“Why Now?”
Why this question is always asked when you’re pitching something, why everyone hates it, why it’s not going away any time soon — and how to embrace it.
If you’re a writer, you’ll know this question, “why now?”, is the go-to for commissioners/producers who don’t want to make the show you’re pitching but are too nice to say it outright. “Why now?” they ask, hands arched, brow furrowed, voice calm and quiet, the same one vets use for The Bad News. It’s a bit like being asked “what are you working on at the moment?” by your parents — it’s surely supposed to be a helpful question, but it’s hard not to hear the subtext. “Really? This? Now? The world is on fire, the oceans are rising, fascists are marauding through the country, and in the midst of all that you’ve decided you’d like to write a show about cartoon dogs learning how to ride a bike? You know Brenda’s son is a lawyer now.”
Because “why now” is perceived as an attack on a writers’ very being, there are essentially two ways to answer it. One is to analyse and justify the motivation for your work in such fine detail that your basic ability to construct normal sentences breaks down, and you start to sound like an AI who has learned to talk by reading nothing but LinkedIn (“Dogs! Always man’s best friend. Woof woof, and such! And with the Tour de France soon coming up, bikes will be on people’s minds! Now is the time to make this show of the dogs and the bikes!”).
The other is to shrug defensively and say “Why now? Because, that’s why. Who are you anyway? I don’t even want to work with you! You’re not my real DAD!”
I have to confess, I don’t mind “why now” as a question as much as other writers. There’s something romantic about it, the way it implies that all ideas have their time, that if we could see the expanse of all history every idea could find a year, a month, a day that they could claim as their own. Sure, the people of 2024 weren’t ready for Cycledogs but they will absolutely lap it up in 2542. Presumably by that time dogs will have replaced us as the dominant lifeform on earth, in which case this would just be quite a conventional flatshare sitcom about two dogs who want to get into racing, which would do absolutely fine on the 2542 equivalent of ITVX.
And it’s not as if it’s an irrelevant question — great shows are very much dependent on their time period. Take Frasier (that’s right I’m talking about Frasier again, sue me). On the surface, Frasier doesn’t feel like it’s particularly 1990s (apart from Niles’ hair, the occasional foray into politics and the odd transphobic joke here and there). But if you think about it, you can’t replicate the dynamics of the 1990s version and simply update it so that Frasier becomes the Martin equivalent in 2024, because the 1990s version is actually predicated on some subtle generational fluctuations — as baby boomers, Frasier and Niles enjoy more wealth, more power and more knowledge than their Silent Generation father. Martin’s sacrifices have allowed Frasier and Niles to move up in society to a more privileged life — but that privilege has isolated them from him, and also allowed them to eclipse him (which in a show with more reason than most to mention Freud and the Oedipus Complex is pretty relevant). But in 2024, the baby boomers still hold more wealth and power than the generations after them, and social mobility is stagnant — the isolation comes not from sacrifice and surpassing one’s elders, but from intergenerational resentment and the sense of perpetual childhood. The “why now” of Frasier was actually a strangely brief moment in history, when one generation had far, far more power, wealth and safety than the one preceding it — we likely won’t see a similar situation for many years to come.
Similarly, it’s sort of fascinating how a show’s meaning and themes can switch when it’s suddenly pulled into a new era. At the same time, it’s not as if shows are confined to one time period only — the meanings and themes of shows can change when they are pulled into different eras. When Hamilton was first written and staged during the final years of the Obama administration, its perceived “why now” was triumphant — by recasting the Founding Fathers as non white, celebrating the diversity of the country, and emphasising the United States as a nation of immigrants, Hamilton reflected the argument that America had become post-racial, that after centuries of oppression, non-white people could take as much pride and ownership in the origin story of America (as, after all, the end result of that story was a Black president).
Of course, the years immediately after the Obama presidency, and the rise of the far right in the United States, revealed how naive this reading was. Lin-Manuel Miranda couldn’t have written Hamilton in its original form after 2016 — it’s almost embarrassingly hopeful, unstained by the horror and the knowledge that a virulent racist would follow Obama, on a tide of anti-immigration sentiment. However, it’s not as if the whole show is suddenly worthless — the core of the idea is still the same, but the “why now” shifts slightly, into something less complacent and more urgent. It acts as a rallying cry for strength in diversity, a reminder that, despite the screams of Trump et al, the country was built on immigration, and that the values of the country now transcend the white supremacy at its heart.
