitcoms as a genre) they almost never stand up to time. And that’s where some of the older ones have an advantage. Survivor bias. The shitty ones aren’t in syndication any more. So we only see maybe the top ten percent of all of them with any regularity.

But it is damn hard to come up with the right combo of writers, cast, and zeitgeist. Look at the Dick van Dyke show as an example. Some of the best comedic actors in the business all in one place, with the best writers or the era, making a show that is about a situation that’s damn near immortal because it focused on core segments of life. Because of that, even the less acceptable humor (and it never went bad) is easy to shrug off.

Since the executives in charge production are a product of decades of cynicism and money only thinking (it was almost always money first, but that is different), they take no risks, and want mostly reheated dreck. That’s never a good foundation for comedy. It has to happen by accident when that constrained.

That being said, it does happen from time to time. While I’m not a sitcom fan, and not into it, always sunny manages to work for most people because they’re willing to keep riding absurdity so that they don’t need a real sense of continuity. There was the office (which, again, isn’t my thing) that was one of those perfect storms of on-screen and off talent being allowed to go ham in a situation that is damn near universal in scope for its target area. Even if you haven’t been stuck in an office, you likely know someone that has. It makes the jokes hit better, and the ones that don’t can get carried by the cast’s talent.

But, yeah, I don’t think the current era is good for sitcoms. The old networks are running scared and chasing an old paradigm. The steamers are past the point of throwing money and seeing what sticks. The audience is spread out even more than the cable dominated era. It’s hard to justify a non proven formula, and formulas don’t work as well as they used to

The majority of sitcoms are terrible. When you think of good older ones and compare them to bad ones today you’re doing the thing.

It’s a kind of nostalgic survivorship bias.
You remember the dozen or so old ones that were good, and forget the hundreds that were not.

I think there has always been funny and unfunny shows, just like there has always been music you will like and music you won’t like. Sometimes your sensibilities line up with cultural zeitgeist and other times you have to dig a little harder to find it. 🤷‍♂️ Don’t be that boomer being like ‘back in my day we had REAL music/comedy/whatever’

Watch an old sitcom without the laugh track. It’s all just cringe.

On TV? People still watch TV?

Little has changed really, I find most sitcoms are just “meh”, kind of like they’ve always been.

I know of 3 sitcoms that are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, and the most recent one has been off-air for 10 years (“Still Game”, Scottish sitcom). The others are “'Allo!, 'Allo!” from 1982 and “Corner Gas” from the early 2000’s.

New stuff I’m watching today isn’t sitcom, because sitcoms are such a crap shoot and any teasers I’ve seen look awful.

I’m not even sure what sitcoms exist today that aren’t animated.

Maybe it’s just bias and the bad shows are simply not remembered anymore?

Then again, many popular shows of old are just plainly unfunny.

Nah, there’s some amazing sitcoms right now:

• Workin’ Moms

• Shrinking

• Platonic

Remember Sturgeon’s Law.

I think there are two kinds of new sitcom episodes airing today:

• The ones on ‘over the air’ network, which are largely unfunny and cringey and have horrible laugh tracks.
• The ones on smaller ‘cable’ networks that are more edgy and usually don’t have laugh tracks, and which are usually genuinely funny.

For me the sitcoms of old were mostly the unfunny, cringey, laugh-track plagued ones. So I don’t think the need cringey ones are really any worse than most of the older ones.