30 Rock

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to shoot a sitcom. There’s the traditional multi-camera style of “I Love Lucy,” “The Cosby Show” and “Seinfeld” — as seen currently on hits like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Two and a Half Men.” On the other hand, “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” and “The Office” use a more cinematic single-camera shooting style. Multi-camera shows usually have a live audience or laugh track; single-camera shows dispense with the stage metaphor and have no laugh track. For you gamers, it’s somewhat analogous to the difference between a side-scrolling video game like Mario Brothers and a first-person shooter, like Halo.

A testament to my solipsism, I hadn’t seen any of the new multi-camera shows (all of which are more highly rated than those I regularly watch) until recently, when the matter was brought to a glaring point. The deeper we get into our Internet-powered, on-demand culture bubbles that let us watch only the things we care about, the more jarring it is to see things that have mainstream, popular appeal. For the past several years, I’ve been experiencing comedy in a completely cinematic form as opposed to the more vaudevillian stylings of its television roots. These single-camera shows — even in faux-documentary style, like “The Office” — are more polished, with music, editing, shooting styles, lenses and lighting that all aid in the creation of each show’s particular timing, realism and comedic atmosphere.

Comparatively, shows like “Are You There, Chelsea?” or “2 Broke Girls“ feel simultaneously contrived — the seams of construction are so obvious — but also more honest in their presentation. The actors remain actors and rarely disappear into their characters. They are in makeup and hair and costume, underneath a harsh light, standing on their mark, trying to deliver jokes on cue, pausing for laughter. There’s a certain grit and intensity in relating to the actors as well as the characters they perform.

If you’re accustomed to single-camera comedy, watching a multi-camera show is a startling change. Most films and shows eliminate all signs of performance, thereby boosting realism, by inserting multiple distancing layers (editing, music, specific camera lenses, etc.) between the viewer and the actor. Consider this scene from ”30 Rock”:

The hand-held camera, quick edits and natural lighting all aid in our acceptance of the performance and set as real, thereby helping the jokes hit their mark. If this same scene occurred on a multi-camera set, with typical TV lighting, a stationary camera and even slightly slower editing, we would suddenly be aware of Alec Baldwin instead of Jack Donaghy, and Tracy Morgan instead of Tracy Jordan.

In comparison, the actors on multi-camera shows barrel forward with fascinating vulnerability. Each actor has jokey jokes to pound out and laughs to wait for. An actor’s reliance on his partner’s performance in a scene is perhaps nowhere as clear as on a multi-cam show. All this without the helpful and flattering gauze of expensive cameras and location shooting. This might make the multiple-camera sitcom the perfect place for comic writers and actors to prove their ability, and simultaneously, since it is so exposing, the riskiest place for the untalented. You can’t hide in a multi-camera show, and unfortunately, most of these show are less than stellar. As the more sophisticated comedies have gone single-camera, we’ve been left without a ”Seinfeld,” “Cosby Show,” “Dick Van Dyke” or even “Laverne and Shirley” to showcase great comic ”stage” acting.

But though the writing on ”Arrested Development,” for example, is smarter and funnier, the simplicity of multi-camera shows is refreshing. The writing is often horrendously bad and the jokes consist mainly of characters insulting each other, but for all their sexual idiocy and reliance on racist caricatures, these shows have worth despite themselves.

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

The live studio audience, a set that is very obviously a set, or even a laugh track, as simple and stupid and taken for granted as it is, are subtle and powerful tools that shape our viewing experience. An agreement between the actors, the set and the audience is loud and clear: We’re putting on a show for your entertainment. For 21 minutes we experience, in the teeniest-tiniest way, the essence of comic theater. Let’s hope someone remembers what these shows can be and makes one that’s actually worth watching.

It reminds me very much of my eighth-grade teacher who so desperately hoped to be the mythic sage who made a difference, but failed to realize his well-meaning musings about why “black families can’t stay together these days” did little to raise our awareness of anything other than his own desire to seem good. And this is what “Parenthood” does in its broad-stroke coverage of everything that could happen in the life of a modern American family. Since we’re all terrified of being different, there is some point in airing things we might still regard with shame: infidelity, moving back with your parents, not going to college, raising an autistic child, and, finally, interracial dating. As the end product of an interracial date, I find this last theme most interesting. On the show, it’s explored in two story lines.

In one, Crosby Braverman (Dax Shephard), the youngest son in the Braverman clan, is reunited with Jasmine (Joy Bryant), an old one-night stand who surprises Crosby with his half-black 5-year-old son, Jabbar. Crosby and Jasmine rekindle their old romance but eventually split apart.

And in the second story line, teenager Haddie Braverman (Sarah Ramos) falls in love with Alex (Michael B. Jordan), a boy so beyond her in sexual energy that a more forced union could hardly be imagined by anyone who spent two seconds in high school. But in “Parenthood,” love is blind — as is a white middle-class family, who, save for one or two lines by characters denying their ability to ever be racist, makes no real reference to the black paramour’s blackness. And here is the point that many of us still have difficulty understanding: Pretending to not see race ignores the experiences of people of color and the racism they do sometimes experience. Race-blindness is a well-meaning assertion of a white worldview, one where race is never an issue.

Comedian Franchesca Ramsey’s recent parody video “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls” is an excellent example of how segregated these realities are. Many black female friends and family members posted a link to the video on Facebook pointing to its hilarious accuracy and mentioning additional comments commonly received — for example “You’re so smart for a black girl.” Many whites, however, found the video offensive, and Ramsey even appeared on Anderson Cooper’s show, “Anderson,” in defense of it.

With its black characters’ curiously race-less existence, “Parenthood” believes it’s nurturing a helpful attitude. Instead, it supports the kind of backlash that Ramsey faced — and this is where things get tricky. How does a television show address race in a real way without alienating those who need to hear the discussion the most? (The people enraged by Ramsey’s video, for example.) Those who point out the continuing existence of inequalities, especially about race, will be attacked. In the age of Obama, where few whites witness blatant discrimination, accusations of racism feel like a betrayal. We’re all supposed to be on the same team now, and a prime-time show, naturally, would rather play it safe and flatter viewers rather than risk ostracizing them. Especially this show, built entirely around stroking its audience to sleep.

The best recent example of a show that handled race well is the first season of Louis C.K.’s “Louie.” It directly addressed white entitlement, smartly cushioning it within self-deprecating comedy. Every serious observation on race was followed by the most absurd and unsophisticated (and funny) joke. Because Louie was the one who made the mistakes, he could tell you about white male privilege. We would listen because we didn’t feel threatened … and then he would make a joke about having sex with a fat woman. In this strategic way, “Louie” escaped preachiness.