The problem with “why now” is that it seems to have morphed into something rigid — it’s no longer a question of how the current era informs one’s idea, but of how one’s idea can encompass everything about the current era. Does this story deal with the key theme of our times (whatever that is)? Does it capture the zeitgeist while also bottling something timeless that will make it a classic for years to come? Can we be sure that this show will define this era, like how Fawlty Towers defined the 1970s, how Cheers defined the 1980s, how Friends defined the 1990s or how Gavin and Stacey defined the 2000s?
Obviously the answer is no. Partially because our era is loud, fast and fragmented — the best one could hope for is to define part of the subset of a subculture of an era — and partially because those shows only came to define those eras retroactively. Defining past eras is easy because you know where it ends, and what happens after it — the 1990s are remembered as utopian and carefree because it’s before 9/11 and economic misery and Trump, which is reflected in the near perfect life of everyone in Friends (Monica falls in love with a billionaire! Rachel gets a job at Ralph Lauren! Ross gets tenure despite an extremely inappropriate relationship with a student and also screaming at his boss about a sandwich! OK yes Phoebe’s adoptive mum was a drugdealer who killed herself but she also dates Chief Wiggum and marries Ant-Man, so swings and roundabouts). But this is all after the event — Friends obviously didn’t start out as “definitive”, and to put that pressure on it, to embody the complexities of an entire decade, to speak for a generation, to have something more powerful to say than “hey young people like drinking coffee in coffee shops quite a lot, what’s with that”, would likely have killed it before it could grow into what it became.
“Why now” also becomes an impossible question to answer in this way in 2024 as the turnover in the discourse speeds up. This is a problem for satirical shows — if a big news story happens at 10am on Monday morning, there will be thousands of jokes about it by 10.05. By the time Have I Got News For You airs five days later, there’s nothing new left to say — so they’re left desperately looking for a new angle or repeating the same jokes that everyone’s already made. And demanding the same of our sitcoms takes that problem and multiplies it fifty fold. Sitcoms can take years to see the light of day, from pitch to transmission, but news now moves so fast and opinions shift so rapidly that what may have seemed timely when it was written feels tired when it’s recorded and positively ancient when it finally airs. Imagine writing a joke about the Prime Minister now, but knowing that it won’t actually go out until 2027 — it’s impossible because you have no idea how he will be perceived in three years’ time. (At least in this scenario you can be relatively sure it will still be Keir Starmer — if you tried to write a Prime Minister joke in a sitcom in 2019 you’d have gone through four of them by the time it went out.)
Increasingly, shows are avoiding this pressure to be “era-defining” by setting themselves in the past, where the era has already been defined. Derry Girls, Changing Ends and Big Boys are all massively successful shows, and each one has a kind of confidence that can only come from knowing the end — we know the Good Friday Agreement is coming, we know Alan Carr will grow up to become an excellent comedian and even better presenter of Interior Design Masters, we know that Jack Rooke will make it as an artist after struggling through uni in the 2010s. The “why now” is replaced by a “why then”, and the “why then” is often because there’s a hint of a nostalgia for what is seen as a less chaotic, simpler time. Obviously I’m not saying the people of Derry have a great desire to go back to the 1990s, but there’s an attraction to a period that at least has a happy ending — contrasting with the present, and the unsettling anxiety of the future.
Ghosts, arguably the biggest sitcom of the 2020s, is set in the present, but it’s a kind of nebulous, undefined present, acting more as a blank canvas for characters who are all from different time periods, whose conflicting viewpoints provide the main engine for the show’s comedy (yes, I’m aware that that this technical language makes one of the funniest shows of the past 20 years sound so so dry, I’m sorry.) Georgian noblewoman bashes up against trouserless 1980s Tory politician, inarticulate caveman against Romantic poet, 1970s scout leader against medieval peasant, etc etc etc. The “why now” of Ghosts is less about what it says about the present per se, and more what it says about our attitudes and understanding of the past in the present. But in that sense, it is like Derry Girls and the others listed above — looking towards a neatly delineated past rather than a murky future.
Given all this, you might wonder why “why now” is still such an important question for commissioners. Audiences have always loved sitcoms, and great ones through the ages have been built not on the zeitgeist but on great characters — no-one watched Porridge to see Norman Stanley Fletcher make sly references to the failing premiership of Ted Heath, no-one watched Spaced to get Daisy Steiner’s opinion on the impeachment of Bill Clinton, etc. Can’t we just commission a bunch of shows that put character, not trends, at their heart? Wouldn’t that usher in a golden age of sitcoms, where every channel on Britain was full to the brim with brilliant new comedies? With great writing at the forefront, wouldn’t the world finally recognise the immense talent of the people who work behind the scenes in the TV industry as actually talented, and my children might actually respect me?
