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Why comedy can and should be a linear TV event

Written by Hassaan Mohammad, British Comedy Guide, 4th April 2026

The way we consume television has changed dramatically. Streaming now dominates, and UK broadcasters have responded by dumping entire series on their platforms the moment - or even before - the first episode airs on TV. For most genres, this is a matter for debate. For comedy, it is a mistake.

The BBC treats certain prestige dramas differently. Happy Valley and Line Of Duty were broadcast episodically, week by week - and they became genuine national events, growing in the ratings with each instalment and building towards finales that the whole country felt compelled to watch. Entertainment formats follow the same pattern: Strictly Come Dancing, The Traitors, The Apprentice and comic formats such as The Graham Norton Show and Blankety Blank all go out linearly, and all command substantial, loyal audiences. Yet scripted comedy - arguably the hardest thing to make well, and the genre most capable of producing beloved, enduring work - is almost universally box-setted from day one.

The irony is that broadcasters and producers will readily tell you that comedy needs time to breathe; that audiences need several episodes, sometimes several series, to properly connect with characters and situations. And they are right. Only Fools And Horses was a modest performer in its first series. It was repeat runs - necessitated by a BBC strike, of all things - that found it a new audience. One Foot In The Grave was similarly slow to ignite. Gavin & Stacey launched on BBC Three, built steadily through low-key airings, and only broke into the mainstream when BBC One reran it ahead of the 2008 Christmas special - a special that went on to attract 7 million viewers. Its third series then premiered on BBC One. Little Britain followed the same trajectory, jumping from BBC Three to One on the back of repeat popularity.

These are not flukes. They are the natural lifecycle of comedy: a slow accumulation of word-of-mouth, repeat discovery, and growing affection over an extracted, episodic-release pattern. Box-setting short-circuits that process entirely.

The argument in favour of box-setting runs roughly as follows: one episode may not be enough for viewers to understand the characters or the world of the show. But this is, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more comedy is written with the assumption that audiences will binge it - serialised arcs, slow-burn character work, storylines that only pay off across multiple episodes - the more a single episode will feel insufficient.

The solution is not to abandon linear scheduling; it is to write opening episodes that stand on their own feet. Feature films manage it. Great sitcoms always have. Box-setting also sends a signal - not always intentional, but unmistakable - that the broadcaster lacks confidence in the show. If a comedy is good enough to commission, it should be good enough to schedule properly. Releasing a full series to streaming before it has aired a single episode on linear television is not an act of generosity to viewers; it is an act of avoidance.

There are better approaches. Launching with a double bill - as Gavin & Stacey originally did - gives comedy the room it needs to establish itself without abandoning the weekly rhythm. Some formats have even been stripped across a week: Outnumbered debuted this way in 2007, with three episodes broadcast in late August and three the following week, creating an event out of a debut series. These are not radical departures; they are sensible scheduling tools that broadcasters already use selectively. The question is why they apply them so rarely to comedy.

The audience is there. The final episode of Gavin & Stacey, broadcast on Christmas Day 2019, drew over 20 million viewers across all platforms - the largest comedy audience since 2001, with 12.3 million watching on the night alone: the biggest Christmas Day figure since 2008. But it does not have to be a special occasion to prove the point. Consider Line Of Duty's final series in 2021, broadcast weekly. The opener drew 6.5 million viewers as live, with a further 3 million on the same day and 3.5 million in the following week - a total first-week audience of 13 million. The penultimate episode reached 14.3 million; the finale, 15.2 million. That is a show building momentum week by week. Comedy is entirely capable of the same trajectory, given the same treatment.

A weekly release cycle creates something that streaming cannot replicate: sustained national conversation. Each episode becomes a talking point that renews itself every seven days. Audiences speculate, recommend, and catch up before the next episode airs. The Traitors works precisely because everyone watches at the same time and no one wants to be left out of the conversation. There is no reason a great comedy cannot generate exactly the same effect.

The long-term commercial case is equally clear. UKTV's U&Gold built its entire identity around sitcom repeats, having long since dropped the drama that once shared its schedule; sister channels U&Drama and U&Yesterday both rely heavily on comedy to fill their hours. A comedy that has genuinely broken through into the culture pays dividends for years in repeat rights, merchandise, and format sales. Box-setting rarely produces that kind of hit - because it rarely produces the kind of broad, shared cultural moment that makes a show feel unmissable.

Comedy is not a niche pursuit. It is not, by nature, a box-set genre. It is the genre most associated with cultural memory, shared experience, and national identity - and also, as any producer will confirm, the hardest to get right. That is all the more reason to give it the platform it deserves. Scheduling comedy as a proper linear event, episode by episode, building an audience week by week, is not nostalgic indulgence. It is the approach most likely to produce the next great British sitcom - and the one most likely to ensure the whole country knows about it.


https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/features/why-comedy-can-and-should-be-a-linear-tv-event/

"This Time with Alan Partridge" was shown weekly, but the latest series was all available immediately. For interaction in BBAPBF it was definitely better to have them weekly.

