Roger Catlin, by way of the Hartford Courant by way of the LA Times, writes that with the series end of The King of Queens, the traditional network sitcom is coming to an end.

The end of “The King of Queens” is another step toward the end of another kind of network comedy — those that are simply presented in a studio before a live audience, where the resulting laughs (sometimes enhanced after the fact) are as much a part of the show as the multiple-camera setup, shooting the action as if it were a play.

Nowadays, comedies are much more sophisticated, without laugh tracks and shot like a movie or drama series. They’re called single-camera comedies, though they certainly involve more than that.

The studio style of sitcoms continues most often on kids’ channels, where the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon churn out inoffensive and cheap comedies that attune young people to the rhythms of studio-audience laughter.

But an attempt to update the form to accommodate adult humor was a huge flop on HBO with “Lucky Louie.”

via artsjournal