I’d love for the answer to be yes — especially to that last one (but I think that ship’s sailed). And I’d love to blame all of my problems on commissioners — it’s very easy, and also quite fun, especially at the pub when you’re crying into your pint after your latest idea has been turned down in favour of a new series of That Guy From That Thing Goes On Holiday With His Dad. But in my sober moments, I recognise that it’s not that simple, and that most commissioners are in a similar boat to everyone else in this industry — doing the best job they can as the walls close in and they’re made to jump through a series of increasingly ridiculous hoops. The problem isn’t the people at the top of the food chain, it’s the collapse of linear TV — the way that people have stopped watching television and started (ugh) consuming content.
(Now follows a brief tangent that starts with “back in my day”. I promise it will not descend into the kind of Facebook post that the uncle you’re worried about would share, filled with “we could leave the doors unlocked” and “you’d get a smack round the head if you talked back but it was fine, honestly, it was fine, I liked it”, and end with the kind of thing that would happily get you arrested this week.)
Back in my day, the easiest way to watch comedy on TV was live. There would be comedy slots on channels — Monday at 9pm on BBC2 was probably the best (there was a run in 2002 when it went The Office S2, I’m Alan Partridge S2 and a series of The Kumars at No 42, and as a 13-year-old I didn’t understand any of it but I loved it all). If you missed the slot, that was kind of it — you didn’t get to watch comedy that week, unless you bought the DVD or you had a friend who had managed to record it. (Sidenote: I spent most of my pocket money/Christmas lists on DVDs and then bribing people into being my friends by inviting them over to watch good comedy. I couldn’t do that now, and I do think if I was growing up now I would die friendless and alone! Anyway.)
Of course, with the advent of streaming and on-demand TV, everything changed, ostensibly for the better (especially for a nerdy little completionist like me, even if it did immediately destroy my DVD collection). Audiences are no longer limited by the whims of TV schedules — we can effectively* watch whatever we want, whenever we want. And that’s genuinely brilliant — unless you’re someone who writes something new, in which case it is terrifying.
(*This qualifier is here because despite the plethora of streaming options available, there are still some huge, inexplicable and ridiculous gaps — so in a sense we’ve gone from being at the whim of TV schedules to being at the whim of media corporations owned by multi-billionaires, who think nothing of pulling and deleting all existing copies of a show to save a few pounds! Anyway.)
If you were releasing a new sitcom in 2002, your main competition would be everything else on other channels on your timeslot — and often channels would make sure their comedy slots weren’t clashing (Channel 4’s comedy slot was usually Friday, so Peep Show, Black Books, Spaced, etc). But now the game has changed — the easiest way to watch comedy is to scroll through your streaming service of choice (Netflix, Disney+, iPlayer, Channel 4) to the comedy section and pick something there. That means that, for the first time ever, it is now as easy to watch something from twenty years ago as it is to watch something from a week ago. Everything is on demand, so the competition for a new sitcom in 2024 isn’t just things on at the same time — it’s every single comedy show that has ever existed, not just in the UK but across the world.
The fact is we can’t really blame commissioners, because there have been a bunch of cracking unconventional comedies with great characters released in the past few years, like Alma’s Not Normal, Juice, We Are Lady Parts, Extraordinary, Black Ops. But they haven’t necessarily had the cultural impact that they might have a decade ago because they’re hard to find and they struggle to break through. That’s not a slam on any of the marketing of these shows, by the way — more an acknowledgement that it’s impossible to build momentum when everyone’s viewing habits are so fragmented.
I get that this sounds a bit melodramatic. Is a bit of competition really that bad? To which I say: “yes, because I’m lazy, and anything that makes my life harder should be illegal.” I also accept that this is surely also a problem that all shows face in the streaming era (and all movies have faced since the advent of the video, and all books have faced since…forever?). But I do also think that sitcoms are uniquely vulnerable to this changing dynamic, due to how and why people watch them.