Quote from: Miguel Wilkins on Apr 04, 2026, 06:30 PM"This Time with Alan Partridge" was shown weekly, but the latest series was all available immediately. For interaction in BBAPBF it was definitely better to have them weekly.

I definitely prefer the weekly format, especially when a series has a strong arc. The anticipation adds to the enjoyment.

It was a boiling hot day last summer, four days after my dad's 73rd birthday. Mum was plating up dinner and Dad was on the sofa complaining about how stifling it was. I was meant to head to work, for my job as a personal trainer, but decided to take the evening off. It was just as well: as I turned back to Mum, Dad collapsed backwards and suffered a massive cardiac arrest.

Mum was hysterical. She called the ambulance as I tried to stay calm but inside I felt mad with fear as she relayed what the 999 handler was saying. "Check if he's breathing," she told me. I put my hand on his chest but felt nothing. "Move him to the floor." I laid him on the wood flooring.

The call handler told Mum to begin CPR. Dad was motionless as she pushed on his chest. I'd attended first-aid training years ago, while working at a bowling alley, but remembered nothing. Something seemed off, though – the timing wasn't right. Then I remembered The Office.

Specifically, I remembered a scene in the US series where Steve Carell's character, Michael Scott, is being taught how to demonstrate CPR to the team, on a dummy, to the tune of the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive. The episode, Stress Relief, is one of the show's best, with a chaotically funny cold opening in which Dwight purposefully triggers a fire alarm to prove his fire safety talk was ignored, prompting Stanley to have a heart attack. After Stanley has recovered, Michael brings in a CPR trainer, who offers a tip – that the rhythm of Stayin' Alive perfectly matches the rate at which you should administer CPR. The first aid is ignored as the team harmonise and dance to the Bee Gees, Andy bringing in the high-pitched lyrics. In my parents' living room, the bit I needed jumped to the front of my mind: "Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah" to compress Dad's chest, then rest on "stayin' alive".

I took over from Mum and played the scene and song in my head for 13 minutes, trying to resuscitate Dad. My arms were getting tired but occasional murmurs let me know he was still with us. I had no intention of stopping.

As paramedics arrived and took over, they asked: "Who did the CPR?" "Me," I said. "You've done a brilliant job, you may have saved his life," they told me. As I went outside for some air, I thought: "They probably tell everyone that." As far as I was concerned, I'd done everything I could but not in a million years was Dad pulling through.

He did, though. He spent 57 days in a coma and four months in hospital with multiple surgeries. I visited every day. Medics would ask: "How did you learn CPR?" And I told them: "The Office."

I'm a huge TV and film fan, especially superhero movies. I've watched most of The Office three or four times; I find it comforting and Carell nails the cringe factor. Stress Relief is one of the best episodes: it takes something so mundane and makes it hilarious. That's what made me remember it that day.

Just like The Office, where the team rallied round after Stanley's heart attack, members the gym I work at, came together, too. It's near the hospital and many were involved in Dad's care: one was an anaesthetist, one did his tracheostomy and another gave him speech and language therapy. He's almost back to full health now but his recovery was rough.

Without that episode of The Office, I genuinely don't think I could have performed CPR the way I did. I'm not the only one: in 2019, a man in Arizona saved a woman's life by breaking into her car, pulling her out and delivering chest compressions to the tune of Stayin' Alive.

At Dad's checkups, doctors still mention it; one of the medics I train recently messaged from a course to say "9% of people survive cardiac arrest out of hospital, most go on to die, which puts your story into perspective". After all the superhero movies I've watched, it's funny to think it was Steve Carell and The Office that helped to deliver my heroics.

---

[See also Alan's CPR advice]:

There is a distinctive, deeply uncanny horror to the way Jimmy Fallon laughs. Look it up—there are literally hundreds of videos showing him breaking out into laughter at the slightest provocation. It is not a reaction (he sometimes won't even wait for his guest to get to their carefully scripted punchline). Rather, it is a performance, a sudden, corporeal convulsion.

Fallon leans in his chair, as if pressed back by some unseen force. It's accompanied by the ritualistic slapping of the desk, a sound that echoes like a gavel in a courtroom. Watching the Tonight Show in the deep hours of the night, beaming out from a phone screen or laptop, there's an unshakeable impression that this is not really entertainment but a desperate kind of ritual.

Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror. But it isn't a monster lurking in the shadows; it is the manic, unblinking insistence that actually, there are no shadows at all. If the Gothic tradition of fear teaches us that the ruins of the past haunt the present, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon offers the inverse: a present so forcefully flattened, so aggressively "fun," that it has exorcised history entirely, leaving us trapped in a sterile, eternal loop of viral games and celebrity lip-syncing while the world slides into climate collapse and fascist politics.

A typical episode of Fallon's Tonight Show has the usual staples of the late-night format, the ones introduced by Steve Allen all the way back in the 1950s and perfected by Johnny Carson: an opening monologue, a couple of celebrity interviews, a musical performance to close out the evening. But what's made Fallon so popular has been his use of endless, repetitive, shareable games. Night after night, he invites you to watch people you know from other shows on TV, or who just coincidentally have a movie or an album to promote, play Pictionary. Watch them Lip Sync Battle! When watching almost any video that goes viral from The Tonight Show, all I can think is: "haven't I seen this already?" Of course I have—we all have. The whole point of these dance challenges, or singing challenges or party games, is that they are fundamentally repeated gestures. They're shared, copied, and endlessly reproduced.

These games are not true "play" in the revolutionary sense of the word, wherein games are unscripted, free, and disruptive. Instead, they represent the total commodification of play. In a cultural landscape dominated by the attention economy and defined by precarious labor and existential dread, Fallon presents play not as an escape from work, but as an obligatory task that must be performed, a contractual obligation to a marketing team. He recently joined forces with the soulless monstrosity that is State Farm to shill their insurance, and in a great detail, their ad highlights that you don't actually need to tell a joke for Jimmy to appear. You just need to say the word "joking" to summon him like a cheap simulacra of Bloody Mary or Candyman. Advertising Fallon is indistinguishable from him on the show—after all, he's doing exactly the same thing.

Fallon and his pseudo-play are, as Bo Burnham pointed out in a 2016 standup set, the end of culture: "People we've seen too much of, mouthing along to songs we've heard too much of." Celebrities fucking around in front of us to take up our time and our attention.

Watching the Tonight Show is an exercise in cultural deja-vu. It's the endless repetition of the already familiar in a setting that is designed to gain our attention, but makes no other demand upon us as a viewer. The familiar cry of "Let people enjoy things" might come in response. But this? This is what we're supposed to enjoy? As Kate Wagner writes for The Baffler:

It may appear somewhat cruel to take entertainment to task. But the far worse alternative would be a world without criticism—a world well-wishing people are now working to build for their bosses, one where monopolistic media conglomerates cater to our simplest desires and most superficial political awareness. Until we are all forced to communicate with memes from pods wholly owned by Disney, we're just going to have to Let People Dislike Things.

Fallon presides over his rituals of play like a vampire, feeding not on blood but on enthusiasm. He doesn't really converse with any of his guests; they all know what they are there for. Rather, he extracts. He demands "relatability" from them, draining the authenticity from the interaction until only the husk of a "viral moment" remains. The horror lies in the repetition: the feigned shock, the hysterical laughter at unfunny mishaps, the relentless "Golden Retriever energy."

It is a performance of joy so excessive, so desperate, that it reveals the void it attempts to cover. It is the logic of the assembly line applied to human connection. What Fallon offers is a standardized production of "fun" that feels increasingly like a desperate plea to ignore the crumbling world outside the studio walls.

The real, unsettling mechanism of Fallon's banal horror is its insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, is itself an aggressively political act. Fallon doesn't do politics, or if he does, he wants to "keep his head down" because "we hit both sides equally." Tellingly, Donald Trump has called for the firing of almost all of the other late night hosts—Colbert, Kimmel, even Seth Meyers—but excluded Fallon from his hit-list, because Trump recognizes that there's nothing about Fallon's empty banality that could be anything close to a threat.

Contrast Fallon's "head empty, no thoughts" presentation with someone like Dick Cavett. Back in 1969, on what was, at the time, the most popular show in the country, there's a 17-minute segment with James Baldwin on the possibility of Black liberation in America. There's a moment where Baldwin talks of the American system wanting him, as a Black man, to be an accomplice to his own murder. The camera cuts back to Cavett, who has been listening intently. "I don't understand that last sentence," says Cavett, which leads into a discussion of the work and activism of Stokely Carmichael. What's shocking is not just the content but the space and time given to ideas—to the intellectual and cultural problems of the world outside the studio walls.

In contrast, Fallon is desperate to keep the real world out. In his interviews, he barely seems to be listening to his guests, waiting for them to finish speaking so his rituals can begin anew. The constant, forced joviality can't completely conceal an encroaching terror—the horror of the political world that keeps threatening to break down the walls around his studio-castle.