I personally believe that for sitcoms to work, you have to fall in love with the characters, at least a little bit. (Sidenote: often this idea gets mistranslated into “you have to make your characters likeable”, which gets people’s backs up, and I could talk for hours about what likeability actually means in this context, but I have already whittered on for long enough already without poking that particular bear). The point is that love — or, if that word is too strong, that trust that these characters are worth spending time with them — takes time to grow. It’s why often the first episode of a sitcom can feel like a bad date with a nervous comedian — the show is trying to do two things at once, make you understand the characters and make you laugh. And the problem is that jokes from characters you don’t know or trust can come off as at best a bit tryhard, or at worst actively irritating.
The other, possibly more obvious, pitfall for new sitcoms is that they’re supposed to make you laugh. And if they aren’t doing that, it’s painfully apparent that it’s failing. This isn’t true of mysteries and dramas — you can think it’s a bit cheesy during the beginning but you only really know whether it’s good or not at the end, when you can assess it as a whole. And unlike many sitcoms, they have high stakes which can hook an audience in and give them a reason to keep watching. With a drama, you can be five seconds in and BAM! There’s a dead body! And in the first ten seconds, BAM! The body’s in the White House! And in the first twenty seconds, BAM! The President is standing over the body with a knife! And then BAM! The President takes off his hat and he’s ABRAHAM LINCOLN! BAM BAM BAM! You’re NEVER turning off this show! By contrast, the stakes in a comedy are “Michael needs to sell paper” or “Frasier is hosting a dinner party that might go wrong.” If you don’t care about Michael or Frasier (and why would you? You’ve just met them), these are not stakes to keep you watching — you’d be better off turning over to Abraham Lincoln: Serial Killer (if you’re a commissioner and this sounds good, call me.)
It can be hard work to get into a new sitcom — and most people don’t want that while comfort viewing. Much easier to fall back among old friends (or Friends) you already know and trust than go through the effort to make new ones — especially if you have no reason to engage with them. And if you are going to engage with something you’ve never seen before, why not choose a critically acclaimed comedy series from 20 years ago that you’ve always meant to watch, rather than a new show that no-one’s really talking about? I complain about this but I’m just as guilty — there are plenty of new shows I haven’t seen because I’ve been catching up on shows I’ve meant to watch from 10 years ago, or worse, shows I have seen but want to rewatch because it’s easier than digging into something new (or because I have to for a podcast. Let’s be honest, it’s the latter, and it’s Taskmaster, it’s always Taskmaster.)
Seen through this lens, “why now” isn’t a fatuous attempt to be edgy and now — it’s a sincere but desperate attempt to arm a new sitcom with a way to stand out from the sea of vast, infinite content in 2024. It’s a question hiding a much blunter, crueller but arguably more relevant one: “Given that they can watch anything in the world, why should anyone care about this show?” With that in mind, the quickest solution is to add something for an audience to latch onto — a trend, a recognisable name, a unique gimmick, a specific urgency to tell this story, anything — otherwise it will just get lost, among thousands of unwatched shows being churned out and half a century of shows casting a shadow over us.
So what is the answer? I’d like to say, now that the money in streaming seems to be drying up, that we should rebuild the ecosystem of TV with more comedy slots, but that seems naive — people expect all shows to be on demand all the time now and I don’t think it’s possible (or preferable) to go back. How you convince them to watch something original (with no connection to IP or big names or The Discourse) with all that old content there, I don’t know. I’d like to say we should retire “why now”, but I can see it being asked for as long as this situation exists — and with good reason.
Ultimately, the only answer, as with most terrifying things, is to embrace it — to turn what seems to be a suffocating demand to sum up one’s era and find the strength within it. When it comes down to it, “why now” is a useful question — it just needs flexibility, to ensure that it’s not trying to encompass too much. It’s perhaps useful to see it less as a confrontational question and more as a psychological thought experiment. Why now? What about our times attracted you to this idea? I believe all stories are products of their own era — guided by its values, poisoned by its prejudice, taking in and internalising its themes without even realising it. You could have written a totally different story ten years ago or ten years hence — there will be something within your work that makes it unique to this moment in history, which is in itself kind of beautiful. You just have to dig into your idea, work out what it is and bring it to the fore — because chances are that’s also what’s going to make an audience engage with it now, in a way that they won’t engage with older, more loved shows.
More generally, we do find ourselves in a uniquely weird and unsettling part of history. The internet is cataloguing our past, warping our present and disrupting our future. We have never been more able to lose ourselves by looking backwards, nor less willing to look forward. It makes many things really, really hard, least of all writing, which I get is not the most important thing. You can complain that you’ve been born into the wrong era, you can give up, you can shout at the sky and say “why now?”
Or you can shrug and say “Why now? Because, that’s why.”