This machinery of niceness reaches points of fracture, but only occasionally. The most infamous was back in September 2016, when Fallon hosted Donald Trump. He sat with the then-candidate, not to interrogate or even lampoon him, but to perform a brief, cozy skit culminating in Fallon mussing Trump's hair. The moment was not just a lapse in judgment; it was the ultimate, logical end point of the show's ideological structure.


The Tonight Show is built to liquify all phenomena into content. Trump, the political reactionary and demagogue, the harbinger of a crisis, was treated not as a threat to democracy or a figure of public concern, but just another wacky celebrity guest willing to play along. Fallon and his show are not horrifying because they are malevolent, actively creating suffering in the world, but because of a thoughtless, systematic refusal to perceive any of their work as having ethical consequences. Trump's monstrosity becomes merely eccentric, as neoliberal media packaged as entertainment normalizes a failing status quo.

Another example: Paris Hilton went on the show in 2022 to discuss her then-recent wedding. In the video, Jimmy even holds up a framed picture from the altar. On cue come the "awwws" from the audience. We're told that Paris didn't cry, but her fiancé (now husband) did. Jimmy laughs at this for no discernible reason. Then comes the horrifying turn. They start talking about NFTs ("non-fungible tokens," the pictures of cartoon primates that were briefly supposed to be the future of finance). Jimmy pulls out a picture of Paris's NFT, one of the infamously fugly "Bored Apes." Fallon's face is a perfect death mask of impassivity, his eyes a blank and empty void. He confesses that he has one too. These financial instruments are now virtually worthless, but at the end of the interview the point of the segment becomes clear. She's there to give away her own NFT to the audience who, on cue, cheer. Fallon lurches to his feet: "I think that's the first NFT giveaway in television history," he cries. You can practically see the blood dripping from his mouth and eyes. There has not yet been a second giveaway, but perhaps with this particular blend of vapid, ritualistic positivity and speculative, environmentally damaging technology, once was enough.

The peak of this banal nightmare arrived only recently when Sam Altman, the serene architect of our contemporary algorithmic enclosure, sat across from Fallon to discuss the most intimate of human labors: the rearing of a child, and how he simply couldn't imagine raising his newborn baby without the "help" of ChatGPT. With the flat, bloodless affect of a man who has already priced in the end of the world, Altman described using ChatGPT as a parental surrogate. Unlike with Hilton, here the audience is deathly quiet. As Altman offers up the future of his own offspring to the black box of his company's large language model, Fallon's grin never wavers. It is the ultimate Gothic inversion: the living child is transformed into a data set to be optimized, while the host performs a pantomime of joy to mask the sound of a tomb clicking shut.

The horror of The Tonight Show is perfected not in its live broadcast, but in its fragmentation and digital afterlife. The show is precision-crafted for algorithmic engagement. Every episode is around 90 minutes of filming whose primary purpose is to generate ten minutes of highly clickable YouTube content. Fallon isn't really a host, he's more a content curator, constantly mining the moment for its potential as a self-contained, shareable commodity.

The true audience is not the people watching at home at 11:30 PM, but the anonymous mass scrolling through video feeds the next morning. The original broadcast becomes merely the raw material for the machine, haunted by its digital offspring. This is where the Gothic element reasserts itself: the uncanny feeling that the show you are watching is not really happening. It is a ghostly simulacrum, merely rehearsing itself for its eventual, more profitable existence as a series of clips.

That said, the live studio audience plays a crucial though ultimately passive role in this arrangement. Their exaggerated, almost robotic applause and laughter are essential; they provide the necessary social proof that the segment is, indeed, "fun." They are asked to perform the joy that the viewer might no longer feel. The audience under the thrall of the glowing "applause" sign becomes, in effect, a collective mechanism for suppressing negative critique, enforcing the manufactured consensus that this vapid spectacle is exactly what we want, and exactly what we deserve.

The horror of the Tonight Show is not found in any singular problem, but in the totality of its project: the systematic replacement of the real world with a brightly lit simulation of "niceness." Fallon is the court jester of the Anthropocene, a figure who invites us to watch celebrities play parlor games on stage while the air outside the studio begins to smell of tear gas and smoke. In Fallon's sterile loop of viral repetition comes the final victory of the commodity over human beings—a world where even our laughter is outsourced to the demands of the algorithm. You don't even need jokes anymore. All you need is to say something that sounds like it could be a joke, and the hollow laughter will come. To watch Fallon is to stare at the face of a culture that has chosen the comfort of a rictus grin over the heavy, necessary terror of the truth. It serves as a grim warning: if we cannot reclaim our play, our politics, and our presence from this algorithmic void, we will be left with nothing but the echoes of a desk being slapped in an empty room, for an audience that has long since ceased to exist.

Jon Greenaway is a writer from the North of England. He is the author of Capitalism: A Horror Story and the co-host of the leftist media podcast Horror Vanguard.